Harvesting Light with Nanostructures: New Crops for Silicon Devices. It seems that cat-like reflexes pay off for solar cell technology… Nanowhiskers deposited on traditional silicon solar cells help in the harvesting of bountiful deep-red solar rays.
Researchers are steadily making progress towards improved solar cell technologies, like Combine harvesters barreling down a field of tall golden crop. The benefits are huge; the problem is getting there without spending a fortune. A major limitation in the harvesting of solar energy is a common problem in almost every process ever invented, whether it be a mechanism for energy conversion or reaping, threshing, and winnowing: Efficiency. Silicon photovoltaics are currently the most viable form of solar cell for carbon-neutral generation of terawatt (TW) levels of renewable power (Garnett NanoLetters 2010, Lewis Proc. Natl. So how do we harvest the bountiful solar radiation that exists in the long-wavelength spectrum?
Solar Cell Semiconductor Materials: 1. References 1. Textured surface may boost power output of thin silicon solar cells. Highly purified silicon represents up to 40 percent of the overall costs of conventional solar-cell arrays — so researchers have long sought to maximize power output while minimizing silicon usage.
Now, a team at MIT has found a new approach that could reduce the thickness of the silicon used by more than 90 percent while still maintaining high efficiency. The secret lies in a pattern of tiny inverted pyramids etched into the surface of the silicon. These tiny indentations, each less than a millionth of a meter across, can trap rays of light as effectively as conventional solid silicon surfaces that are 30 times thicker. The new findings are being reported in the journal Nano Letters in a paper by MIT postdoc Anastassios Mavrokefalos, professor Gang Chen, and three other postdocs and graduate students, all of MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering. The new approach avoids that problem. "It's hard to pick a winner," he says, but this approach has great promise. Solar power cheaper than coal: One company says it’s cracked the code.
Over time I’ve grown more and more suspicious of stories about breakthrough technologies.
I always think back to those heady days of EEStor, the guys who were going to make a battery that would revolutionize grid storage and electric cars alike. “EEStor CEO says game-changing energy storage device coming by 2010”! As you may have noticed, 2010 came and went and the game remains unchanged. All of which is to say, regarding the post to follow: caveat lector. Still, this looks very, very cool. CleanTechnica has an exclusive on a new solar technology that claims to be able to produce power with a levelized cost of energy (LCOE) of 8¢/kWh.
The company is called V3Solar (formerly Solarphasec) and its product, the Spin Cell, ingeniously solves two big problems facing solar PV. First, most solar panels are flat, which means they miss most of the sunlight most of the time. The conical shape catches the sun over the course of its entire arc through the sky, along every axis. The Most Efficient Energy Under The Sun.