Sunlight-To-Electricity Conversion Record Broken, Prototype Attained 40 Percent Solar Efficiency
In an accomplishment for the record books, solar researchers in Australia have managed to optimize solar efficiency and converted 40 percent of the sunlight that hit a solar system into electricity. According to a press release, the new record for solar efficiency was recently achieved in outdoor tests in Sydney. The solar record was then confirmed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) the United States.
“This is the highest efficiency ever reported for sunlight conversion into electricity,” UNSW Scientia Professor and Director of the Advanced Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics (ACAP) Professor Martin Green explained. The Australian researchers broke the solar efficiency record with a new prototype that uses a custom optical bandpass filter to use the sunlight that is normally not captured in typical solar cells. The prototype then turned the sunlight into energy at a “higher efficiency than the solar cells themselves ever could,” the press release explained.
“We used commercial solar cells, but in a new way, so these efficiency improvements are readily accessible to the solar industry,” added Dr. Mark Keevers, the UNSW solar scientist who led the solar researchers into the record booking achievement.
Green, known as the “father of photovoltaics,” and 2007 winner of the SolarWorld Einstein Award, said that the remarkable solar efficiency that was achieved using focused sunlight and added that the results of the research “are particularly relevant to photovoltaic power towers being developed in Australia.”
The Australian company, RayGen Resources, provided design and technical support for the record breaking solar efficiency prototype, according to Science Daily. The American company, Spectrolab, provided some of the solar cells that the researchers used.
The work was supported financially by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA). Ivor Frischknecht, CEO of ARENA, said the 40 percent efficiency record demonstrates the value of investing in Australia’s renewable energy ingenuity. According to the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics, ARENA supports Australian R&D in solar photovoltaic and solar thermal innovation. Its goal is to make solar power more financially competitive.
The research was also supported by the Australia-U.S. Institute for Advanced Photovoltaics (AUSIAPV). AUSIAPV, in part, trains the next generation of solar engineers and solar researchers, according to the government website.
“We hope to see this home grown innovation take the next steps from prototyping to pilot scale demonstrations. Ultimately, more efficient commercial solar plants will make renewable energy cheaper, increasing its competitiveness,” the press release stated. The solar efficiency achievement is explained in greater detail in a soon-to-be published paper in Progress in Photovoltaics and will be presented Monday at the Asia-Pacific Solar Research Conference.
[Photos via Pixabay]
