On 4/15/2011 10:05 AM, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> On 15/04/2011 05:01 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> On Fri, 15 Apr 2011 10:21:37 +0100, Invisible wrote:
>>
>>> Wind power is great. But... do you really want the whole country to go
>>> black every time the wind stops blowing? Similarly, solar power. You
>>> realise that the sun is below the horizon for hours at a time, right?
>>> And some days, it's just not very sunny. For either of these things to
>>> work, you seriously need high-efficiency power storage, so you can
>>> collect power when it's there, and store it for when it's not.
>>
>> And most solar collection and all wind powered systems I've seen actually
>> include that storage subsystem.
>
> Last time I heard, storing electricity efficiently is an unsolved problem.
>
> (Apparently current battery solutions aren't very efficient.)
>
Yeah, that is the biggest hang up. One company though is looking to use 
the panels to split water, then store the hydrogen in a regular fuel 
cell. This can't, obviously, be too helpful for thing that need to be 
"on" all the time, but.. in principle, for anything that needs to only 
operate as needed, this would reduce costs quite a bit, since all you 
need it to make sure it has water to work with.

Still, the major break throughs are going to have to be in battery tech, 
and in making those solar cells both cheaper, and more powerful. The 
former being, maybe, easier than the later. There are people working 
with organic dye cells, which you can make damn cheap (but don't work as 
well as normal ones yet), and others that think they may have ways to 
make the silicon they are made on *way* cheaper.

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