Slashdot Mirror
40% Efficiency Solar Cells Developed
gtada writes "A story published at Physorg.com discusses recently published research into the fabrication of solar cells that surpass the 40% efficiency milestone. Such devices would be the high water-mark to date, and hint at the possibility of even more effective technology. 'In the design, multijunction cells divide the broad solar spectrum into three smaller sections by using three subcell band gaps. Each of the subcells can capture a different wavelength range of light, enabling each subcell to efficiently convert that light into electricity. With their conversion efficiency measured at 40.7%, the metamorphic multijunction concentrator cells surpass the theoretical limit of 37% of single-junction cells at 1000 suns, due to their multijunction structure.'"
It's another gallium-based technology. That's going to limit it. There's just not that much gallium available. 30%+ efficient cells using gallium have been around for a few years, but other than on spacecraft, and the Stanford Solar Car, they're too expensive to be useful. They talk about "concentrator cells", but that means mirrors and trackers, running up the system cost.
Citation: King, R. R., Law, D. C., Edmondson, K. M., Fetzer, C. M., Kinsey, G. S., Yoon, H., Sherif, R. A., and Karam, N. H. "40% efficient metamorphic GaInP/GaInAs/Ge multijunction solar cells." Applied Physics Letters 90, 183516 (2007).
I'm sorry, but you are decidedly incorrect. The amount of sunlight that can be converted on a fully overcast day in the Seattle-Tacoma region is normally in a range of 70 to 80 percent for photovoltaic solar cells in terms of solar energy.
You might want to investigate it yourself - just pop over to Seattle City Light on the City of Seattle website and read up on it.
Now, the solar cells we use to POWER some of our public buildings, bus shelters, and schools here are not as efficient as the 40 percent that this Letter in Applied Physics speaks of, but they are about half as efficient.
Cloud cover as you understand it, depends on visible light spectra. The solar cells absorb far wider bandwidths, at least the ones in common use here.
If we were a snowbound or ice-storm city like many others - which we are not - it is possible that your statement would be less inaccurate, as the ice crystals and heavier cloud formations might refract more of the effective solar energy, but we tend to only have a mild drizzle due to the consistency of our cloud cover.
Or haven't you noticed?
Don't believe me? Go look at the bus stops with LED readouts along N 45th, some of the public schools (including two my son went two and the high school he's in now), and even Seattle Center's public meeting rooms.
See - solar cells. Perfectly happy solar cells.
Some people use solar water heaters on their rooftops here, and if you look around Phinney Ridge you'd see a few of them. There's a reason they're frequently referred to in the Seattle Times supplements on Green Houses - people USE them. Because they make sense here.
Here endeth the lesson.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Not particularly. Because they rely on semiconductors, they only scale as well as the fabs to build them. The problem has been that the solar industry uses plants that are at the end of their semiconductor chip fabricating life; thus they do not wield great efficiency due to small wafer sizes. They also suffer from the base challenges of dealing with silicon wafers (raw cost of wafers, dicing costs, etc.) The same cost problem exists with LEDs. It's interesting to note how GE is focused on cost of production in OLEDs rather than their efficiency on GE's Global Research Blog post. Following that analogy, it's not the 40% efficiency that will launch solar cells, it's 10% efficiency at 10% of today's cost (It's about cost/kWh).
Now, if we could only figure out some way for the oil companies to reap massive profits from such a scheme, I'm sure it would happen in no time.
You mean oil companies like BP and Royal Dutch Shell? ... two of the top 6 producers of solar cells?
I'd note that most oil companies do have lots of research into alternative (non-oil) energy. It's just hard to see in their financials because oil is so lucrative. The major one that realy gets criticized for its lack of investment in areas like solar is ExxonMobil - and the reason they don't is probably the same reason that Cisco doesn't tend to develop most of its revolutionary technology inside the company. XOM and CSCO both have tons of cash, tons of cash flow and a well-priced stock giving them the ability to simply buy a producer of new equipment if it becomes a valuable market. Why bother to spend tons of money on basic research when you can let the newcomers fight it out in the market and just buy the leader when the time is appropriate? As strange as it is, that's R&D economics at many large industry-leading corporations. It's "efficient outsourced innovation".
The fact of the matter is that no matter how efficient a cell is on cloudy days, there just isn't as much energy available on cloudy days as on sunny days. A heavy overcast probably has 15-30% of the energy as a sunny day, which is certainly better than zero but is a major hit if you can't count on some sunny days to "make hay" on.
Also, efficiency matters to people with limited space in which to install solar arrays. Of course, current production crystalline technology has cells with efficiencies in the high teens, but when packaged the overall efficiency usually drops to the low teens for a number of unavoidable reasons.