illuminating science

Interesting article from Slashdot about a new type of solar cell that is made from titanium rather than silicon. This is good, because silicon is in pretty high demand at the moment, and mass produced solar cells are necessarily expensive. However, I’m not sure if this is really a solution - for a start, their product page seems more focussed on “high power” applications, like space and so forth. It’s also not clear whether these cells would be significantly cheaper in the long run or not - better (they say), but what you really want is a dirt cheap solar cell that we can cover roofs with etc. At the end of the day, there’s only a limited amount of titanium too, and the manafacturing costs are still significant.

I think the answer is far more likely to lie with the “soft solids” approach - using flexible polymers (plastic) and biological inspiration to make cheap and efficient cells. This is what we’re working on at UQ, as well as a number of other groups - such as making solar cells out of spinach! The holy grail would have to be a sort of “grow it yourself” solar cell - but I’m not really convinced that that’s going to happen.