Solar power without silicon solar cells? New magnetic effect of light into insulators discovered.

The Michigan discovery suggests a new salient in particle physics- the hunt for the teleon, the elusive triad of faith, hope, and charity quarks particle researchers at the Swiss supercolluding ultraclimber collider are seeking along with its eleemosynary resonance, the templeton.
Purse string theory suggests that , just as photons with energies in excess of 1 GEV create electron-positron pairs, templetons accelerated to Nielsen energies > 10.5 megabucks (IU ~ 8.7 x107 CHF) will cause the Hicks Boxon, AKA the “Gaga particle” to emerge from the intellectual vacuum along with eschatons, atheons, and telethons starring Fritjof Capra.
These yield high-spin reports of quantized teleology that NPR theory , and to observe their contrast with the microwave background, we seek a matching grant from the Discovery Institute to measure the evanescent cash flow of teleons orbiting amplitude modulated talk radio circuits before decaying into the null set of teleologists worth televising. To detect the resulting telluric currents, Texas A&M physicists will retune its marching band’s tubas into an array of superconducting ear trumpets to detect angelic choral radiation left over from the Big Band event leading metaphysicians date to November 23, 4004 BC.

I dropped a decimal point in that fresnel lens size. To get 10 million watts per square centimeter you’d need 100 million square centimeter fresnel at 1/10th watt per square centimeter in full sun, cloudless sky, at a low latitude which works out to a square fresnel lense 100 meters square or about 2 American football fields.
Anyone have one of those laying about? I seem to have misplaced mine. Out of that you get a megawatt of electricity (best case) which sells for about $100/hour in the U.S. right now. In an ideal environment (no clouds at all) it could operate for about 2,000 hours per year. Let’s say it has a service life of 25 years so we get roughly 50,000 hours of operation or $5 million in revenue.
I can’t believe you could even cover the initial construction cost to build the sucker with $5 million. Worse, invested at 5% APR that 5 million will turn into 20 million in 25 years using the rule of 72. So you’d have to build it for about a million bucks and then not pay a penny more in operating expenses for the next 25 years to just break even. And that’s not counting what it costs to deliver the juice from point of production to point of consumption (you need to build a grid or use someone else’s) as the $100 per megawatt is the average delivered-to-your-front door price of electricity.
I didn’t even begin to address the actual physical requirements of concentrating sunlight by a factor of 100 million. Whether a mirror or a lense it has to track the sun which introduces far more cost & complexity. This is so far from practical it’s breathakingly stupid. Far easier to concentrate sunlight by a factor of a 1000 with mirrors or lenses and using that to generate heat for a heat engine/generator which might get 50% efficiency and thus require 5 times less sunlight to collect in the first place. Even in that situation there are a large number of experimental solar electric installations in the world and none of them can come close to competing with coal on a level playing field.

Dave Springer says:
April 16, 2011 at 11:15 am

Yes, Dave, there you have it. ANY dispersed low-density energy source, however “free”, requires 2 things: lotsa real estate and lotsa capital-hungry equipment. Which then needs to be maintained, upgraded, replaced, etc. Whether its solar or tidal or wind or wave, all these diffuse energy sources are also plagued with uncontrollable variability, and cannot be forced to track demand.
Every one is a money pit, and a dead end. Only in isolated areas with no access to a grid are they economic, and then only on small scales.

With the nuclear crisis in Japan still raging, it seems there is renewed interest in Solar energy once again. Granted, solar may not provide all energy needs, but it certainly goes someway to help those who so desire become energy neutral.

