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Australia Engineers Set New Solar Energy World Record With 34.5% Sunlight To Energy Efficiency (unsw.edu.au)
An anonymous reader writes: Australian engineers have edged closer to the theoretical limits of sunlight-to-electricity conversion by photovoltaic cells with a device that sets a new world efficiency record. A new solar cell configuration developed by engineers at the University of New South Wales has pushed sunlight-to-electricity conversion efficiency to 34.5% -- establishing a new world record for unfocused sunlight and nudging closer to the theoretical limits for such a device. The record was set using a 28-cm2 four-junction mini-module -- embedded in a prism -- that extracts the maximum energy from sunlight. It does this by splitting the incoming rays into four bands, using a hybrid four-junction receiver to squeeze even more electricity from each beam of sunlight.
Bloody good onyaz! Big ups, UNSW! :D
The current record for terrestrial solar cells is 46.0 percent, so I am not sure how this team justifies their claim of "a new world record for unfocused sunlight". I point out that the 46% result was taken under focused lighting conditions, which actually makes the result stronger since it means the cells are robust enough to be used at high concentration, but even if you insist in directly comparing to other unfocused results the current record is Boeing 38.8% cell.
They also do not explain any of their methodology in calculating their efficiency (it is trickier than you might think, since sunlight is not considered equal everywhere on earth, for more details see NREL's website which has a catalog of the current highest efficiency cells and the test methodology used to compare them. http://www.nrel.gov/ncpv/
If these cells get any better and efficient, we are going to use up all the sunlight!!!! We won't have any left for tomorrow!
Are republicans building a dyson sphere? Otherwise solar panels steal sun how?
So you're saying that they climbed the fence from mexico just so they could be forced to work for crackers? I doubt that even in mexico it's unlikely you would find anyone that would try to pay you with crackers. Drugs maybe but crackers? No.
,,, why if harnessing wind-power can affect the local climate, why harnessing solar power doesn't affect how long the sun is going to continue to burn?
Still, I bet they were just beaming with pleasure, excitement lighting up their faces, coloring everything they said, reflecting their deep satisfaction with the realization of what was originally just a glint in their eyes. Their laser-like focus on area efficiency illuminates just what it takes to blaze through challenges like this; it's not just about brilliance, it's about focus and resolution. Clearly, this was a very bright idea, sourced from a rainbow of possibilities.
[runs away, trailing frightened shadow]
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
There have been some exceptionally ignorant statements from politicians concerning renewable energy. It hasn't been exclusively from Republicans, but the lion's share of them have been. Mind you, a couple of those statements are taken out of context, but the general gist of it is that we shouldn't worry about switching to renewable forms of energy or climate change because Jesus.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
It sounds like you're one of those awful Republicans yourself. Deranged reactionaries tend to be attracted to toxic politics, and their caricatures of their imagined enemies tell us a lot about them. Of course the reactionary media outlets that pander to their imagined fears, instead of trying to talk some sense into them, are their real enemy.
This does make for a nice press release...but there are SINGLE junction panels, commercially available, that can do 20% efficient. 3 more junctions is a much more expensive device to manufacture - cheaper to just make the panels bigger.
Another problem is that right now, the wholesale prices for panels are below 50 cents a watt. The inverters are generally more expensive now. Effectively, quad junction panels just mean more watts per panel, which might mean less cost per watt but probably won't, but the major drivers of cost are unaffected.
It's cool, it's just solving the wrong problem. The problem is there's too much sunlight at midday, producing more electricity than people need, and no sunlight when the weather is bad.
a device that sets a new world efficiency record.
Although not intended, the device is slightly venomous and should be approached with an open palm when feeding. its normal operating temperature is in a 51c environment.
A new solar cell configuration developed by engineers at the University of New South Wales has pushed sunlight-to-electricity conversion efficiency to 34.5%
while technically true, this was only after it lept off a table and attacked a research graduate it had mistaken for one of the innumerable natural predators along the countryside.
The record was set using a 28-cm2 four-junction mini-module -- embedded in a prism
the prism, paradoxically enough, is extremely venomous however immune to the slightly venomous configuration overall. most of the wales team that installed the device are still recovering from a combination of intense agony and euphoric constipation. see the research study in the bio sci lab called "the prism does what now?"
