liveforphysics
100 TW
I'm always for no moving parts when possible.
As humans are only beginning to do microscopy at single atom resolution, we are only beginning to explore the nature of material technology, and so far only with carbon and boron and nitrogen, while we have an entire periodic table to play with.
With atom level precision in mfg, it will enable building devices to scale its own manufacturing of the equipment. Using sufficient temperature plasma, there is no waste, just atom sources for recycling processes approaching the limits of atom perfect.
With atom perfect manufacturing, it should be easily possible to trap superconductivity states in materials at room temperature while being only a few atoms thick, as well as just a few atoms required for the photon to excited electron junction stage to happen, and to stack the added junctions to get bi-tri-quad junction for harvesting to >70-80% efficiency or beyond becomes just a few more atoms thicker, and a few more fractions of a cent per meter to print or GM a virus or fungus to do whatever complex nano-assembly for us.
At this point solar becomes the cost of the raw materials and some miniscule energy input to make it, and you laminate the fractions of a gram material onto whatever normal building material you're useing, like siding or fencing and road signs and whatever gets even 10min of sun a day makes sense.
Originally PV cells were millions of lab RnD to achieve even a single Watt. Now it's <$0.50/Watt, and will continue to fall at exactly the rate people figure out how to use materials and energy at atom perfect levels to create self-scaleing nano-manucturing. Then energy storage is cake and dirt cheap with energy density exceeding gasoline, and solar is cake and dirt cheap because it only uses fractions of a gram of material per square meter and has 70-80% efficiency over a wide range of available light angles (its also going to look black to human vision, yet stays cool when sitting in the sun, because that energy went out the wires.)
As humans are only beginning to do microscopy at single atom resolution, we are only beginning to explore the nature of material technology, and so far only with carbon and boron and nitrogen, while we have an entire periodic table to play with.
With atom level precision in mfg, it will enable building devices to scale its own manufacturing of the equipment. Using sufficient temperature plasma, there is no waste, just atom sources for recycling processes approaching the limits of atom perfect.
With atom perfect manufacturing, it should be easily possible to trap superconductivity states in materials at room temperature while being only a few atoms thick, as well as just a few atoms required for the photon to excited electron junction stage to happen, and to stack the added junctions to get bi-tri-quad junction for harvesting to >70-80% efficiency or beyond becomes just a few more atoms thicker, and a few more fractions of a cent per meter to print or GM a virus or fungus to do whatever complex nano-assembly for us.
At this point solar becomes the cost of the raw materials and some miniscule energy input to make it, and you laminate the fractions of a gram material onto whatever normal building material you're useing, like siding or fencing and road signs and whatever gets even 10min of sun a day makes sense.
Originally PV cells were millions of lab RnD to achieve even a single Watt. Now it's <$0.50/Watt, and will continue to fall at exactly the rate people figure out how to use materials and energy at atom perfect levels to create self-scaleing nano-manucturing. Then energy storage is cake and dirt cheap with energy density exceeding gasoline, and solar is cake and dirt cheap because it only uses fractions of a gram of material per square meter and has 70-80% efficiency over a wide range of available light angles (its also going to look black to human vision, yet stays cool when sitting in the sun, because that energy went out the wires.)