Thursday, July 26, 2007

Team sets solar cell record

Using a novel technology that adds multiple innovations to a very high-performance crystalline silicon solar cell platform, a consortium led by the University of Delaware has achieved a record-breaking combined solar cell efficiency of 42.8 percent from sunlight at standard terrestrial conditions. ... Barnett and Honsberg said that reaching the 42.8 percent mark is a significant advance in solar cell efficiency, particularly given the unique small and portable architecture being used by the consortium and the short time – 21 months – in which it was developed. Modern solar cell systems rely on the concentration of the sun's rays, a concept similar to youngsters using magnifying glasses to set scraps of paper on fire. Honsberg said the previous best of 40.7 percent efficiency was achieved with a high concentration device that requires sophisticated tracking optics and features a concentrating lens the size of a table and more than 30 centimeters, or about 1 foot, thick. The UD consortium's devices are potentially far thinner at less than 1 centimeter. "This is a major step toward our goal of 50 percent efficiency," Barnett said. "The percentage is a record under any circumstance, but it's particularly noteworthy because it's at low concentration, approximately 20 times magnification. The low profile and lack of moving parts translates into portability, which means these devices easily could go on a laptop computer or a rooftop." Honsberg said the advance of 2 percentage points is noteworthy in a field where gains of 0.2 percent are the norm and gains of 1 percent are seen as significant breakthroughs. More...
Solar power for the win! I hope they can manufacture it cheaply.

3 comments:

annom said...

Using concentrators is a bit cheating ;), but impressive and solar power for the win anyway!

Cost per watt should be the driving factor to make solar power win, but this is of course just one of the ways to Rome.

Someone I met at the surfing camp in France was working as a chemist on new organic solar cells. He had a very free cool job with lots of opportunities/government funding.

cybrbeast said...

Why is a concentrator cheating? the concentrator is 90% efficient.

annom said...

It's not cheating if the concentrator efficiency is taken into account in the solar cell efficiency.

Too much research seems to focus on the efficiency number alone.

High efficiency is nice for space and military(DARPA) purposes, but price per watt and energy payback time are the only important numbers for general energy use.

We have enough space and sunlight so we shouldn't care about efficiency if it doesn't reduce the price per watt or energy payback time.

Concentrators may be able to do both though.