MIT's Solar Cells

It's hard to be interested in sustainable design and not be a regular visitor of Inhabitat.com. For my first post on sustainable technology, I figured it would be fitting to discuss something a bit outside the 'design' category on which I'm focusing. Tonight's check of new posts on Inhabitat.com brought to my attention new PV technology. The MIT publication, which was admittedly a bit sketchy with the figures, presents a new PV design solving a couple of major previous problems: efficiency - current PV cells have limited wavelength absorption range; and cost of production - you don't have to cover the entire roof (or surface) with PV cells, just the edges of panes. We'll see what happens though.
I do believe that the best way to solve energy production problems will be to localize energy production - i.e., taking people off-grid, or at least less grid reliant. This new development in the technology could have the potential to make it more commonly available (i.e. cheaper) and practical. Also, the system could harness photons in the UV range as well, making them effective on cloudy days as well (they don't mention this potential capacity in the fact sheet, but I don't see any reason preventing it).
Critical questions: are the dyes used in the concentrators toxic?
What will the life span be?
Hopefully, we shall soon see.

Also, with micro-production of electricity, we aren't necessarily constrained to the tradition of 120V (or 240V depending on your country). Because the electricity is only being transferred a short distance, this minimizes need for AC currents. If a particular DC voltage was designated, like the 12V now used in car sockets, engineers and designers could start designing products for the lower power source, and therefore decrease overall consumption of power. This relates back to why I italicized production problem: much of our problems come from the consumption side. Decrease consumption and we don't need more coal power plants. But right now, almost all our electronics consume far more energy than they actually need to run, releasing much of that energy as heat. In fact, I could probably fry an egg on my computer right now. And that's not even considering the transformer which is taking the 240V AC from the wall and converting it down to 18.5V and 16.5V DC. Not the most efficient of systems. The only problem is: power companies aren't going to start changing if there are no products to run off a different type. And why design for a source that's not easily available - that's just plain stupid. This is a dilemma.
This is a place for a full scale re-design. Can it happen?

Notes

So this blog is actually the informal notes behind another blog, 'Designing Sustainability: Green Developments'
I wanted to keep this blog as a sort of bibliography, a collection of thoughts on my investigations. While that blog will be more formal, finished ideas, this blog will be updates on what I've done with the project thus far, video's I'm watching, books I'm reading, articles I've especially enjoyed.

Basically attempting to map the development of my thoughts on green design, sustainable design, however you like to label the movement. (In fact I will discuss this labeling as well, because it's interesting in itself.)

So, without further delay: these are my notes.