Materials Scientist Jessica Trancik Comments on Solar Panels and the Cleantech Patent Boom

MIT professor of engineering and materials scientist Jessika Trancik is an expert in cleantechnology. In an interview with Grist, Trancik offers her thoughts on the future of cleantech and the importance of creating innovations that can scale up quickly enough to realistically battle climate change. Notably, Trancik casts doubt on the efficacy of solar cells, and observes that we are in the middle of a promising cleantech patent boom.
As quoted in the interview with Grist, Trancik says:

Within one generation, and really most primarily in the last decade, we’ve seen this shift where there’s just a lot of innovative activity as measured by patents going into clean energy, solar, and wind. And while that may not be surprising, the scale of the effect is really interesting.

According to the article itself:

If PVs using CdTe [cadmium telluride] and CIGS [copper indium gallium diselenide] are going to meet more than just 3 percent and 10 percent, respectively, of projected electricity demand in 2030, the production of tellurium and indium would have to rapidly increase at a rate never before seen in the metals industry (neither metal is very abundant in the earth’s crust, so both are currently only extracted as byproducts during other, more abundant metals’ extraction).

Click here to read the full interview with Trancik on Grist.