'Major discovery' from MIT primed to unleash solar revolution

Normally these break-through solar discoveries are followed by promises of taking over the world in just a couple of years. The industry will be revolutionized! And so far, I can count the number of times that the "big breakthrough" has commercialized on... well, NO fingers. This one guesses it'll be ready in 10 years. If you research enough, you'll find these major breakthroughs announced several times per year. Sadly, not ONE of them has turned the corner into commercialization. Turns out that we can do all kinds of neat things in the lab. Putting it on our roofs is a different story.

Still... it is nice to dream. And there's no telling. One day it could happen, and all our energy worries will be over.

 

I note, with interest, that there is no claim of efficiency. Storing energy in a battery recovers about 70% of the energy (More perhaps with LiOn). Does this approach come close to that efficiency?

JeffD

 

It certainly appears to be a different approach though, trying to replicate photosynthesis. I don't blame people for being skeptical. Remember when scientists claimed they had been able to do fusion, but were then unable to ever replicate it?

However, this one seems to be a bit more of a "Wow" than the others I've heard of in the past.

Wow!

 

Science is a very competitive, sought after journal for publishing articles. Apparently the editors think that it is a worthy of publication.

 

I would hope people would give this the credit it deserves. If it takes 10 years to put it into the mass market, that will work. If it takes sooner, I'm ecstatic. This is, after all, MIT, not Podunk Labs.

 

Ah, the old 10 years. Always 10 years away.

I did hear on this on the radio. And they guy said he was releasing the information as open source so others could use it for development too.

And MIT has taken a patent on developing the means for doing it. Open and a patent. Not sure how that works.

 

Very few nascent technologies are efficient. Improvements in efficiency will evolve later. This is more just a matter of "We can do it !!!!"

As a biochemist, I've studied photosynthesis in detail in the past, and although this is on a much larger scale, it is never the less "photosynthesis." In a plant, the conversion of light to electricity (reduction of NAD+ to NADH) occurs in one compartment, the electricity is then transported to another compartment (electron transport chain), and then the conversion of the electricity to chemical energy (ATP synthase) occurs in the second compartment. So yes, using a photovoltaic cell to generate electricity from sunlight and then running wires to another compartment and then converting the electricity into chemical energy IS photosynthesis. BRILLIANT !!!!

 

I decided to read the source articles and clean up some hype.

1) This has nothing to do with solar power. It has everything to do with improving the efficiency of electrolysis. The solar power aspect is just an application target, nothing more. (Electricity from a Nuclear or Coal plant could be used....but this does not get good airplay....for maybe the right reasons.)

2) The present shortcomings as reported in Science (1 AUG 08) are; "The catalyst isn’t perfect. It still requires excess electricity to start the water-splitting reaction, energy that isn’t recovered and stored in the fuel. And for now, the catalyst can accept only low levels of electrical current." The good news here is that these are engineering problems, not missing physics or mystery chemistry. Apparently, a lot of electricity needs to be spent getting the active cobalt film to form on an Indium Tin Oxide Electrode. Once the electricity stops, this film disolves...till the next startup. So this is not a quick On/Off type of thing.

3) I could not find an easy to understand "efficiency" comparision to conventional electrolysis. Obviously this would be nice to know.

4) The research focused on ensuring that this was a robust process that did not destroy the catalysts or required perfect conditions to work (e.g. pH can vary reasonably).

5) The exciting part to the authors was that nothing exotic is needed to make this work (other than the right recipe of materials and operating conditions). If you read Jayman's oil refining details on how exotic catalyst are needed for oil refining, you might grasp why non-exotic materials are a big thing.

6) The authors do not make any bombastic claims and look to be first rate in previous work and reporting. However, energy PR does rage out of control very easily.

7) It will not be an overnight solution to anything.....but it makes the cost of future solar kWh's likely to be less....and this is good.