Brian H says:
April 16, 2011 at 5:54 pm
“Yes, Dave, there you have it. ANY dispersed low-density energy source, however “free”, requires 2 things: lotsa real estate and lotsa capital-hungry equipment.”
Sunlight isn’t quite so dispersed as one might think. Every square kilometer receives about 200 megawatts daily on average. A square kilometer of arable land is a hobby farm in Texas and a square kilometer of non-arable land if you’re lucky will support two dozen head of cattle. There’s more solar energy recieved by the Texas panhandle each year than is consumed by the entire western world.
“all these diffuse energy sources are also plagued with uncontrollable variability”
The sun has been reliably shining on the earth for billions of years so I’m not buying that argument either. The variability is purely a matter of clouds and over a course of a year there’s very little variability from year to year. You can bank on annual insolation being relatively invariant.
The first and foremost problem with solar is that electricity isn’t what we need. We need liquid fuels that can be stored cheaply, indefinitely, and without loss. If you have liquid fuel you can make it into electricity on demand. All the solar “alternatives” you mention generate electricity. I agree none of those look promising for a variety of reasons the largest of which is that we need liquid fuel.
There is one solar technology that stands out from the rest. Biosynthetic production of liquid fuel. Every square kilometer can easily produce 10 million gallons of diesel, kerosene, or ethanol each year quite reliably if you can custom design bacteria to turn air, sunlight, and brackish water into hydrocarbon fuels. This can be done cheaply and easily once genetic engineering advances to the point where we can plug in the genes for a custom effluent pump into a bacterium that produces a significant fraction of its total weight in hydrocarbons. You simply give the critter an effluent pump for some chemical that’s a sterilant to wild species, treat the water with it, and you can have open ponds where nothing grows except what you want to grow. Harvesting is as simple as straining them out of the water and crushing them like so many grapes.
The US consumes somewhere south of a billion gallons per day of fuel. A thousand square kilometers of biosynthetic fuel farms can supply the entire nation’s liquid fuel appetite at an equivalent price of about $5/bbl oil. Generating plants just need something that burns to heat their boilers. Liquid hydrocarbon fuel works as well as coal or natural gas for this purpose so add another thousand square kilometers and our cup will overfloweth with cheap electricity.
The day this becomes reality is quickly approaching. There are pilot plants being built right now using custom designed patented cyanobacteria that can produce 2 million gallons of diesel per year per square kilometer at a cost equivalent to $30/bbl oil. These plants are just the first baby steps. Synthetic biology advances are coming along at a pace that reminds me of Moore’s Law for semi-conductors. These pilot plants are like the first transisters with doublings in efficiency every 18 months until theoretical limits are approached. The theoretical limit appears to be only in how much sunlight hits the ground which is on the order of hundreds of megawatts per square kilometer on average night and day 365 days per year.
The Texas panhandle alone (a mere tenth of the state) is 70,000 square kilometers and isn’t used for much of anything right now except wind farms, oil wells, and cattle grazing. No one would even notice 2,000 square kilometers of it covered in shallow pools of brackish oily water soaking up the sun except from a satellite view where it would appear like a few dark freckles.

Dave;
I wasn’t implying that we’d run out of real estate, merely that you have to “lay on” your collectors over a large area; that implies lots of “stuff” (panels, windmills, whatever) that have to be made, installed, maintained, tapped, replaced, etc. This is non-trivial. In fact, it is a major distinction from concentrated sources, and often is very poorly costed and carried out. Part of the real estate requirement is transmission, not generally properly accounted for. The sites where diffuse energy can be gathered are not typically close to demand, and long corridors need to be dedicated and wired up.
And so it goes.
As for the biofuel options, they have been unmitigated disasters or hoaxes, so far. Whether ponds can be fed with enough “waste” at low enough transport and acquisition cost to contribute is yet to be demonstrated. As has the collection and refinement technology and costing.

