Baby steps towards dispatchable Solar

[josecamoessilva]

Amid the discussion in another thread found some research by Evelyn Wang of MIT mechanical engineering on solar cells with thermal accumulation:



Interesting idea, making solar power dispatchable right at the generation point (rather than using grid-scale batteries); that would be a game changer for solar. (And somewhat bad news for Wang's MIT colleague Don Sadoway, who's been developing grid scale molten-salt batteries at Ambri.)

Yes, it's old-ish, but I only found it today. A press release from last year: http://news.mit.edu/2016/hot-new-solar-cell-0523

Yes, I know about solar thermal plants that are somewhat dispatchable (same principle: hot stuff), but we're talking flat panel solar cells here.

(Rats! They published in Nature. As a member of the AAAS, I can read Science for free, but to read Nature I have to find an open proxy in some university library. Idaho State at Potatoville, maybe; state schools in square states usually don't check IP location or require users to log in.    The San Francisco Public Library doesn't subscribe to Nature, only to Naturalist Today, which is completely different.)

[Seekonk]

If you are going to use industry specific terms like power dispatchable, you should explain them.  I could watch the movie, but I have lost interest already.

[Red Squirrel]

 Is this essentially like a peltier but more efficient?  If this is more efficient than steam it could be viable for other heat sources too like a wood stove.  It would make it viable to go off grid even in winter.