 

One of the other articles I read on the subject claimed near 100% efficiency in making hydrogen from the available current. However I take all news articles based on scientific discoveries a bit tongue in cheek.
EETimes.com - MIT claims 24/7 solar power
(other article)

When I was in grad school my thesis professor would constantly bring up this same damn tired talk every week we had a meeting "Need to find a way to plug into trees".... it was that crap which got me going a different route and leaving solar research behind.
Glad someone else got an idea on it though

 

Very cool indeed! They've been talking about this approach for years. Glad to hear it looks promising after all.

 

This is really exciting stuff. Maybe MIT is patenting it before anyone else so they can release it open source for the betterment of mankind.

No, I don't think so... more likely the poor scientist will have an unfortunate car accident :tape:, MIT will receive large cash infusions from anonymous donors, and the technology will downplayed and quietly swept under the rug. Oil prices will continue to rise...

 

Well, they are going to have to make taking oil out of the ground a primitive concept to save the planet (sorry-oil companies). Maybe this one will be cheap and simple enough to do it--using just water and solar energy. It's too bad too many politicians are thinking as much about how to save the oil and car companies as how to save the planet. Now there's a rub.

 

Their report is quite detailed on exactly how to do what they did. No secrets kept here, now the world knows the details. The real key is an anode of Indium Tin Oxide. This allowed using disolved cobalt and potassium phosphate in the electrolyte.

Remember when high temp superconductors were the scientific rage. The recipe there was reported to the world. High Schools were even making superconductors from this writeups. (But large scale use was decades in coming.)

When snake oil is a Prius Chat weekly topic, this looks to be the real deal on something useful. I went in somewhat skeptical and have returned encouraged.

 

MIT (or any other school) owns the rights to anything discovered by people working for or under them. It's a fact of life, now usually if there's some sort of financial gain those who discovered it (maybe some poor grad student) might get a percentage of the cash (depends how nice the school is). As for the betterment of mankind, they're not suppressing the knowledge, simply saying if you want to profit from it, you need to pay us for it first.

 

The big hurdle here is getting DISTILLED water to use in the device. I can foresee minerals in the water causing all sorts of problems. Distilling the water might cost more energy than the device will produce!

 

You are overlooking the big picture. The distilled water would come from the Hydrogen and Oxygen being recombined in the large scale energy storage applications envisioned. That would be a pure as you could get. The device does not produce any energy, it takes in electricity to perform electroysis. Any large scale use of this will have parasitic loads, of which purification would be one....but not a major one.

Making large volumes of pure water is rather efficient, so the volumes needed for electroysis are miniscule when looked at what is made with present day plants for city water supplies. When running power plants (especially nuclear plants), supplying pure water (much purer than distilled) is a very efficient operation with a very small parasitic load.

 

Look at nanosolar ... THEY'VE already made their breakthrough, with thinfilm ... now in production as of this year at a way cheeper cost than traditional solar. But Bush, Chevron, Shell, BP & the rest of the oilie power lobby are set to kill all incentives for solar by the end of this year, here in the U.S.. Thus, nanosolar's entire production is going to Germany, rather than the U.S.. So even when we find a cheeper way, the petro power dollar really dis-incentivies it.

 

Wait. Be patient.

BTW the government can suspend patents in a time of crisis. I believe they did it during WWII. So if anyone is sitting on a certain technology (like batteries) to the detriment of the current economic crisis....the government can suspend their patent monopoly and open that up.

That's what *I'd* do if *I* were Supreme Dictator of the Universe for Life.

 

You're acting like they have products available for the consumers. No need to get all political on us here. Nanosolar had their breakthrough many years ago, it's taken them this long just to get to the point of making large scale solar projects, not stick on your roof kind. Their entire production isn't going to Germany, they built a plant in Germany to build them as well as the US. So keep your panties on and wait until they actually have products that can serve the individual before you start pointing fingers at Bush & Oil companies, the fact is if they had products that they claim ($1 per watt) you wouldn't need subsidies.