Sun Plus Nanotechnology: Can Solar Energy Get Bigger by Thinking Small?
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2013/04/130429-nanotechnology-solar-energy-efficiency/
It seems that there are now some ideas in the lab that might transform the photovoltaic industry in the next couple of decades. For a long time I wasn’t seeing any movement in the basic science behind solar cells and figured we might have topped out of the achievable results (despite the promise being so huge). Of course we still need to store the captured energy, but there appear to be pending breakthroughs on energy storage mechanisms on the horizon, so things might get very interesting just as the supply of fossil fuels tap out. Of course, it will still take 100’s of trillions of dollars to convert the world’s infrastructure to the ‘next great thing’, but it is amazing how quickly something like that can happen when each individual makes a calculation and decides that they are personally better off with the new ‘thing’ at the same time.
