One of the greatest need for energy in the next few years is going to be for air conditioning if this really works it is going to be put another nail in the coffin of Oil and gas industry.
The press release doesn't give any concrete numbers, but if it doubles efficiency of Peltier coolers, it's still 3-5× less efficient than heat pumps.
Thermoelectric cooling is notable for not having any moving parts and ability to scale down to small sizes, so it might end up having many specialized applications, but for A/C heat pumps are already very effective.
And what about service life? I had a mini-fridge that used this technology, and it stopped working after about 2 years. Was that just bad luck or poor quality, or some inherent lifetime of the components?
In principle peltier elements should be very robust over time, as a solid state system where the only moving parts are fans (versus traditional refrigeration which includes a high pressure pump...).
In practice I strongly suspect most peltier based systems are built very cheaply... because their inefficiency means the majority of the market is bordering on a scam. Sophisticated consumers aren't going to be buying very many fridges built with them (of course you might have a niche use case where they actually make sense and you're willing to pay for a quality product, but do most purchasers?).
Thermal cycles is murder on rigid electronic connections; the mechanical connection between the heatsink on each side of the peltier cell being a prime example.
Air conditioning is mostly needed while the sun is shining, and so electricity of A/C can come mostly from photovoltaics (plus batteries). So I think this technology is not quite as important. Sure, its nice to reduce electricity usage! But cheaper heat storage, for winter, seems more important.
Yes you can! Not with peltier elements, but with elastocaloric (phase changes in solid metal induced by stress) and maybe magnetocaloric (phase change induced by magnetic fields) heat pumps.
There's engineering challenges here, but I believe the science is pretty clear that in principle these beat gas phase change systems.
IIRC from reading up on these in the past, you need a pretty large input energy in order to make them work. The elastocaloric ones are also super loud IIRC.
Gas phase change systems in practice are up to about 60% efficiency (relative to an idealized carnot cycle), magnetocaloric systems in labs have been something like 70%, and elastocaloric 80%.
Edit: And just for reference peltier devices are usually 10-15% efficiency on this scale. So I suppose this new one is somewhere in the 20-30% range.
