I said: "Perhaps its because Rossi hadn't given them the proper recipe for making the TE devices?"
Let me explain a bit more... I've been following (and occasionally helping) with a colleague's company that has carbon-based photovoltaic cells that are consistently getting 40% more power than Shell/BP panels, and don't degrade with temperature (interesting stuff!)... This has been going on for over a year now and they are in the process of working with a semiconductor foundry to commercialize the technology... I've visited the foundry in San Jose and I listen in on the weekly phone conferences, and the film stacks and process flows can be very detailed and complex, and even a few degrees of temperature or what one would think of as insignificant 'contamination' from some other molecule or gas can mean the difference between working as expected and dismal failure -- sometimes not much grey area! The small foundry that produced the cells that are beating out the BP panels did not keep good notes/logs and we've had some trouble figuring out exactly what recipe was used to produce those cells!! At this point, it could even have been a contaminant that has resulted in the much greater efficiency! My point is that, given the fact that Rossi is probably not the best of a lab-note taker, even he may not have the exact recipe that created the 20% TE devices that were originally working at LTI... And maybe he did and didn't divulge it. Its useless to speculate on these kinds of topics and just diverts our collective neurons from focusing on what really matters... -Mark
