Solar lab tour

On Wednesday afternoon when the day’s meetings had finished I began my tour of NREL. A wonderfully pleasant woman was showing me around and handing me off from one scientist to another. I asked what her role is, what she does at NREL. “Oh, I arrange tours for all tour groups and VIPs”. I did a casual look over my shoulder to realize that I was a group of one or a VIP. I prefer to look at it as the latter and was treated very much that way. J
One of the larger programs at NREL is the solar research. I was given a tour of several labs doing cutting edge research on all sorts of solar cells. One benefit of being a ‘group of one’ is that I was free to ask questions about any point of interest and many who know me won’t find that hard to imagine. Having spent the past two summers doing research on organic solar cells as part of another fellowship I knew enough to engage with the scientists, somewhat, and to avoid too much of that nodding and “uh-huh,” response feeling I get when I hang out with many physical scientists. Yet many assumptions I had about solar cells were quickly dispelled. I was feeling sassy that I was able to quote (loosely) a paper from the 60’s which set the upper level of efficiency for solar cells at +/- 35%. “No,” I was told, and shown a model, “we have made one with a 45% efficiency” followed by an explanation of what Shockley had not anticipated in his seminal paper. Ok. Pretty cool stuff but one of those things that involves the use of some pretty toxic material to manufacture. I also had my notion of silicon solar cells being rather expensive, needing years and years to recover the energy used to make them before they produce “free” energy. It’s been cut way down with new design methods.
I walked into the second lab to the sounds of Jimmy Buffett filling a large lab which looked much more like a ‘shop class’ but with really nice stainless steel equipment. A friendly scientist who looked as though he could as easily be a forestry professor as a top end solar research scientist at a cutting edge national lab. The cool toy designed in this shop is a vacuum chamber on wheels that allows the researchers to move a solar cell from one piece of test equipment to another without bringing the solar cell into ambient air (and pressure) which can change the surface or composition being designed/tested. Way cool toy.
During the tour I got to see a fancy ink jet printer, one that can ‘print’ a solar cell onto, well, anything you might conceive. Don’t think the typical solar cell mounted on a roof or the one that powers your calculator. Think –dye absorbs light, metal moves electrons- and you’re headed in the right direction. They can print such a mixture onto surfaces to make the windows of your house into solar cells, so long as they are hooked up to a device to accept those electrons. There are probably umpteen errors in this explanation but you get the idea. I asked if you could print it onto a t-shirt. Answer: sure. Wouldn’t be efficient but t-shirts don’t last that long anyway…. How cool would that be?
Next up: brewer turned biofuel researcher and mega-wind towers.