Hey J.D.

Let me know if you find such a list, I would be happy to integrate it into my public database of PV manufacturers. ( energystats.org )

Dave

UK Research Team Aims To Decrease Cost of Solar Energy

The easist way to save on Solar pv is to stop using it until the price comes down. If the price never comes down, don't use it. You save at least .$20 per kwh that way.  Hence my solar pv solutions save $.20 per kwh. That could be 50% or better by some estimates.

Gee, I did that with no funding at all and under 2 minutes. I bet those guys in the story are less sucessful, take a lot longer, and spend lots more money.

As far I know, just the simple silicium cells, do not use any rare material. I have been checking that, but I couldn't find anything.

If Indium is used as conductive layer, it can be replaced by graphene (in principle).

Lucas

Does anyone have a list of each manufacturers latest cell efficiencies? Anyone?  solarjake@gmail.com

I have never been a great fan of solar energy, but I still hope Durham university has great success:

I always have, and still believe that energy via hydrogen is the way forward, and believe the wealth of the UK would be better spent trying to iron out the problems of how best to produce hydrogen safely and cheaply: Once the hydrogen conundrom is solved the possibilites are endless and a safe bright future is assured:

Roll on the day when we can tell the worlds oil cartels to stick their oil where the sun dont shine:

I'm sure all these research efforts to use less of certain rare metals to make them go further are very worthwhile and if Oil is any indication, when there is a need, more effort is spent in searching for new sources  and they are found.  However there  are some much more prosaic ways of making solar-electric financially attractive.  On the technical side, simply developing a long-run solar panel that would clad a roof rather than putting your solar panels on top of the conventional roofing would reduce the price of solar by the cost of the conventional roofing.  In addition, there are many "strokes of the pen" any government could do to reduce the cost of solar by half.  See:

http://mtkass.blogspot.com/2007/07/solar-electric-government-role.html 

That is assuming it is wise to use the world's entire indium production to produce a trivial 10GW of power.

Sounds crazy to me, when silicon can do the job, albeit perhaps at lower efficiency. 

Fantastic initiative by Durham University. Raw Material has been a concern for Thin Films and the research work will certainly help inlong-term to find solutoin for cheaper and cost-effective materials

For readers pleas eb know that Indium is not an issue for Thin Films as its utilisation is hardly 5 g/m2 and the present reserves are sufficient to sustain for atleast 10 GW production. Till that capacity is reached, alternative methods would have been found out which is what the authroties at Durgham Univ.a re doing rightly

Jaideep Malaviya, INDIA

Great news from Durham the birthplace of steam and now looking to the future with solar energy.

Show us the way on how to tap into that benevolent ball of energy which laid down the Durham coalfields and in turn kick started  the industrial revolution.

We are on the brink of an energy revolution and solar plus hydrogen will be the key to secure our future energy needs.

Unlike Jim I bet you guys will be successful and will make a lot of money!

Mike H. founder HYDROGENHEADS

I couldn't agree with you more Mike.  In other words, solar electric and hydro will tend to be complimentary.  I think a future development we are much in need of is to generate an excess of renewable energy as often as possible which opens up the possibility of using demand balancing instead of supply balancing of our electricity.  Some ideas on this subject are in:

http://mtkass.blogspot.com/2007/10/excess-energy-what-to-do.html. 

Good point William. Less wind less rain equals more sunshine. It just shows as far as renewables go we can't put all our eggs in one basket.

That is why we need to get in behind Massey and support their efforts to develope efficient solar panels to split hydrogen from water.

Hydrogen is the greatest energy carrier known to man; just look at the sun.

When I do see its friendly face popping up over Rangitoto every morning the message it seems to be sending out is "use me or loose me"

Mike H. founder HYDROGENHEADS www.hydrogenheads.org

There are some good developments in the pipeline already - Crystalline Silicon on Glass and Sliver Cells being two silicon based ones that use significantly less processed silicon. I'm not aware of them requiring rare metals like indium. CIGS type cells could well come up against resource constraints.  Any project aimed at low cost, massively mass produceable PV ought to begin from the best in the labs and under development rather than what  is currently mass produced,  as well as improvements in producing nano materials, so it ought to have a good head start.