Silicon is hardly the best path forward but we have seen evidence of international sabotage of progress
Alta had custom implementation of 3-5 growth in order to produce high efficiency solar cells at a price competitive for ships, drones, etc. But once the tech for GaAs becomes competitive with silicon then the industry shifts, that’s not a welcomed change.
Just an opinion.
Are you afraid of My Guatemalan-ness?
This right here is why you do not ever trust Media coverage of science. This shows a good increase for a particular material system, but to be clear: Silicon solar panels can achieve around 20-25 mA/cm^2 at 0.7 V while this system jumped up to 11.3 MICRO amps at 7 MILLI volts. A jump for a material system is published to show that a material could use further study, but that doesn’t mean it’s competitive with current tech yet. The real thing to watch for is increasing efficiency and low cost of halides.
I’m a solar researcher, I’m used to any attention over hyping our results.
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Pretty much every Sierra franchise.
Warcraft, C&C, Street fighter two turbo, and final fantasy!
It’s more complicated. Silicon has an overwhelming advantage on manufacturing because of IC, ultimately that will make the dollar per watt hard to beat. That’s why Alta focused on applications with limited area.
I mentioned halides earlier (also called perovskite unfortunately). If you look at the NREL chart https://www.nrel.gov/pv/cell-efficiency the bottom right showed halides rapidly increasing in efficiency and the manufacturing has the potential to scale a lot. I remember a conference presentation a few years back showing efforts to repurpose newspaper printing machinery and just roll out cells at high volume.
My secret little inside tin foil hat voice says China might not be comfortable with an American supremacy in tech that can make relatively inexpensive drones that stay in the air indefinitely.