WASHINGTON, Feb. 8 — It was not so many years ago that solar power was a niche concept for electricity generation, an idea embraced mostly by the green-minded who were eager to do their part for energy conservation.

It is still a niche concept, providing less than 1 percent of the electricity on the grid. By comparison, coal generates about half the nation's supply, followed by nuclear power and natural gas at 20 percent each.

But the list of leading solar supporters now includes President Bush, a former oil man living in a partly solar-powered White House who is suddenly endorsing solar energy as an affordable source of power in the future."

Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists have discovered that a phenomenon called carrier multiplication, in which semiconductor nanocrystals respond to photons by producing multiple electrons, is applicable to a broader array of materials that previously thought. The discovery increases the potential for the use of nanoscrystals as solar cell materials to produce higher electrical outputs than current solar cells.

The Los Alamos findings point toward practical photovoltaic technologies that may utilize such traditional solar cell materials as cadmium telluride, which is very similar to cadmium selenide.

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Honda Motor Co., Ltd. is to begin mass production in 2007, of an independently developed thin film solar cell composed of non-silicon compound materials, which requires 50% less energy, and thus generate 50% less CO2, during production compared to a conventional solar cell. A mass production plant with annual capacity of 27.5 Megawatts will be established at Honda's Kumamoto factory."

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"Golden, Colo. — Solar concentrators using highly efficient photovoltaic solar cells will reduce the cost of electricity from sunlight to competitive levels soon, attendees were told at a recent international conference on the subject. Herb Hayden of Arizona Public Service (APS) and Robert McConnell and Martha Symko-Davies of the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) organized the conference held May 1-5 in Scottsdale, Ariz.

"Concentrating solar electric power is on the cusp of delivering on its promise of low-cost, reliable, solar-generated electricity at a cost that is competitive with mainstream electric generation systems," said Vahan Garboushian, president of Amonix, Inc. of Torrance, Calif. "With the advent of multijunction solar cells, PV concentrator power generation at $3 per watt is imminent in the coming few years," he added.

We have seen steady progress in photovoltaic concentrator technology. We are working with advanced multijunction PV cells that are approaching 38% efficiency, and even higher is possible over time. Our goal is to install PV concentrator systems at $3 per watt, which can happen soon at production rates of 10 megawatts per year. Once that happens, higher volumes are readily achieved," Hayden, Solar Program Coordinator at APS, said."

"Golden, Colo. — Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have shown that nanotechnology may greatly increase the amount of electricity produced by solar cells.

In a paper published in a May issue of the American Chemical Society's Nano Letters journal, an NREL team found that tiny "nanocrystals," also known as "quantum dots," produce as many as three electrons from one high energy photon of sunlight. When today's photovoltaic solar cells absorb a photon of sunlight, the energy gets converted to at most one electron, and the rest is lost as heat.