As reported by
Science Daily, a team of University of Toronto scientists have discovered how to substantially reduce the cost of solar energy. The breakthrough could mean a proliferation of the already inexpensive technology.
"The researchers have invented a solar panel that uses inexpensive nickel in the place of gold, One of the most promising technologies for making inexpensive but reasonably efficient solar photovoltaic cells just got much cheaper. Scientists at the University of Toronto in Canada have shown that inexpensive nickel can work just as well as gold for one of the critical electrical contacts that gather the electrical current produced by their colloidal quantum dot solar cells."
"The change to nickel can reduce the cell's already low material costs by 40 to 80 percent, says Lukasz Brzozowski, the director of the Photovoltaics Research Program in Professor Ted Sargent's group. They present their research in the July 12, 2010 issue of Applied Physics Letters, which is published by the American Institute of Physics (AIP)."
"Quantum dots are nanoscale bits of a semiconductor material that are created using low-cost, high-throughput chemical reactions in liquid solutions. Since their properties vary according to their size, quantum dots can be made to match the illumination spectrum. Half of all sunlight, for example, is in the infrared wavelengths, most of which cannot be collected by silicon-based solar cells. Sargent's group has pioneered the design and development of quantum dot solar cells that gather both visible and infrared light. They have reached a power-conversion efficiency as high as 5 percent and aim to improve that to 10 percent before commercialization."
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Science Daily