When it comes to solar energy, we ain’t seen NOTHIN’ yet. The boys and girls in the labs at Cal Tech and MIT and Cal Berkeley and places like that, being especially bright boys and girls, glanced up at the sun (when they were let out of the labs for Spring Break), and said to themselves “hello sunshine and hello fortune.”
They have hugely improved the miracle of taking a slab of plate glass and turning it into electricity, getting efficiencies approaching 50% now from panels that have a lifespan 25 years or more. They have also concocted panel compositions that are a little less efficient and noticeably less expensive and malleable panels for all kinds of special circumstances. But such miraculous stuff still costs a lot and only pays off for the average consumer after 5-to-10 years.
Engineering financial solutions that make such a proposition manageable has turned out to be a gift from the lab rats to their lesser and more materialistic compatriots in the business schools. But the wizards of sunshine are hardly done with their wonderworking.
Coming generations of solar materials will be spray on, wearable and storable. They will be a lot like the mysterious world of the digital, too nanotechnological to visualize, too psuedo-photosynthetic to really understand and too cheap and easy to not use.
Meanwhile, here in the now, a draft of a forthcoming study obtained by NewEnergyNews shows that energy policy planners are preparing for the U.S. to obtain 10%-to-20% of its electricity from the four prominent solar energy technologies by 2030. That’s up from today’s
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