It does this by splitting the incoming rays into four bands, using a hybrid four-junction receiver
which became territorial during testing and was found to be both predatory as well as bioluminescent. it occupies a classroom on the second floor and to date is consuming around a post doc per month. So remember, that while we now have 34% more energy here which is a huge breakthrough, we must all now add another item to the list of things to check for in boots and under toilet seats. sorry mates.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Alta devices has a record efficiency of 28.8% (not 24%, as quoted in the article) specifically for a single junction solar cell. This cell technically has four junctions, for which I'm not aware of any world records; however, Boeing spectrolab created a five junction cell with the world record for non-concentrated light (38.8%). I'm not aware of the records for spectrum splitting cells, so it's possible that Alta made a spectrum splitting cell with 24% efficiency and that this is the new world record for such a cell, though it's not particularly ground-breaking in terms of impact since it doesn't solve the major problems that make these high efficiency cells so expensive (the triple junction cell still requires an expensive substrate and an expensive process for depositing the films)
Let's pass a law to force bad weather only at noon then!
And I mean solar geeks in the nicest way.
For a given panel of 1 sq m, how does the actual electricity output of this cell compare to:
1) The best mass produced, commercially available panel?
2) A run of the mill generic panel?
It sounds groovy but is the likely increased cost worth the electric output increase for any but the most niche application?
They can expect a prior art lawsuit from Pink Floyd any day now.
Limits, do they even exist?
Wont the prisms collect dust, and how do you clean an array of prisms?
I can go for that, it'd make my desert mining more tolerable mid-day!
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Unfocused device?
So a beam splitter to refocus individual components of said light doesn't qualify as focused?
I think they broke the record via technicality.
Still +1 though.
So basically they break the sunlight up into several color bands and use 4 optimized "solar panels" to collect the energy. Great for a science project but it doesn't sound all that likely to be of any use in the real world. You're basically manufacturing 4 separate solar panels and integrating them into one unit to get 34.5% efficiency when you could simply have 4 separate solar panels and to achieve 44-60% more energy over a single panel (11-15% per panel) which is in all likelihood much cheaper per unit of power and since it is non-concentrating is also much more easy to install/maintain. The only place I can see this being of any use is areas with severe space limitations.
These evil Republicans are trying to steal all the suns energy, and turn it into profit for their evil globalist Eugenic empire. Won't some people think of the poor trans-gendered African American Latino immigrant farmers that are forced to use the correct bathroom
Let's kill all those sun stealing white people.
-Hillary Clinton for pres. 2016
fixed that for you
In some applications, density is good. In most others, amount of space isn't the barrier. It's the upfront cost of the solar panels. What they SHOULD be looking for are ways to lower the costs of making pretty good solar panels. That would actually help the planet and actually improve adoption rates of solar electric systems.
a new world record for unfocused sunlight
The record was set using a 28-cm2 four-junction mini-module -- embedded in a prism -- that extracts the maximum energy from sunlight. It does this by splitting the incoming rays into four bands, using a hybrid four-junction receiver to squeeze even more electricity from each beam of sunlight.
So, take an arbitrary amount of noise and discriminate/split it into bands of energy using a prism. This sure appears to focus to me.
Same old PV receptors, just a different optical assembly.
An actual breakthrough would be 40% efficient PV receptors.
I already did this design in high school, 30 years ago and have the notes to prove it.
Maybe one day we'll invent a way of storing the energy for use later in the day.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
That "way" is expensive as heck. The batteries only last for about 1000 cycles and they cost $800 per kilowatt hour. See the problem?
And let us know once these things reach actual production...
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
While progress on efficiency is nice, the important criteria is watts/$, not watts/m^2. We have plenty of space on rooftops, over parking lots, and in deserts. But we need to continue to bring down the cost.
That's where dirt cheap big silicon wafers come in. This stuff is for satellites and other situations where surface area of mass is at a premium and you want to get as much energy out of the photons that hit your available surface as you can.
Is that imperial percent or metric percent?
Taxpayer-Funded Terrorists Attempt to Sabotage Vital Coal Industry
I don't get why this inverter topic is coming up all the time on /. when we talk about batteries or solar energy!
The inverter is probably the cheapest or second cheapest part of a solar plant!
