PowerSwitch

"In a scientific breakthrough that has stunned the world, a team of South African scientists has developed a revolutionary new, highly efficient solar power technology that will enable homes to obtain all their electricity from the sun."

http://www.int.iol.co.za/index.php?set_ ... 138C184427

Any knowledgeable comments?

There is some more information here:

http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory: ... film_solar

Thanks Da

How much of an advance over normal PV is this?

The advance is in cheap manufacturing, if it's genuine. They sound like they are lower efficiency, as you wouldn't normally need 30 square metres to power a home, more like 10, but if they're cheap to make (in energy as well as money) then that may be OK.

Three different kinds of efficient when considering solar panels.

• Power per square meter (the commonly quoted 5-15% efficiency)
• Power per $ spent on the panel (a ?500 panel might have a peak power of 100W)
• Embodied energy in the design, manufacture, install, maintenance, decommission compared to how much energy the panel generates over it?s life (a 100W panel might generate 4MW over its 30 year life in southern Europe compared to an embodied energy of say 0.4MW)

It seems to me that most of the effort to date has been on improving the first kind of efficiency. I suspect there are significant gains to be had lowering the cost per W and lowing the manufacturing energy at expense of area efficiency. Often area is not the limiting factor ? cost is.