[Via Slashdot]

In what's become an increasingly familiar tune, a startup company has announced that it's just pulled in a significant haul of funding based on its promises of better, cheaper solar power. In this case, the company in question is 1366 Technologies, which was spun out of research from MIT and is headed by MIT professor Ely Sachs (who is taking a leave of absence to focus on the company). According to the company, it's found a way to make solar cells from multicrystalline silicon that are just as efficient as ones from single-crystal silicon, which is normally much more expensive to produce. In terms of hard numbers, that translates to solar cells that are 27 percent more efficient than your average solar cell, and (in its current state) a cost a $2.10 per watt. Sachs says that cost will come down to $1.65 per watt when manufacturered on a commercial scale, however, and will eventually drop to $1.30 a watt with some "planned improvements." That's still short of the $1 a watt goal they're aiming for (which is roughly the cost of coal), but the company seems confident they can hit that mark by 2012 with some "anticipated advances."

[Via Physorg]

Not to sound alarming or anything, but apparently, we've only got a decade or so before our planet runs clean out of indium. Thankfully for us, a team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Germany are purportedly onto a replacement. For those in the dark, indium is a critical resource in "creating solar cells, LCD and other devices which must have transparent electrodes to carry out their function," but the aforementioned crew has seemingly been able to take graphene ("single layer 2D sheets extracted from the common material graphite") and build an acceptable alternative. The creation is 80-percent transparent to visible light and 100-percent transparent to infrared light, which could actually lead to solar cells capable of soaking up even more energy from more of the EM spectrum. 'Course, there's no telling how close this discovery is to being commercially viable, but we suppose we could always resurrect RPTVs and rely solely on wind farms for renewable energy if necessary, right?

[Via DailyTech, image courtesy of About]

Nanoelectonic devices have to have juice too, and thanks to a team at Harvard University, extraordinarily minuscule gizmos of the future could be powered via a "silicon nanowire that can convert light into electrical energy." The device itself is said to look much like a typical coaxial cable, but it's around 100,000 times smaller and shuns metal in favor of "silicon with three different types of conductivity arranged as layered shells." Reportedly, a single strand can output "up to 200-picowatts," which won't move much, but it could be just enough to run ultralow power electronics that could be worn on, or even inside, the body. Hopefully they'll have this all ironed out by the time we need a pacemaker.

[Image courtesy of Harvard]

If that silly Hummer O2 concept vehicle we just saw didn't sate your appetite for environmental friendliness, try this on for size: researchers at Boeing-Spectrolab have just succeeded in building a multi-junction solar cell that achieves an incredible 40.7% efficiency, or -- to the best of our knowledge -- about twice that of the reigning champ in this space. To put this Department of Energy-backed breakthrough in perspective, it was less than two months ago that Silicon Valley-based SunPower announced a 22% efficient cell, and even that model was claimed to produce 50% more power over a given space than previous iterations. In case you're unfamiliar with multi-junction cells -- no shame in that game -- they can best be described as being composed of several layers, with each slice capturing only a portion of the solar spectrum; this method of optical concentration is what has allowed cells to surpass the 12% to 18% efficiency barrier faced by most traditional modules. In conclusion, while this is certainly an encouraging development, we remain somewhat skeptical about its potential for real-world implementation: once Big Oil gets wind of this new tech, it will likely "disappear" just as quickly as that guy who invented a car that runs on water, man.

[Via Slashdot]