Nexus - 0223 - New Times Magazine-pages

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The Earth acts like a giant electricity storage battery, charged by the Sun. If we could harvest these abundant free electrons cheaply and easily, we could satisfy all our energy needs. everal decades ago a man took a bucketful of ilmenite, or similar, melted and compressed it into a solid block of monocrystal silicon and sliced the block into wafers. The wafers were square. Today they are square, round or any desired shape. Recent breakthroughs in solar’electric technology have even allowed the silicon to be completely flexible. On his workbench he placed a stack of the wafers and a sheet of glass (today, plastic is most commonly used). On cach wafer he glued an aluminium conducting grid, leaving a tail north and south. He turned each wafer over, gluing them on the glass so that the con- ducting grid was between the glass and the wafers, arranging a panel of perhaps eighteen wafers in, say, rows of six. He solder-connected all the north tails to the south tails, mak- ing a continuous conducting grid. Over the lot he glued a laminate to weatherproof it all and hold it all together. On one of the remaining two tails he connected a diode to give direction flow. He took the assembled panel out into the sunlight. He turned it over so that the glass was nearest the light, then the conducting grid, then the silicon. He connected the two tails to a battery and two meters—one on volts, the other on amps. The meters began to register a flow of electricity. His theory was no longer a theory. Light—a stream of particles called photons—shines through the glass (or today, plas- tic). Some photons dislodge some electrons off the silicon atom at an energy conversion rate so far achieved of some 14 per cent in the market-place and 25 per cent in the labora- tory. The freed electrons are captured by the conducting grid and fed into the battery for later use, or immediately used as controlled electricity. Thus was born solar-to-electric conversion of energy, used and known throughout the world today as the photovoltaic effect. You can see the evolution of the process on site and for sale in shops all around you today. Photovoltaic Effect At its birth the photovoltaic man-made effect was hailed as the saviour of mankind. cheaply and Limitless energy to herald a utopian future? No. It slowly and painfully became clear that this new energy source was far too meagre and had very limited application, though easily, we could some diehards still doggedly assure the public that it is the energy source of the future. T have spent some ten years researching and developing my concept of the energy H source of the future. I offer it herewith. Sa ti S f y all our The photovoltaic effect described above is man imitating and greatly improving upon nature. I firmly believe that man cannot do anything in the realm of physics if nature has ener BY nee ds. not already done it. He just does it better mostly, and occasionally am That photovoltaic effect happens all over the world wherever and whenever the Sun shines. All the surface of the Earth that is not biological (alive or dead), water or mineral is silicon—all the rock of the Earth, from mountains to hills, boulders to rocks, stones to pebbles, from sand to dust. All that silicon, plus most minerals, contribute free electrons into the air by the Sun's photovoltaic effect, in much less per-area quantity than the con- centration in a man-made panel but in an immeasurably larger world-sized conglomerate. My concept was and still is simplicity itself. We have to learn how to harvest those free electrons that fill the air all around us. by Richard A, Edwards | Before I could start experimenting with hardware, I had to think it fully through. That took me several years. Here is that big think in summary. Perth, Western Australia That infinite source of free electrons must be the major source of natural electricity on Earth, from its obvious manifestation in lightning to its unseeable but measurable vasmess in the ionosphere. J do not wish to lock horns with scientists who might hold an image of NEXUS ¢ 49 DECEMBER 1994 - JANUARY 1995