Lazs,
I'll believe it when I see it. There are a whole lot of snake oil salesmen out there, and where it comes to measurable results and repeatable/usable working hardware, the 80% solar cell ranks somewhere between the healing properties of magnet matress pads and cold fusion. Nasa and various satellite manufacturers have put a lot of time/effort into solar cell research and the best they can get out in space (above that pesky atmosphere) using tricky pass-through double-sided reflector techniques is about 20% (IIRC). And even those seem to go tits-up at an alarming rate, much to the chagrin of companies who just spent 800 million bucks on their new fancy comm satellite that is now running on 70% expected power because the solar cell performance degraded far faster than expected.
Don't get me wrong, solar cells have many legit uses even today, but I don't think we'll see a really big breakthrough in efficiency anytime soon even with the space industry tossing millions of dollars at the problem every year. It's easy (and incredibly lazy/cynical/ignorant) to say our energy problems would be solved if the govt only spent $XXX on THIS instead of THAT, but the fact is that whoever comes up with the next big breakthrough is going to be rich so even corporations intrenched in the petroleum cycle are working on this, and there are several expensive industries (space for one) that are actively advancing the state of the art (and throwing obscene amounts of money at it), and we're still only getting incremental improvements.
If we could only turn all the bad spelling and hideous grammar (and my run-on sentences) on this BBS into energy... That would fix everything. But those dictionary.com bastages are keeping us down by helping me spell those hard words, damn them.
