Published

2 years ago

March 21, 2024

Alice Rush

Scientists from Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, have led an international team to what it calls a breakthrough by setting an efficiency record for fully roll-to-roll printed solar cells.

Printed onto thin flexible plastic films and incorporating perovskite, the printed solar cells are portable.

“CSIRO’s thin and light-weight solar cells are now on the cusp of emerging from the lab to create clean energy in the real world,” says Dr. Anthony Chesman, CSIRO’s Renewable Energy Systems Group leader.

“We’ve solved several engineering problems to achieve record results across a large surface area of interconnected modules. Roll-to-roll printing allows for the solar cells to be manufactured on very long, continuous rolls of plastic, which can dramatically increase the rate of production.

As these methods are already widely used in the printing industry, this makes their production more accessible for Australian manufacturers. The successful commercialisation of printed flexible solar cells has the potential to create significant economic and environmental benefits for Australia and the world.”

The results were achieved in collaboration with researchers from the University of Cambridge, Monash University, the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales, and have been published in Nature Communications.

This activity received funding from ARENA as part of its Research and Development Program: Solar PV Research.

The post CSIRO Sets Record for Next-Gen Roll-to-Roll Printed Solar Cells appeared first on Solar Industry.

CSIRO Sets Record for Next-Gen Roll-to-Roll Printed Solar Cells

Renewable Energy

Renewable Energy Concepts Can’t Violate the Laws of Physics

Published

15 hours ago

February 28, 2026

Alice Rush

In the early days of 2GreenEnergy, my people and I were vigorously engaged in finding solid ideas in cleantech that needed funding in order to move forward.

I vividly remember a conversation with a guy in Maryland who was trying to explain the (ostensible) breakthrough that he and his team had made in hydrokinetics. When I was having trouble visualizing what we was talking about, he asked me to “think of it as a river in a box.”

“Oh!” I exclaimed. “You mean you take a box full of standing water, add energy to it get it moving, then extract that energy, leaving you with more energy that you added to it.”

“Exactly.”

I politely explained that the laws of physics, specifically the first and second laws of thermodynamics, make this impossible.

He wasn’t through, however, and insisted that, in his office, his people had constructed a “working model.”

Here’s where my tone descended into something less than 100% polite. I told him that he may think he has a working model, but he’s wrong; if he believes this, he’s ignorant; if he doesn’t, but is conducting this conversation anyway, he’s a fraud.

“But don’t you want to come see it?” he implored.

“No. Not only would not fly across the country to see whatever it is you claim to have built, I wouldn’t walk across the street to a “working model” of something that is theoretically impossible.”

—

I tell this story because the claim made at the upper left is essentially identical. You’re pumping water up out of a stream, and then claiming to extract more energy when the water flows back into the stream.

Of course, social media today is rife with complete crap like this. We’ve devolved to a point where defrauding money out of idiots is rapidly replacing baseball as our national pastime.