Solar cells for charitable purposes

[technossomy]

With the advent of flexible solar cells in the consumer and retail sector, we are ultimately witnessing mobile phones, personal digital assistants and wrist watches equipped with an unlimited supply of energy. Some of this energy will be a surplus and can be used to contribute to grid computing projects, such as Folding@Home and Genome computing projects. This is possible as the amount of flops per device will be increasing with every new generation of portable devices reaching the mass consumer market. Exactly how much of this surplus can be used should be determined through an embedded learning process, that will ensure there is at least a supply of energy for its basic functioning and the surplus for other more charitable contributions.

[Roxoff]

lol, I really don't think that these devices will have 'an unlimited supply of energy', but I get the point; they'll have enough power for themselves and a little bit more.

These solar cells convert daylight into electricity; very nice, but I think it's time someone invented a device that converted room temperature heat into a steady electricity supply, we'd never again need fossil fuels or neuclear power, or even air-conditioning.

I can see the genome project being a useful contribution, but 'charity' such schemes are not. If any medical breakthroughs come as a result of this, it'll mean the people who have designed and run the scheme will surely be lining themselves up for nobel prizes and medical patent income for a very long time in the future.

[bidi]

The problem with solar power is that it is still expensive. I remember during one of my college projects, where we were building a small Cube Satellite, we had to use 6 solar cells in order to power the satellite with each cell costing $75 dollars to produce energy measured in mW (I can't remember the exact numbers now). These cells were actually the most top of the line ones we could get, yet were extremely expensive and produced very little power.

Converting heat into energy is already something exists and is used, think reverse of heat sinks.
EDIT: I was just reading this again and realized made a mistake. Instead of reverse heat sink, it was supposed to say reversed resistor.