There is an interesting (and depressing and challenging) Perspective, The Gratzel cell: Where next?, by Laurence Peter in Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters. Here is the beginning of the abstract:
Twenty years after O’Regan and Gr
tzel’s seminal Nature paper entitled “A Low-Cost, High-Efficiency Solar-Cell Based on Dye-Sensitized Colloidal TiO2 Films”, dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs) and analogous devices have become a major topic of research, with over 1000 papers published in 2010. Although much more is now known about the physical and chemical processes taking place during operation of the DSC, the exponential increase in research effort during this period has not been matched by large increases in efficiency.
The paper gives a nice summary of some of the key scientific challenges. I thank
Seth Olsen for bringing the paper to my attention.
I think this brings up an interesting question about the efficacy of predicting technologies before they exist and funding them indefinitely until the predicted technology emerges. I believe a parallel thing is happening in the search for light duty vehicle hydrogen fuel cells which, after billions in funding have produced nothing practical.
ReplyDeleteits a very difficult question to answer, at what point have we given it a good enough try and its time to stop the funding?
A few of us were joking about this issue over a few beers at a recent Telluride meeting. Say I propose to do a series of calculations involving millions of CPU hours to try to find better donor/acceptor pairs for dye-sensitized solar cells. Will the energy I expend in doing the research be far less than additional the energy harvested using systems based upon my calculations. My hunch is that the answer is NO. So, the best thing the funding agencies could do is to fund me NOT to do the calculations in the first place. We do this already with farmers....the USDA pays farmers to leave fields fallow to balance supply/demand.
ReplyDeleteWhat I think that yes more energy research can help save the planet. I believe a parallel thing is happening in the search for light duty vehicle hydrogen fuel cells which, after billions in funding have produced nothing practical.
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