Trial and error is a perfectly legitimate design strategy that does not require intelligence. The artificial iteration and selection system in which this trial and error took place *in this instance* was obviously intelligently designed.

Does this have to be used with organic cells or could it be used with silicon cells as well?

Does this have to be used with organic cells or could it be used with silicon cells as well?

Looking at the setup, there is no reason you couldnt replace the active layer with whatever material you desired, but one should take into account the optimal spectrum needed for absorption and make sure this scatters well, I imagine the design is married to this parameter.

Seems like a finite-element-type computer simulation of mirror patterns using a genetic algorithm and millions of parallel 'experiments', would somehow be able to find the patterns that maximize both facet (mirror) size and number of light bounces from a range of incident angles. Then we would know sort of from "experimental mathematics" what shapes work best. Seems to me like spiral-seashell shapes would work best but also have smallest facet size because of the continuously curving surface, and would be prohibitively expensive to micro-fab millions of them. Probably need to search for patterns that match certain crystal forms, since we can 'grow crystals', from even single chain molecules as the starting points.

They're approaching meta-material photon energy converters that shift frequencies over a wide range by scattering nano-scale quarter and half-lambda equivalent sized detectors across the surface while, in so doing, increasing the effective surface area of the photon absorbing surface, enabling down-scaling of the size of an entire solar cell array, the ultimate goal after all.

Trial and error is a perfectly legitimate design strategy

But that's not what they did. They used a genetic algorithm which is
Trial and error
AND
selection of best fit as a starting point for the next round.

This isn't a random approach but a (self-) directed walk with thrown-in variability.

The 10x is a very old number (or a very cloudy location). It is currently ~3x to 4x in a moderately sunny location, if you ignore that:
coal is a consumed resource and ignore the CO2, mercury, fly ash, etc. from coal (accounting for which would very roughly double the price of coal),
and on the other side ignore that photovoltaics are intermittent (which will limit the amount useable unless low-cost storage is solved).

Jeddy is correct that the price differential will disappear, and in more like 10 to 15 years than 200 years at current cost trends.

This will leave only lack of storage as a limiter of solar's potential in all but a few ultra-cloudy regions. Whether and when storage will be solved remains to be seen, but it is a non-trivial challenge.

The increasing of surface area of solar cells may increase their efficiency but it increases the speed of their contamination, oxidation and photodegradation too. As usually, every improvement comes with its own price - you as a customer may be fooled with it after few years.

@ichard - those aren't secrets. People do indeed put reflectors under some films to increase the light path. And there are experiments on layers that down-convert high energy photons into multiple lower energy photons (but crystals aren't magic so the total photon energy is not increased).

@ichard, - yes, luminescent concentrators are related to lasers. Lenses don't create photon beams, but they can concentrate the light (and this is used in CPV).
But none of these are secrets, and they all have cost/benefit tradeoffs.

$per watt is now coming down consistently over time. Even if. It takes200 years, solar power will one day reach a true tipping point where only impoverished cou.tries use coal.

Hope so, because now it's the US and China who burn all the coal to the atmosphere...

Gotta wonder if creationists would boycott such a product "inspired by evolution". Of course not, because they are self-serving hypocrites, having learned such hypocritical behavior from their anti-humanity anti-curiosity doofy religion(s) designed to kill kill kill.