<story><title>The perovskite lightbulb moment for solar power</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/02/perovskite-lightbulb-moment-abundant-solar-power-britain</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>InclinedPlane</author><text>The biggest roadblock to widespread adoption of solar as a baseload power source is the storage problem. Photovoltaics stop producing power when the sun goes down, that&amp;#x27;s not just inconvenient it&amp;#x27;s unworkable with the way power is used today. Until we can economically shift the output curve of solar power plants to match demand rather than supply it will always fill no more than a niche. Today the only way to do this is to work in concert with hydropower, but that is a very limited solution.&lt;p&gt;Also, it&amp;#x27;s not strictly necessary to solve the problem on a large scale, even at a small consumer-grade scale it could be helpful. If every house had a battery pack or supercap bank or what-have-you and it allowed for smoothing out power demand or perhaps enabled charging electric vehicles overnight, then it could have a huge impact on energy usage patterns. Even with the PV -&amp;gt; battery -&amp;gt; battery losses it would still be a substantial net win.</text></comment>
<story><title>The perovskite lightbulb moment for solar power</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/02/perovskite-lightbulb-moment-abundant-solar-power-britain</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ars</author><text>Is this going to be another one of those products that are cheap in small quantities, but are simply not available in large quantities?&lt;p&gt;The reason we keep going back to silicon is the planet (the crust) is basically made out of it. It&amp;#x27;s available in any quantity.</text></comment>