Monday, August 24, 2009 at 4:14:43 PM - by Danny Vo

Considering that the world’s largest solar project (in Germany) covers about 210 football fields with approximately 560,000 thin-film First Solar panels – projected to top out at 700,000 – and still produces a mere 53 megawatts, or enough to power 15,000 households, it’s clear that solar efficiencies are the underlying problem when it comes to solar’s thin share of the electricity generation marketplace.

The most carefully designed, expensive and complex photovoltaic solar panels in the world operate at about 40 percent efficiency. The same is true for concentrating solar power, or CSP, though CSP also offers the advantage of energy storage. In addition, some three-phase CSP operations (solar energy, desalinated water for shaded horticulture, and cooled water for HVAC systems) can raise overall efficiencies to about 70 percent.

Recent discoveries out of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, suggesting that indium/gallium/nitrogen alloys may be able to convert the entire spectrum of sunlight, still face a 70-percent ceiling. This, if commercially viable, is a 40 percent improvement over the most efficient multi-junction solar cell created, which is still rated at 30 percent.

A better margin is offered by scientists from Idaho National Laboratories, where the use of nanotechnology surface imprinting (of nano-antennas) allows infra-red capture. Infra-red is 47 percent of light’s spectrum, as compared to about 46 percent for visible light, and infra-red is also available at night.

Of course, there is currently no way to capture the energy produced, so the scientists are working to incorporate miniscule capacitors in the center of every nano-antenna, and this, if made commercially viable, would potentially provide up to 80 percent efficiency and change the paradigm for solar energy.

This is going to be the secret to solar’s success; not more solar, but better solar, allowing solar to eventually replace at least 25 percent of fossil-fuel electricity generation by making it both efficient and affordable.

It isn’t merely important that solar succeed as an energy resource, it’s essential. Petroleum experts like Dr. Sadad al-Huseini, the former Head of Exploration and Production at Saudi-Aramco, has publicly admitted that oil is likely to peak by 2015, and he is joined by Dr. Shokri Ghanem, director of research at OPEC's Secretariat from 1993 to 2001, who publicly stated that peak oil could arrive within the next decade. Coal is facing the same peak.

The petroleum companies and their representatives are running scared, not only at the idea of Peak Oil, but at the idea that their reign of pollutive terror (and massive profits) will be ended if the climate bill is passed. This is the reason behind the American Petroleum Institute’s leaked memo urging members’ employees to pretend they are private citizens and badmouth climate legislation (Waxman-Markey).

It comes as no surprise to those who advocate clean energy technologies like solar that all the fish in U.S. streams contain mercury from coal-burning power plants, and that fully 25 percent of this contamination exceeds federal standards for safety.

This is why ARRA, for all its faults, is superb energy policy. Offering $19 million in Massachusetts and Michigan for improved solar photovoltaic efficiency (and another $52.5 million in the latter for improved CSP), the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act may produce the sort of efficient, affordable solar that allows business, industry and the American homeowner to escape the 20th century paradigm of pollutive energy without also causing the collapse of civilization as we know it.