[citation][nom]doive1231[/nom]There's so much energy from the sun that even modest improvements in efficiency will be good. Ideally, I would like to walk around and wear clothes that charge my MP3, phone, batteries etc so that most of my energy needs are met for a low initial cost.[/citation]
To give a bit of perspective, there is about 1kW / m^2 of solar radiation that strikes the Earth's surface on a cloudless day (a simple web search will bear this fact out), i.e., one-kilowatt per square meter. At 1% efficiency, this would mean that you would get 10 Watts from a one square meter array of these.
I once estimated that I would need about 7 kW to take my house off-grid using PVs alone. With these, I would need 700 square meters of them to supply that level of power. For those using English measure, figure that a square meter is roughly 10 square feet. So, that means that I would need 7,000 square feet of these to supply my home. I don't know about anyone else, but that is about 3.5 times the square footage of my home.
I am not against innovation in the least bit, but before these become commercially viable, they will need to bring the efficiency up to some figure that is a substantial improvement over what it currently is. If they could reach 10 percent, then I would only need 700 square feet of these. While I still consider this "large" it is substantially better than having to cover my entire property with the cells as they stand.
Now for devices that have a significantly reduced power need over something like my home, say in the 10 W or less range, these might be commercially viable if they are inexpensive enough to manufacture. What I have heard as a reasonable figure is $1.00 / W.
I want to see research like this continue, however, I more so want to see something like this come to market. There are so many developments like this that I am aware of, like a thermo-electric device that may be able to reach 99% efficiency, that I hear of and then almost never hear of again. To me, that's frustrating.