They start off by saying these cells are cheaper. But then they mention that they used a newer, higher purity method for construction. They discuss efficiency without mentioning any numbers. Then they discuss voltage, but not watts, or efficiency, or watts per centimeter.

When are they actually going to discuss the stuff we want to know?

Also,

"They then synthesize the crystal in a furnace above 1100 degree °C ..."

They could easily expend more energy, during manufacture, than the cells would ever hope to create.

It is interesting to know how highly toxic Cd would behave in cheap panel all-around usage ...

Tellurium is about as rare as platinum, so the technology isn't exactly scalable even if it was functionally better than silicon PV.

Current world production output of tellurium is only enough for a couple gigawatts worth of CdTe panels. Producing enough to satisfy world demand of PV panels using CdTe would take thousands of years at this rate.

Tellurium is a byproduct of copper mining, so it's cheap insofar as the demand doesn't exceed the supply that exists. Once the production of the panels exceeds existing supply from copper mines, extracting tellurium for its own sake becomes extremely expensive.

Guys ... ... this is thin-film solar panel! The amount of material used is significantly less than conventional silicon panel, making it "cost efficient" despite expensive material. It has same high grade efficiency, at 20%.

As long as you don't mind using 10,000 acres of land for this inefficient technology instead of efficient nuclear, water and fossil fuel. You have to build a city-sized solar farm to power just one city.

As long as you don't mind using 10,000 acres of land for this inefficient technology instead of efficient nuclear, water and fossil fuel. You have to build a city-sized solar farm to power just one city.

Then you dispose of your nuclear waste by firing uranium shells at schoolchildren

Rossi's 1 megawatt E-Cat plant, tested for one full year under tightly controlled conditions and 24/7 video security...

That is another nonsense! "leaked reports" is not what science community is waiting for. There should be an independent test and that is what Sr. Rossi is carefully avoiding.

Guys ... ... this is thin-film solar panel! The amount of material used is significantly less than conventional silicon panel, making it "cost efficient" despite expensive material. It has same high grade efficiency, at 20%.

You'd be surprised. For whatever information is publicly available, you need around 90 tons of tellurium per Gigawatt of CdTe panels, depending on the process and film thickness. Of course this development lowers the amount, but only by 30-40%.

The current world production output is around 135 tons a year, almost entirely due to copper mining byproducts, which means the supply cannot increase arbitrarily. If you manufacture more than 1-2 GW of panels per year, you exhaust the current supply and the price of tellurium shoots through the roof.

To put that into perspective, the US average electricity demand is on the order of 500 GW, and the capacity factor of a fixed PV panel in the US is between 10-15%. Do the math.

You have to build a city-sized solar farm to power just one city.

Fortunately the two can coincide vertically.

Rossi's 1 megawatt E-Cat plant, tested for one full year under tightly controlled conditions and 24/7 video security...by a well known third party assessment corporation, that test has come to an end.

The first one of these 'reports' I've read about surfaced in the early 1990's. Guess what. It's (not even) hot air.

But if you're so certain then you should invest all your money into Rossi's scam. I'm sure he'll take it with great enthusiasm.

Gosh, Eikka, your calculations do not match up with my experience.

Your experience is not relevant to real published figures from the field.

Of course you can make more energy over some particular month, because the capacity factor of solar panels is in part a matter of weather and cloud cover. You do not own gigawatts of dispersed solar power, so you wouldn't be seeing the average production figures.

Talk about missing the forest for the trees...

The point was, that with the currently available supply of tellurium, and the rough ballpark figure of how much you need to make a gigawatt of panels, it would literally take hundreds of years to build enough panels to matter in the scale of an entire nation like the US of A, and much longer still in terms of the entire world.

That's why silicon panels are still the champion of solar energy.

My real numbers and proven performance are not as important as something you read somewhere else?

Yes. Because your "real numbers" are not representative nor "proven performance", because the true performance of the system is partially down to luck.

You're thinking like winning in the slots machines means you have a viable investment strategy. You're just delusional.

See for example:
http://techxplore...ray.html

"will have a top capacity of 6.3 MW, able to generate approximately 5.8 million kWh during the first year of its operation."

That's a capacity factor of 10.5%

The reason why solar capacity factor is fundamentally limited is due to the fact that even in California, the average solar radiation over the year is about 22% of the maximum peak radiation, so a perfect solar panel in perfect weather 365 days a year could not get more than 22% capacity factor. Add in clouds and rain, and you go down to about 15%

Here's another example:

http://www.treehu...put.html

the capacity factor for a 4.6 MW PV array in Arizona is determined to be 19% over two years.

You basically got three factors at play:
1) how close you are to the equator determines the average incoming solar radiation
2) how you locate and orient your panels determines what amount of that radiation they see. This also includes how well your panels work with low-angle off-normal incoming rays.
3) the sort of weather you get over the year determines how close to the optimum as dictated by 1&2 you will actually reach.

Basically, if you're in the desert, you get good capacity factor. If you're down near the coast, you get more clouds and lower capacity factor.

That's why individual cases like gkam don't tell you anything about solar power in general. Much less so because he's probably lying again, as usual.

Oops, bad news for nukes and coal:

http://www.thegua...-storage

Good for people and other living things.

"I think we have reached some holy grails in batteries – just in the sense of demonstrating that we can create a totally new approach to battery technology, make it work, make it commercially viable, and get it out there to let it do its thing,"

The battery storage systems developed with Arpa-E's support are on the verge of transforming America's electrical grid, a transformation that could unfold within the next five to 10 years, Williams said.

Lots of chaff, little wheat.

Coulds, woulds, and "I thinks" don't actually do anything. There's no word about what these "holy grail" technology even are, because they don't exist yet.

Don't confuse hype and pleas for funding for actual progress.

Your attempts to denigrate alternative energy technologies is transparent. Do you work in a coal plant?

The point is that not everything that is "alternative" actually works, no matter how much YOU want to pretend so in order to pretend that YOU are personally at the forefront of progress and saving the earth.

YOUR kind of people are making it worse for everyone because you're a snakeoil salesman, a conman, a crook and a pathological narcistic liar. You work deliberately to cloud other peoples' judgement with propaganda in order to make it seem like your personal choices and exploits are admirable and you deserve credit for things you haven't done and aren't doing.

You don't care how much you are hurting other people in your quest for glory, which makes you a hypocrit of the worst kind, and that makes it an imperative to point out your falsehoods so that other people would not fall in the trap.

Because I actually bought and had installed a solar PV system and an electric vehicle?

Because we can't trust that you actually did, given the false information you've given in the past, and your habit of embellishing yourself and claiming to be everything you're not, claiming to know things you do not, and offering yourself as an authority and source of information on subjects you have no authority in.

You're as real as the reporting on RT.

I am not selling anything

Yes you are. You're selling yourself.

I see a minor improvement in voltage, which is nice, but I don't see a cheap scalable fabrication path for this material. Hot oven temperatures, slow crystallization, critical purity requirements - sounds like expensive fab to me.