I fear for induced demand. If electricity is cheap, why build more efficiently? Why not do bitcoin mining or AI training?

It wouldn’t be so bad if there weren’t plenty of places around the world that could desperately use solar panels, that are building fossil fuel infrastructure instead. Climate change is a global problem, so the obsession with getting your individual emissions down to zero is selfish and sometimes even detrimental to the climate if “your emissions” don’t include the cost of manufacturing and limited availability.

We should be sending solar panels to the developing world as fast as humanly possible, not making electricity so cheap in California that multinationals can open up a couple more data centers.

They’re using hydrogen to de-rust iron, and later let the iron rust again. I don’t have a degree in chemistry, but that sounds like a scam.

There are basically two sources of hydrogen that matter at an industrial scale: fossil fuel cracking (not clean energy) and electrolysing water. In the first case, if you want power it’s more green to burn the fossil fuel directly.

And if you’re electrolysing water and then using the hydrogen to chemically derust iron, it would (as far as i understand with high school chemistry) be strictly more efficient to electrolyse rust directly. The oxygen can dissipate into the environment or be reintroduced as necessary, like with a sacrificial metal for ship’s hulls.

It’s undoubtedly innovative that they have a relatively efficient way to store the latent chemical energy of hydrogen given an excess of hydrogen, but in terms of energy storage that is putting the cart before the horse.

It’s a 1000 times improvement the same way riding a horse is a 1000 times improvement over riding an army of snails. It’s possible because nobody was doing the old thing because it was garbage.

“Strong current flow” is informal language, but both it and photoresponse refer to the electrical power that comes out. In theory you would just divide that by the incoming solar flux and get the efficiency. For now it’s only in a lab setting, though, so we’ll have to see what the practical efficiency will be if this is actually incorporated into a reasonable solar cell.

So yeah, apparently barium titanate solar panels used to be extremely terrible, and now they might become competitive with further research.

I put together this gif for a side-by-side comparison. The picture was taken from a slightly different location, so it’s not perfect, but the difference is obvious.

Maybe they’re going for something similar to RDJ’s Sherlock Holmes. A veneer of propriety over a ruthless and savage intelligence.