 | Prof Peter Newman Diamonds of Hope (Part A) | TOD: Australia/New Zealand | Sydney must prepare now for peak oil |  |
User login
Contact
- anz at theoildrum dot com
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Archives
GAIA Host Collective
Not to mention the cost increases from tight silicon production (Traditional silicon based solar cells) and high raw material costs for the thin solar cells (eg gallium). I'm not yet convinced that solar can be ramped up globally as a large portion of a country's energy mix without some sort of new solar technology being developed without these limiting factors. The high prices could quickly kill these very big schemes.
Solar thermal doesn't use any silicon.
Silison as a material is incredibly plentiful in any case - as demand rises so is manufacturing capability - you can expect the same sort of price drops for the material long term as we have seen for semiconductors in the past, once output catches up to the fast rising demand.
The situation for thin film using rare metals is less clear, but there are silicon based thin film approaches.