Comments on: 18 Yr Old Invents Cheap Solar Panel That Uses Hair Instead Of Silicon — Yes, Hair!

By: solar panels for your home

solar panels for your home — Sun, 29 May 2011 23:37:42 +0000

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By: residential solar panels for homes

residential solar panels for homes — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 21:21:19 +0000

I like this data presented and it has given me some sort of desire to have success for some reason, so thanks.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 04:00:03 +0000

Hoax. Please refer to: http://sites.google.com/site/edwardcraighyatt/hairsolarpanelnepal

By: unog

unog — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 13:21:53 +0000

This is incredible, that’s enough power to run transistor radios for 6 billion homes, that is, if you cover the entire earth with hair.

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 12:51:02 +0000

Nazis!

By: Uncle Patso

Uncle Patso — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 11:19:53 +0000

We’ll never hear another word about this, just like hundreds of stories from the old “Popular Science” and “Popular Mechanix,” both of which regularly carried stories about the promising progress on flying cars, etc.

By: OhYeahItalianMenAreSoHot

OhYeahItalianMenAreSoHot — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 09:36:23 +0000

Now we know how best to employ the obnoxious (redundant) Guidos that have been making our sinks look disgusting for centuries.

By: Glenn E.

Glenn E. — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 05:07:16 +0000

One more “tree hugging” excuse for why the Third World shouldn’t be allowed to burn oil or coal, for reliable electric power. They can just run off of solar cells made from hair. SURE! But even today’s solar technology isn’t filling the bill, in these countries. You can’t run a refrigerator off a 9 volt system. And it’s not always as sunny as you might think, in countries that have an annual monsoon.

Keeping the Third World nations, poor and underdeveloped (in the name of the environment) also keeps their labor costs lower than developed countries. So you can bet that there is some financial interests in keeping the scales tipped that way, as long as possible.

If Edison had never ran wires into American (and some European) homes, for powering his light bulb. We would never have all the labor saving and entertaining appliances that we do today. We’d be not much better than most of the Third World. You can’t run a PC, off of Natural Gas. This is what many South African nations have had to live with, because their political regimes have kept them poor and backward. And by not having the hope of a higher standard of living, they don’t make trouble for the labor intensive industries that exploit them. Not just brand name athletic wear. But the diamond and gold mining biz too. There are some genuine bastards at work, behind all this. Hair solar cells, Ha!

By: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 02:55:45 +0000

People who don’t have innovate, that’s how thing works.

By: noname

noname — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:52:10 +0000

The panel the kid holds looks like 2 ft X 1.5 ft, or 3 sq-ft for 6 watts/sq-ft or 0.006kWh per sq-ft. A square foot in Arizona averages close to 0.6 kWh per day. Ok, that means it has a 24% conversion efficiency. I can’t believe that.

On average (as a general “rule of thumb”) modern photovoltaics (PV) solar panels will produce 8 – 10 watts per square foot of solar panel area.

9 V (18 W) of energy. Hum, that 2 amps. It’s really hard for me to believe this thing puts out 2 freaking amps.

Put 13 in series and you have 117V at 2 amps. Put 13 in parallel and you have a hefty 26 amps at 9V.

It strikes me as B.S.

By: Angel H. Wong

Angel H. Wong — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 23:11:21 +0000

American investors will greet him. They will bring Lawyers who will harass and threaten him until he signs a document where: a) he will admit he’s a filthy, brown skinned son of a peasant asian who couldn’t come up with something that smart and b) He will grant any of his research findings to the investor’s company without seeking any monetary compensation at all.

By: RSweeney

RSweeney — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 21:46:56 +0000

hmmmm… 18 watts for 23 pounds

That’s $2.08/watt. Even at 1/2 price, it’s still over a buck.

Which is pretty interesting to call cheap since the Chinese are selling polysilicon for less than $1/watt and First Solar is making cadmium telluride panels for 50 cents/watt.

By: The0ne

The0ne — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 17:40:08 +0000

#11
I am and while this seems interesting it’s probably not going to take off anytime soon or in a big way. There’s just too many missing info on the project and most of us, technical or not, most of us already know what hair is/does.

1. it’s all over the place!
2. decay’s slow
3. turns white!
4. not a good conductor or the hair that just fell from my head on the powered PCB would have shorted
5. curls when heated, could be bad for his project there
6. Add your comments here

still a fun project imo. My 8th grade science project was solar cells lol.

By: Turing Machine

Turing Machine — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 16:38:33 +0000

marks right dissimilar metals. and i was hope for Photovoltaic effect.

still i did make some very crude transistors in tech shame they (all but one) broke before they reached bias.

hehe

By: The Monster's Lawyer

The Monster's Lawyer — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 16:17:19 +0000

#12 dr phill – Yep, sounds hair brained to me too.