“”””” Dave Springer says:
April 16, 2011 at 2:26 pm
It’s worse than I thought.
Solar electricity By T. Markvart page 237
I can’t copy the text but you can read it. It appears there’s a theoretical limit to the energy density you can get from sunlight.
The sun is a nearly colimated radiation souce with a divergence cone half angle of about 15 minutes of arc or 0.25 degrees.
The theoretical maximum concentration ratio for the output “beam” in air or vacuum is 1/sin^2(0.25deg) = 52,525
That of course is areal concentration. The linear concentration is about 229.
If you produce the final concentrated beam in a medium of refractive index (n) then you can increase the concentration by n^2.
I don’t know how many times I have to post this; obviously I’m just wasting my time here talking into an empty hole.
Concentration of sunlight by a factor of 10^8 is impossible; NO MATTER WHAT as Dr William Schockley would say.
The same problem works in reverse. You cannot take an arbitrarily small source of radiation and “passively” spread it over an arbitrarily large area so that it visible over some finite viewing angle.
A single modern LED die that is say a 10 mil (250 micron) cube is capable of emitting all of the photons required to meet the SAE spec for a CHMSL; Center High Mounted Stop Light; which requires eight square inches of illuminated area that is visible over some vertical and horizontal viewing angles at a certain “brightness” level. It is impossible; using passive optical means; reflection-refraction-diffraction etc to so redistribute all those photons from the LED into the beam required by the SAE spec.
The basic reason is that using passive means, any element of the output “light source” within its restricted viewing angle must be as “bright” as the original surface of the LED die, is over its much greater viewing angle (180 degrees, or 90 degree cone half angle). Of course the output can’t be brighter, but it can’t be less bright either, except for losses due to innefficiency; and the LED die surface is hundreds of times brighter than is the SAE spec requirement.
The significance of the “passive” resrtiction, is that the desired result can be achieved through “active means”, which is in effect time division multiplexing.
You can illuminate a smaller area or a smaller viewing angle but it will be much brighter than the spec, and then you can rapidly scan that source over either the area or the soilid angle, or both, to give the illusion of constant illumination, but it now will have a duty cycle reduced brightness.
The same effect can be met in principle without moving parts by simply running the beam through a scattering medium; which amounts to a time division multiplexing. The photons travel according to a statistical probability, so that on average, only a few of them go to a particular location while travelling in a given direction. The problem with diffuse scattering, is that there is always backscattering, and scattering into undesirable directions; so it is an extremely lossy process requiring even more photons from the LED.
In practice it isn’t possible, which is why NO automobile LED CHMSL is anything like a uniformly illuminated 8 square inches over the restricted solid viewing angle required by the SSAE spec; they are mostly dark empty space, with just an array of lit dots viewable.
I’d like a dollar for every hare brained idea I’ve ever heard, for how to either concentrate or unconcentrate light from light sources to limits that are forbidden by the second law of thermodynamics.
Two axis steerable elements do permit concentration of sunlight by factors of a few hundred to a few thousand, in practical large area systems. 10^8 concentration is neither practical nor possible.

This is great to think outside the box… and it may get somewhere somehow…but,
I think we really need to focus on more OIL and GAS now – may be on properly designed nuke power-
And… maybe we could start using the sun for day lighting our buildings, and to power passive thermal chimneys for cooling, and direct gain passive heating – this stuff works and yet we still neglect it? why? Is it just too low tech to be sexy?

