PV has increased from a <10% percent efficiency in the 80s to 25-30% now for commercially available panels. They can grow another 3.3x in efficiency at most, hardly comparable to the doubling every few years that semiconductors have had.
The wikipedia link you provided contains the following snippet:
> and can achieve efficiencies of up to 90% instead of 40-45% attainable by efficient turbine-driven thermal reactors.
A doubling of efficiency is extremely nice, don't get me wrong. But after you get to 90% there is simply not much further to go. On the other hand, semiconductor production has probably not even reached 1% of what is achievable. Non-flat structures are still seen as incredibly advanced, let alone true 3D chip manufacturing.
Bulk energy production will never see improvements comparable to those found in semiconductor manufacturing, simply because the systems don't have nearly as much "efficiency space" left to grow into.
I never claimed that energy production would increase in efficiency the way semiconductor production has. I just pointed out that anything based on the Carnot cycle is going to be horribly limited and should be considered an old-fashioned way of generating energy.
The wikipedia link you provided contains the following snippet:
> and can achieve efficiencies of up to 90% instead of 40-45% attainable by efficient turbine-driven thermal reactors.
A doubling of efficiency is extremely nice, don't get me wrong. But after you get to 90% there is simply not much further to go. On the other hand, semiconductor production has probably not even reached 1% of what is achievable. Non-flat structures are still seen as incredibly advanced, let alone true 3D chip manufacturing.
Bulk energy production will never see improvements comparable to those found in semiconductor manufacturing, simply because the systems don't have nearly as much "efficiency space" left to grow into.