New Report: Solar could provide 100% of world's energy needs by 2050 using only 1% of world's land

[jberryhill]

23. They are used in certain exotic PV's

But give me a boule of Czochralski grown silicon, some phosphorus, some boron, some aluminum, some oxygen, a wafer saw, clean water, some furnaces, an evaporator, and a buttload of organic solvents and I'll give you all the solar cells you want.

If you want to go with poly-Si cells, we can skip the CZ grown silicon, or go with any of a number of thin-film Si technologies.

There are a lot of different ways to do PV. There are some that use lanthanides for spectral conversion to obtain marginal efficiency improvements, but at some point if you are talking about a really, really huge scale, then you simply mark off a point in the efficiency/cost/scalability space, and go with it.

It's all a matter of what you want to pay for what efficiency. But if someone is handing me 1% of the earth's surface to play with, then I'm not going to care a whole lot about the efficiency.

Everyone else is going to care about what I do with that buttload of organic solvents, though....