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#1 2024-10-02 21:14:02
- tahanson43206
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Solar Cell Technology Improvements
For SpaceNut ... we have 3 pages of topics that contain the word "solar", but none that also contain the word "tandem"
This topic was renamed 2026/04/12 to cover improvements in technology.
Combining materials to capture different wavelengths of light has been going on for some time, but for whatever reason, the members of the forum have not created a topic just for these combinations...
The article that leads off this topic is about combining silicon and perovskite to approach 34% efficiency
https://theconversation.com/new-solar-c … wtab-en-us
Thanun Vongsuravanich / Shutterstock
New solar cells break efficiency record – they could eventually supercharge how we get energy from the Sun
Published: September 25, 2024 12:21pm EDT
AuthorSebastian Bonilla
Associate Professor of Materials, University of Oxford
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Sebastian Bonilla receives funding from UK Research and Innovation, The Royal Academy of Engineering, and The Leverhulme Trust.
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Facebook221The sight of solar panels installed on rooftops and large energy farms has become commonplace in many regions around the world. Even in grey and rainy UK, solar power is becoming a major player in electricity generation.
This surge in solar is fuelled by two key developments. First, scientists, engineers and those in industry are learning how to make solar panels by the billions. Every fabrication step is meticulously optimised to produce them very cheaply. The second and most significant is the relentless increase in the panels’ power conversion efficiency – a measure of how much sunlight can be transformed into electricity.
The higher the efficiency of solar panels, the cheaper the electricity. This might make you wonder: just how efficient can we expect solar energy to become? And will it make a dent in our energy bills?
Current commercially available solar panels convert about 20-22% of sunlight into electrical power. However, new research published in Nature has shown that future solar panels could reach efficiencies as high as 34% by exploiting a new technology called tandem solar cells. The research demonstrates a record power conversion efficiency for tandem solar cells.
Do experts have something to add to public debate?
What are tandem solar cells?Traditional solar cells are made using a single material to absorb sunlight. Currently, almost all solar panels are made from silicon – the same material at the core of microchips. While silicon is a mature and reliable material, its efficiency is limited to about 29%.
To overcome this limit, scientists have turned to tandem solar cells, which stack two solar materials on top of each other to capture more of the Sun’s energy.
In the new nature paper, a team of researchers at the energy giant LONGi has reported a new tandem solar cell that combines silicon and perovskite materials. Thanks to their improved sunlight harvesting, the new perovskite-silicon tandem has achieved a world record 33.89% efficiency.
Perovskite solar materials, which were discovered less than two decades ago, have emerged as the ideal complement to the established silicon technology. The secret lies in their light absorption tuneability. Perovskite materials can capture high energy, blue light more efficiently than silicon.
In this way, energy losses are avoided and the total tandem efficiency increases. Other materials, called III-V semiconductors, have also been used in tandem cells and achieved higher efficiencies. The problem is they are hard to produce and expensive, so only small solar cells can be made in combination with focused light.
The scientific community is putting tremendous effort into perovskite solar cells. They have kept a phenomenal pace of development with efficiencies (for a single cell in the lab) rising from 14% to 26% in only 10 years. Such advancements enabled their integration into ultra-high-efficiency tandem solar cells, demonstrating a pathway to scale photovoltaic technology to the trillions of Watts the world needs to decarbonise our energy production.
Graph comparing different types of solar cell.
Tandem solar cells have huge potential. NREL, Author provided (no reuse)
The cost of solar electricityThe new record-breaking tandem cells can capture an additional 60% of solar energy. This means fewer panels are needed to produce the same energy, reducing installation costs and the land (or roof area) required for solar farms.
It also means that power plant operators will generate solar energy at a higher profit. However, due to the way that electricity prices are set in the UK, consumers may never notice a difference in their electricity bills. The real difference comes when you consider rooftop solar installations where the area is constrained and the space has to be exploited effectively.
The price of rooftop solar power is calculated based on two key measures. First, the total cost to install solar panels on your roof, and second, how much electricity they will generate over their 25 years of operation. While the installation cost is easy to obtain, the revenues from generating solar electricity at home are a bit more nuanced. You can save money by using less energy from the grid, especially in periods when it is costly, and you can also sell some of your surplus electricity back to the grid.
However, the grid operators will pay you a very small price for this electricity, so sometimes it is better to use a battery and store the energy so you can use it at night. Using average considerations for a typical British household, I have calculated the cash savings consumers would gain from rooftop solar electricity depending on the efficiency of the panels.
If we can improve panel efficiency from 22% to 34% without increasing the installation cost, savings in electricity bills will rise from £558ְ/year up to £709/year. A 27% bump in cash savings that would make solar rooftops extremely attractive, even in grey and cloudy Britain.
Solar panel manufacturing
The higher the efficiency of solar panels, the cheaper the resulting electricity. IM Imagery / Shutterstock
So when can we buy these new solar panels?As research continues, considerable efforts are being made to scale up this technology and ensure its long-term durability. The record breaking tandem cells are made in laboratories and are smaller than a postage stamp. Translating such high performance to metre-square areas remains a vast challenge.
