Top Stories
Protect any hard drive with the DataLocker Drive Enclosure
220mph California Bullet Train on the way
NASA returning to Mars later this month
Sections
Archive
Solar energy has enormous appeal, but until now it’s been just too expensive. Maybe not any more. A Massachusetts startup called 1366 Technologies has created solar cells in its lab that company scientists are saying are 27% more efficient, bringing down the cost to $1.30 a watt, beating the current best price of $2.10/watt by a country mile. These guys are bragging about how by 2012 they can make the cells even cheaper, down to a buck a watt, the same price it costs to generate energy with dirt-cheap coal.
This looks like the real deal, a genuine breakthrough that somehow captures light that otherwise would have been reflected. Now if somebody can just make some batteries that can cheaply and efficiently store all that power for cloudy days and nighttime, we’ll have something here. Maybe in five years or so, we can all plug our electric cars into outlets overflowing with cheap energy from the sun, so inexpensive it’s not even necessary to meter it. Isn’t that what they were saying about nuclear power in the '50s?
What is Dvice?
Editor: Peter Pachal
editor@dvice.com
editor@dvice.com
Newsletter
Get the top stories from DVICE every week!


By Andrew at 6:07 PM ON 04/16/08
i am very interested buying large quantitys of solar panels
By Gene at 11:21 PM ON 05/10/08
Do you have the complete systems for interfacing into the power grids for home use and what do they cost? Please send me a pdf file with details and possibitity of becoming a dealer of your power cells.