A Minor comment on Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near"

[bleyddyn]

In Ray Kurzweil's 2005 book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, he covers a lot of ground. One very small section has to do with the possible benefits of nanotechnology on the energy sector. While he may be right about the future benefits, I don't think his facts are very accurate about the present.

On page 249 he has a number of figures about the efficiency of "commercially available" solar cells, stating among other things that today's solar cells are 34% efficient. I'm not sure where he got his figures, but the best I've been able to find is about 17.5% (which is for the individual solar cells, not the panels that are actually installed). In addition, the price that he quotes, $2.75 per watt is considerably less than the best I've found, which is $4.47 per watt. And those prices only include the solar panels themselves, not any of the supporting equipment (inverters, mounts, installation costs, etc).

Below are some of the solar panels I found for sale on the web.



Brand
Model
Type
Watts
Cost ($)
Cost/Watt ($)
Effic. (%)

Sharp

mono-crystal
185
$879.95
$4.76
17.5/14.21

BP
3125U
silicon nitride multi-crystalline
125
$598
$4.78

Kyocera
KC120
multi-crystal
120
$535.95
$4.47
14%

Kyocera
KC167G

167
$769
$4.60

1 17.5% cell efficiency, 14.2% panel efficiency.