Yet, we are making progress. Earlier this month, Oxford PV, a solar manufacturer at the forefront of perovskite technology, announced the first sale of its newly developed tandem solar panels. They have successfully tackled the challenges of integrating two solar materials and making durable and reliable panels. While they are still far from 34% efficiencies, their work shows a promising route for next generation solar cells.
Another consideration is the sustainability of the materials used in tandem solar panels. Extracting and processing some of the minerals in solar panels can be hugely energy intensive. Besides silicon, perovskite solar cells require the elements lead, carbon, iodine and bromine as components to make them work properly. Connecting perovskite and silicon also requires scarce materials containing an element called indium, so there is plenty of research still required to address these difficulties.
Despite the challenges, the scientific and industrial community remains committed to developing tandem solar devices that could be integrated into almost anything: cars, buildings and planes.
The recent developments toward high efficiency perovskite-silicon tandem cells indicate a bright future for solar power, ensuring solar continues to play a more prominent role in the global transition to renewable energy.
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#2 2024-10-02 21:14:42
- tahanson43206
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Re: Solar Cell Technology Improvements
This post is reserved for an index to posts that may be contributed by NewMars members over time.
Index:
Post #3: Laboratory research to split blue light to improve capture efficiency
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#3 2026-04-12 19:19:30
- tahanson43206
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Re: Solar Cell Technology Improvements
This post is intended to report availability of an article about splitting of blue light to improve solar cell efficiency. This is still a laboratory project.
The post Scientists Set New Record for Solar Cell Efficiency appeared first on Futurism.
https://futurism.com/science-energy/res … ergy-cells
Scientists Set New Record for Solar Cell Efficiency
A sunny day for solar energy.
By Joe WilkinsPublished Apr 12, 2026 8:15 AM EDT
Close-up of a solar panel surface showing a grid of small, rectangular photovoltaic cells. The cells display a gradient of colors from pink and purple on the left to blue on the right, with black lines separating the cells and small metallic connectors visible at intervals.
Getty / FuturismWhat’s not to love about solar energy? Using photovoltaic cells — tiny semiconductors that convert light directly into electricity — we’re able to harness the power of the Sun itself, turning it into wattage to power our homes.
It’s great in theory, but there’s a huge catch. Of all the power our star graciously beams to us, only about 33 percent of it can ever be turned into usable electricity, and most commercial solar panels don’t even come close to that.
This ceiling is known as the Shockley-Queisser limit, named after the two physicists who first theorized it back in 1961. The reason comes down to thermodynamics: sunlight comes to us as a vast rainbow of light energy, but we can only convert a narrow slice of that spectrum into usable electricity. The rest either passes through, or is lost as excess heat.
But now it’s possible that a novel process could blow the Shockley-Quiesser limit wide open. In a new paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, a team of scientists in Japan and Germany detail a method they say can capture the parts of the light spectrum that would otherwise be burned off as residual heat.
Basically, the researchers found that if you blast a certain compound with high-energy blue light — a part of the light band that we normally can’t convert to electricity — you can split the incoming energy into two usable parts. Using their method, the team was able to achieve around 130 percent energy conversion efficiency, meaning that for every 100 photons that entered, they could harvest 130 usable energy carriers.
To achieve the breakthrough, the team mixed the organic molecule tetracene with the metallic element molybdenum. While scientists had previously used tetracene to harness this kind of high-energy blue light before, there were practical issues preventing prolonged energy conversion, which they say the addition of molybdenum solved.
“We have two main strategies to break through this [Shockley-Queisser] limit,” Yoichi Sasaki, a chemist at Kyushu University and one of the study’s coauthors, said in a press release. “One is to convert lower-energy infrared photons into higher-energy visible photons. The other, what we explore here, is to use singlet fission to generate two excitons from a single exciton photon.”
It’s important to highlight that these are controlled lab tests so far. The most efficient commercially available solar panels still ring in with around a 25 percent efficiency rate, and that probably won’t change anytime soon. Still, it’s the biggest crack so far in a theoretical ceiling that’s stood for over 60 years.
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#4 Yesterday 14:40:51
- SpaceNut
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Re: Solar Cell Technology Improvements
what you have is the triple junction layering where the substrates are of different materials.
Triple junction solar cells utilize multiple p-n junctions made from different semiconductor materials, allowing them to absorb a broader range of wavelengths of light. This design enhances their efficiency, with lab examples achieving over 46% under concentrated sunlight, significantly surpassing traditional single-junction cells, which have a maximum theoretical efficiency of 33.16%.
WikipediaThe performance of these solar cells is optimized by using filtered spectrums to match the current output of the sub-cells, which are designed to absorb specific ranges of wavelengths. For instance, the best balance in efficiency is reached at about 1.1 eV (approximately 1100 nm), which is close to the natural bandgap in silicon and other useful semiconductors.
Wikipedia
+1Overall, triple junction solar cells represent a significant advancement in solar technology, offering higher efficiency and better performance under various solar spectrum conditions.
Springer
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#5 Yesterday 14:50:01
- tahanson43206
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Re: Solar Cell Technology Improvements
For SpaceNut .... your post #4 described an entirely different system.
It appears you did not read the article before you went out to find the old way of doing things.
Our readers do not benefit by having an old system laid upon new work, as though the old system were as good as the new one.
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