10kW installation:
75c per Wp, 10kW: 7500Euro
Inverter: 2000Euro
Cable: 100m, 500Euro
Framing: 1500 Euro
Labour: 1000Euro
Grid management: 150Euro
Total: 12,650 Euro for 10kWp
The rule of thump for a quick calculation is 1600Euro per 1kWp on average over germany. The above is cheaper, no idea, must be my location.
The inverter is less than all the work and framing and cables together, granted, if count everything separated it is the second most expensive part, but in comparision to the panels it is irrelevant.
This also 'begs the question' why in the USA installation costs seem to be higher than the panels themselves, at least everyone here mentioning costs is complaining about labour and framing.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I don't know where your numbers are coming from. Mine from from sunelec.com. The inverters are 50 cents a watt, they have deals for panels that are under that.
My numbers come from a vendor installing you the stuff for the prices I quoted.
The rule of thumb is: 200Eur per kWp.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Those prices include mark up for the vendor's profit. Also, in Europe you may have to pay various taxes on the panels that don't apply the same way to the inverters. So your numbers aren't a realistic reflection of cost - it's more accurate to use the price of oil as a basis for calculating worldwide petrol prices than the price at a particular gas station.
Batteries come in all kinds of qualities and cycle ratings. Lead acid batteries (still really common) also have cycle curves that are based heavily on temperature and DoD (depth of discharge) - most offgrid set ups are trying to keep worst case DoD below 20-30% (aka SoC 70-80%) to keep total cycles up above 3000. There's usually a nice knee in the curve there: http://www.rpc.com.au/pdf/rayl... (page 11).
The LFP/LiFePO4 lithium batteries that are gaining in popularity achieve that kind of cycle life but with DoD around 70-80% (again, less DoD = more cycles).
There's also Nickel Iron batteries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel%E2%80%93iron_battery) - hard to buy new at the moment because they fell out of favour (heavy per Wh) but known to last more than 50 years with no cycle memory - some manufacturers starting to build them again for this kind of application (i.e static applications where weight doesn't matter).
You can pay much more or less than $800/kWh depending on quality and what kind of DoD you're going to run (i.e how long you want your batteries to last).
If you cycle only 1/5 to 1/3 the battery's capacity through each cycle, but it lasts 3 times longer, you haven't accomplished much. The total amount of energy stored and recovered is the same. In the case of solar, the problem is that widespread panel deployment will eventually mean there are so many solar panels that a bunch of energy produced exceeds the entire demand for the local electric grid during certain hours of the day.
So you need to store that energy if you don't want to waste it. And the cost per kilowatt-hour stored, you can work out pretty easily.
If it's $800 for 1 kilowatt hour capacity, and you can store 0.8 kilowatt hour 1000 times before the battery dies, you pay $800 for a battery that can store and return $80 worth of electricity. Not a winner.
Maybe you can look up what the numbers are for lead acid. Don't think they are noticeably better. Also, the $800 figure is a few years old, it supposedly has been slowly declining. But even $100 a kilowatt-hour isn't going to cut it for storing electric grid energy. (though, it's an excellent deal for electric cars - $8500 for an 85 kilowatt-hour pack for a "full range" electric vehicle with comparable range to a gasoline car)
The prices I gave where from a vendor, no idea what you want to say.
Also, in Europe you may have to pay various taxes on the panels that don't apply the same way to the inverters.
How exactly should that work? All products have hidden costs like the CO2 tax used in producing them. And then you simply have the price the vendor sets, for what ever reason, and VAT on top of that.
Except for alcohol, tobacco and 'oil' nothing has a 'special tax' here.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
No idea. The point is that my numbers are more accurate than yours. Maybe the vendor you quoted decided to mark up their panels and not the inverters. But every online direct - sale store for solar equipment directly on the internet, the inverters are generally more expensive per watt than the panels. Do you dispute this?
the inverters are generally more expensive per watt than the panels.
I live in Germany. And my question was exactly aimed at "why the fuck does this inverter cost so much" come up in threats like this all the time (from the USA).
The cost of an inverter is not even 20% of the cost of a panel.
Do you dispute this? YES, I do!
Why the fuck would something so simple as an inverter cost more than a panel? That does not make any sense at all!
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You're paying massively inflated prices for panels then. It is only possible explanation. Again, go to sunelec.com. Or Ebay USA. Or Wholesalesolar. Or 50 other sites. And look for yourself.