Powered by Arsenic!

Okay, so I admit I’m old enough to remember (vaguely, I’m not that old!) when Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House! Solar power is coming into its own. We have dreams about the Mojave becoming the new Saudi Arabia of solar, and LA, especially Pasadena, is becoming the solar hub. Last year, I went to InterSolar, a huge solar industry trade show that was in the US for the first time. So the gist of this is . . . greater efficiency at a smaller scale. And yes, this technology has toxicity concerns, but so does the current silicon-based technology.And the foundation of solar technology is silicon. Why? Well, silicon is cheap and abundant—the films get better and better . . .and thinner and thinner. Silicon can also be insulated easily, and the cells can also charge quickly.

But there’s a new technology that could give silicon a run for its money. It’s called Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) . . . which is a combination of, well, gallium and arsenic, which sounds kind of creepy. Compared to silicon, it has a much higher concentrated electron velocity, which in plain English, means that the energy reaped from the sun can transfer much more quickly. GaAs also transmits light much more efficiently—silicon is actually poor at transferring light. Finally, all those sun rays can not only be churned along quickly, but GaAs can be applied in a much thinner layer than silicon-based films on solar panels. There’s also the possibility that these GaAs panels can be manufactured at a much smaller size . . . so perhaps we won’t have to pave over the Mojave after all . . . and in fact, as what often happens with green/clean tech, you try to solve one problem, and you open a can . . . just remember Senator Her Majesty Feinstein’s recent fit of pique over proposed solar farms in the California desert