The Optics of Non-Imaging Concentrators is a very interesting subject; and NI systems beat imaging Optics hands down.
The archetype of NI Concentrators is Roland Winston’s CPC, or Compound Parabolic Concentrator. In its two dimensional form, it is IDEAL in the sense of being able to practically reach the theoretical maximum concentration ratioo set by the second law of thermo-dynamics. And of course it can be used backwards, to unpack a compact source to create a larger wide area beam over a restricted viewing angle. By two dimensional, we mean a linear or trough like structure, that concentrates (or un-concentrates) in one axis only.
A practical application would be to take the light emitting from a cylindrical fluorescent tube, which radiates over 360 degrees in the plane perpendicular to the axis of the tube; and compacting ALL of that light (less reflectance losses) into an output beam, that has more illuminated area than the fluorescent tube surface, and is only visible over a limited viewing angle; say +/- 45 degrees downward from the axis of the tube. A tube say 1 3/4 inch diameter has a circumference of about 14 cm, and every point on that surface emits light over a cone half angle of 90 degrees. When you look at such a tube, you see a source that is 1 3/4 inch wide (about 4.5 cm), and it is visible over a full 360 degree, if you mount the tube vertically, or 180 degrees, if it is in the ceiling. So you can put a mirror behind it, and capture some of the backward emission. Put it in a properly designed CPC derivative reflector, and you can get a source that is visible over +/- 45 degrees, and is 14/sin (45) = 20 cm (roughly) Wide.
The key point is that the entire 20 cm times the length of the tube, within that 45 degree viewing angle range, is AS BRIGHT (less reflectance losses) as the original tube surface itself; so you went from 4.5 cm width at 360 degrees to 20 cm over a total of 90 degrees. And if you space those properly reflected tubes at the right spacing and ceiling height, then of course you can illuminate the entire office space to the required illumination level. The brain dad egg crate baffles that are put in most office ceilings, simply waste a lot of the light. With the CPC, the tube is invisible outside of that 45 degree angle off the center line.
The required reflector, is slightly more complicated than a CPC. The outer parts are a normal CPC down to about the tube axis, and then the reflector curves around the back side of the tube, spiralling in towards the tube until it touches the back of the tube down the center line, and forms a cusp normal to the tube surface. The required curly portion, is in fact the involute of the cylindrical surface. It is a perfect application of Non-Imaging Optics; and so easy to implement; yet it is not used in indoor office lighting.
When you try to take a CPC profile, and rotate it to make a three dimensional concentrator that now concentrates in two axes, so you have a sort of funnel contraption, with a circular source (or square/rectangular) in the middle; you now discover that it is no longer an IDEAL concentrator. Only the MERIDIONAL RAYS are ideally concentrated; and most of the emission consists of skew rays; which are NOT ideally concentrated. But they are quite efficiently concentrated, and it is still one of the better designs for such a source.
Notice that the two dimensional trough concentrator, that I just described, is the exact shape, that you need to collect solar energy as a “heat” source, and concentrate it on a cylindrical pipe containing a working fluid; such as water or maybe oil or what have you. In that case, you theoretically can get a concentration of 1/ sin (0.25) = 229.
So a tubular CPC collector heating a pipe can theoretically reach 229 suns; but remember that it now has to be steerable in the axis perpendicular to the tube axis, to keep the concentrated beam on the tube. In principle, it is possible to make this steering almost totally passive by using bimetallic strips that attach to the tube, and detect its heating; and rotate the reflector, to either prevent a meltdown, in the case of a loss of fluid, or regulate the Temperature.
Winston, and his associates DID develop a true IDEAL concentrator that does work in three dimensions; unlike the CPC. It is a rotationally symmetrical Hyperboloid, that looks more like a trumpet end. I suppose mathematically it would be described as a Circular Hyperboloid of One Sheet.
That can theoretically reach 229^2 concentration which is 52,525. in air, or over 210,000 in a solid form such as a YAG crystal, with a refractive index of more than 2.0. Unfortunately that concentration is only obtainable inside the high index medium; so to get access to the 200,000 suns, you would have to have your hot tube Optically immersed in the crystal. I believe the 56,000 number which Winston achieved was done with the near ideal CPC form, rather than the newer shape, which is why he couldn’t get to 200,000, since it is only ideal for the meridional rays (rays lying completely within a plane containing the optical axis of the CPC).
In a losss of fluid accident, you would have an instantaneous meltdown, at 50,000 suns or even at 200,000 suns. Forget 10^8 suns; ain’t gonna happen !

“”””” M. Simon says:
April 19, 2011 at 1:17 pm
George E. Smith,
I like the Zome Works Passive solar trackers: “””””
Well I notice they conveniently omit the only performance spec that one would want to know; and that is the pointing accuracy. A cylindrical 229 suns concentrator, would have to be steered to better an 1/4 of a degree angle. If you made a three dimensional one to get 52,525 suns, you would have to be better than 1/4 degree in two axes simultaneously.
The problem with too high a concentration ratio, is that you have to run it at very high Temperature to benefit from the concentration.
So more practical, if you can do with boiling water Temperatures, is to reduce the concnetration ratio, by increasing the acceptance angle above 0.25 degrees, until you get to the operating Temperature range you want. Then of coursae that wider acceptance angle translates into a sloppier steering requirement.
In a practical integrated solar system; I would want a hot water system with lower concentration, and a smaller three-D system to get cooking Temperatures.