Important advance in thermoelectric materials... I'd never really thought about it before, but commercially-available thermoelectric materials (Peltier modules, made with a special semiconductor) haven't changed at all in my entire career in electronics. While the rest of the semiconductor world has undergone multiple revolutions since the '70s, the Peltier modules one can buy today are identical to the ones I purchased in the '70s. Some researchers in Germany have changed that, finding ways to make more efficient thermoelectric semiconductors less expensively.
I can think of many, many applications for these, especially if they really can efficiently generate electricity from small temperature differentials. The article linked cites recovering waste heat from cars, certainly a big possibility. Possibly even bigger, though: generating electricity from sunlight warming water. This has huge potential, as it is cheap and easy to build large-area solar energy collectors that warm water to temperatures less than boiling – such collectors don't require any optical concentration. Past efforts to do this have been mostly based on Stirling engines, because their efficiency was higher than available thermoelectric systems. That may be about to change – thermoelectric devices with conversion efficiencies considerably lower than the 15% or so that photovoltaic achieves would suddenly start looking quite attractive. A large solar collector could be combined with a relatively small thermoelectric device to provide the same power levels that photovoltaics deliver – at a lower cost, and with built-in power storage possible with a reservoir of warm water...
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