Solar Cells

[Duane Attaway]

On Sat, 15 Jan 2005, Jonathan Hutchins wrote:

> There's been some talk about independent power generation here lately, 
> so I thought some of you would be interested in this:
>
> http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=scienceNews&storyID=7319094&src=rss/scienceNews
>
> New solar cells that are 5x more efficient than the current 6%.
>
> I should point out that there are a LOT of resources on alternative 
> power on the web.  Don't rely on this list unless your interest is 
> purely casual.

That's pretty good.  Compare this with our biological friends: plants like 
sugarcane usually get around 4.5% efficiency with photosynthesis and a 
yield rate of 1/10th that.  So, with the sun giving averaging us 100 watts 
per square meter 24 hours a day/365 days a year, we would get about 400 
milliwatts of sugar per square meter...

So how many potato plants does it take to run a Debian Linux box on either 
technology?

-=Duane
http://dattaway.org