What's Your Super Power?
The creation of electrical power is constantly being made more efficient by researchers, engineers, and scientists around the world who want to make energy costs cheaper and be more friendly to the environment by using our resources more wisely. We're extremely reliant on electricity in today's world - especially with the advent of the smartphone and other mobile devices (tablets, laptops, desktops, etc.). In fact, a typical smartphone actually has a carbon footprint larger than you might think, on average consuming more energy in a year than a refrigerator!
Now this is not to say that to charge your phone itself takes that much energy, but when you take into consideration all the infrastructure that has to be supported with providing cell service and data storage, the power consumption per device goes up dramatically, according to an article in GBTimes.
So this leads to the energy generation dilemma: how do we get power and why is it so expensive? Well, there's a number of ways, such as coal-fired plants, nuclear plants, hydro-electric generators, wind, and solar, just to name a few. The problem with a lot of these, though, is inefficiency and using up fossil fuels and other non-renewable resources, which all contribute to their high prices. Wind and solar power both use renewable resources, but their efficiencies are fairly low, which means that there's a lot of power losses in transferring the source of the power into electrical power that we can use. (Wind turbines, for example, take a lot of wind force just to move the enormous generators, thus losing a lot of the power and momentum in the wind just to get the generator moving.)
But what if we could make solar power more efficient? There's enough energy given off by the Sun in a single day (200 million Terawatt-hours (TWh)) to satisfy the entirety of human power consumption for over a year (Wikipedia)!! That is a whole lot of energy!!! According to the description of a photo found on Wikipedia, in 2009, the total global power usage was 140,000 TWh for that year. Thus, doing just a bit of math, we can see that there's enough energy hitting the earth from the Sun in a single day to power the entire globe for 1,428 years!!! And it's just sitting there, most of it (70%) being reflected back into space! Check out the photo below (found on the same Wikipedia article) that lays out the total energy potential that various renewable (left, per year) and non-renewable (right, total reserves) energy sources have in Terawatts (TW).
What would happen, then, if we could make solar energy generation more efficient? Well, an Australian team of researchers at the University of New South Wales has come up with solar cells that can convert roughly 46% of all the incident energy it receives. That may not seem like a lot, but to put it in perspective, most solar cells in use today are only 15-20% efficient, so that is more than double the power output from the same source using this new technology! And according to a YouTube video on the subject, this is even more than modern-day fossil fuel methods, which are only about 33% efficient (albeit fossil fuels pack the most punch for their weight, which is why they are so widely used). But 33% efficiency is still pretty low, especially compared to a totally renewable source whose efficiency is 13% greater! If this technology is implemented in solar power plants around the globe, it could mean that electricity prices would go down overall, since the power source (the Sun) provides so much free energy, just waiting for us to harvest it!
So where is the future of power generation headed? It may very well be this kind of super-efficient solar panel. It seems that this is the most viable alternative to burning our limited supply of fossil fuels, as well as an answer to the inefficiencies in modern-day energy production.
Now this is not to say that to charge your phone itself takes that much energy, but when you take into consideration all the infrastructure that has to be supported with providing cell service and data storage, the power consumption per device goes up dramatically, according to an article in GBTimes.
So this leads to the energy generation dilemma: how do we get power and why is it so expensive? Well, there's a number of ways, such as coal-fired plants, nuclear plants, hydro-electric generators, wind, and solar, just to name a few. The problem with a lot of these, though, is inefficiency and using up fossil fuels and other non-renewable resources, which all contribute to their high prices. Wind and solar power both use renewable resources, but their efficiencies are fairly low, which means that there's a lot of power losses in transferring the source of the power into electrical power that we can use. (Wind turbines, for example, take a lot of wind force just to move the enormous generators, thus losing a lot of the power and momentum in the wind just to get the generator moving.)
But what if we could make solar power more efficient? There's enough energy given off by the Sun in a single day (200 million Terawatt-hours (TWh)) to satisfy the entirety of human power consumption for over a year (Wikipedia)!! That is a whole lot of energy!!! According to the description of a photo found on Wikipedia, in 2009, the total global power usage was 140,000 TWh for that year. Thus, doing just a bit of math, we can see that there's enough energy hitting the earth from the Sun in a single day to power the entire globe for 1,428 years!!! And it's just sitting there, most of it (70%) being reflected back into space! Check out the photo below (found on the same Wikipedia article) that lays out the total energy potential that various renewable (left, per year) and non-renewable (right, total reserves) energy sources have in Terawatts (TW).
What would happen, then, if we could make solar energy generation more efficient? Well, an Australian team of researchers at the University of New South Wales has come up with solar cells that can convert roughly 46% of all the incident energy it receives. That may not seem like a lot, but to put it in perspective, most solar cells in use today are only 15-20% efficient, so that is more than double the power output from the same source using this new technology! And according to a YouTube video on the subject, this is even more than modern-day fossil fuel methods, which are only about 33% efficient (albeit fossil fuels pack the most punch for their weight, which is why they are so widely used). But 33% efficiency is still pretty low, especially compared to a totally renewable source whose efficiency is 13% greater! If this technology is implemented in solar power plants around the globe, it could mean that electricity prices would go down overall, since the power source (the Sun) provides so much free energy, just waiting for us to harvest it!
So where is the future of power generation headed? It may very well be this kind of super-efficient solar panel. It seems that this is the most viable alternative to burning our limited supply of fossil fuels, as well as an answer to the inefficiencies in modern-day energy production.
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