Thanks Steve. But I am still sceptical. I see a lot of press release info, and not a shred of technical data. They keep telling the world what they claim they've done, but not one of them is describing how they have done it. I wrote several hundred press releases in my life, and until someone can show me the technical reasons these things work, I consider it all smoke and mirrors.
I dont see the connection between DBK's claims and the South African.
I did try to dig into the South African claim, and found this on a blog:
Ok I checked at the Cape Angus newpaper site, and found the original
story. Unfortuanantly I could not delve deeper into their sources as you have to buy a subscription .
I checked at cooltech.iafrica.com (they were credited with the photograph) and came across thier
story. The photograph seems to be a silicon-based panel, not one of these new ones. (why they included the picture is beyond me).
I checked into solar energy in South Africa (SA) and came across
this site. Nothing mentioned about any revolutionary solar panels.
I checked at the
University of Johannesburg and found nothing about it. I checked into Prof Vivian Albert and found papers he has written where he is looking into
solar cells based on CuInSe2, but nothing about any breakthrough or anything.
Eskom, a SA power company, has nothing about it on their website (not surprising really--why would a power company want to promote a product like this?)
I have found some interesting sites (
here,
here,
here for eg) (run a search on Vivian Alberts for more) It appears that Dr Alberts was granted money by the SA government in 2004 to build a pilot assembly facility and worked in co-ordination with physicists from the U of Pretoria and the U of Port Elizabeth to produce the new panels (and no doubt to test them too). The story from cooltech is from Oct 2005, and appears to have been essentially copied right onto the Earthworks site.
I really love the idea of a complete solar home, but so far, there sure seems to be a lot of snake-oil involved.
Now, I am off to go invest in a perpetual motion machine...
For me, when remarks like this send the bulls**tometer off the scale I know it's time to read no more.