Hot news in cleantech: Test-driving Tesla S; super-charged solar cells

Big news this past week was the much-awaited release of the Tesla S electric car. The arrival on the scene of what has been billed as the world’s first, purpose-built premium EV has been accompanied by a huge amount of hype, much of it whipped up by the inimitable Tesla PR machine – CEO Elon Musk hand-delivered keys to a select group of early reservation holders during last Friday’s ceremonies at the factory in Fremont. Tesla said it had more than 10,000 reservations for its Model S, which boasts a charge range of 265 miles (that’s with the top of the range – $US77,400 before subsidies – 85kWh battery pack model) and 0-100kph in under six seconds. It has a base price of $US49,900 (that’s after US federal tax credits), and Tesla expects to produce and deliver 20,000 vehicles per year, beginning in 2013. On top of all this, as Bloomberg has pointed out, Tesla is counting on the car to generate the company’s first profit.

So, does the car live up to all, or any, of the hype?

Here is a selection of comments and reviews (and one video) from Telsa S test-drives…

“If our brief seat time is any indication, Tesla hasn’t just delivered a functional, all-electric sedan – it’s made a luxury EV that can outpace and outclass the stalwarts of the premium sports sedan segment, while changing the perceptions of electric mobility. It’s also a complete hoot to drive.” – Damon Lavrinc, Wired Autopia

“Tesla’s placement of the battery pack, in a 4-inch slab at the base of the car, keeps the center of gravity extremely low. That weight gave the Model S a unique feeling in the turn, very different from cars in a similar class, which are usually battling with a big, front-mounted engine.

“…In this top-trim car, Tesla certainly succeeded at what it set out to do. The Model S is a car that can easily compete with the premium sedans of the world. Sure, it will take a lot longer to charge than it would take to fill up the tank of a gas-engined car, but it will also cost a lot less to run.” – Wayne Cunningham, The Car Tech Blog

“The Tesla Model S drives like [no EV]… or any gas-powered vehicle ever built. …The first sight that greets you behind the wheel is a 17-inch touchscreen that fills the dash, eliminating almost all the buttons and knobs that clutter up most car interiors… On the road, the Model S rewires what you expect when your foot touches the pedals. Unlike gas engines, electric cars generate their maximum power at start – and no electric car has ever had as much power as the Model S. …At the other end, the Model S tries to recapture as much energy as possible from the car’s motion by letting the wheels recharge the batteries. In regular driving, that means the Model S immediately begins to slow once you take your foot off the pedal, at a rate a few ticks greater than normal coasting.” – Justin Hyde, Motoramic

Super-efficient carbon solar cells

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology continues its exciting work at the cutting edge of solar innovation, with two recent developments. The first, the news last Thursday that a MIT team had developed a new kind of all-carbon solar cell that could harness the 40 per cent of solar energy (from the near infra-red region) that conventional silicon-based solar cells cannot. These all-carbon cells are also transparent, so could be overlaid on conventional solar cells, creating a tandem device that could, potentially, harness most of the energy of sunlight.

R&D Magazine reports that the new cell is made of two exotic forms of carbon: carbon nanotubes and C60, or ‘buckyballs.’ “It’s a fundamentally new kind of photovoltaic cell,” says Michael Strano, the Charles and Hilda Roddey Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT and senior author of a paper describing the new device in Advanced Materials. “It has only been within the last few years or so that it has been possible to hand someone a vial of just one type of carbon nanotube,” he says.

To function properly as solar cells, the nanotubes have to be very pure, and of a uniform type: single-walled, and all of just one of nanotubes’ two possible symmetrical configurations. And they will need refining: So far, proof-of-concept devices have demonstrated an energy-conversion efficiency of only about 0.1 per cent. But further research and fine-tuning aside, “we are very much on the path to making very high efficiency near-infrared solar cells,” says Rishabh Jain, a graduate student and lead author of the paper.

The power of MIT maths

Solar development number two comes from a multidisciplinary of  team of researchers from MIT and Spain’s Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, which has developed a mathematical approach that could help in simulating materials for solar cells and LEDs. According to MIT Media, The researchers have found a new mathematical approach to simulating the electronic behavior of noncrystalline materials, which may eventually play an important part in new devices including solar cells, organic LED lights and printable, flexible electronic circuits. The new method – the research will be reported in the journal Physical Review Letters, June 29 – uses a mathematical technique that has not previously been applied in physics or chemistry, and has resulted in predictions that match the actual electronic properties of noncrystalline materials with great precision.

Jiahao Chen, a postdoc in MIT’s Department of Chemistry and lead author of the report, says that finding this novel approach to simulating the electronic properties of “disordered materials” — those that lack an orderly crystal structure — involved a team of physicists, chemists, mathematicians at MIT and a computer scientist at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. The work was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation aimed specifically at fostering interdisciplinary research. The new method makes it possible to translate basic information about the amount of disorder in the molecular structure of a material into a prediction of its electrical properties.

“There is a lot of interest in how organic semiconductors can be used to make solar cells” as a possible lower-cost alternative to silicon solar cells, Chen says. In some types of these devices, “all the molecules, instead of being perfectly ordered, are all jumbled up.” These disordered materials are very difficult to model mathematically, but this new method could be a useful step in that direction, he says. “Our results are a promising first step toward highly accurate solutions of much more sophisticated models,” Chen says. Ultimately, an extension of such methods could lead to “reducing the overall cost of computational modeling of next-generation solar materials and devices.”

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