AsianScientist (Dec. 15, 2014) – Researchers have converted over 40 percent of the sunlight hitting a solar system into electricity, the highest efficiency ever reported. These results were presented at the Australian PV Institute’s Asia-Pacific Solar Research Conference and will be published in the Progress in Photovoltaics journal.
The world-beating efficiency was achieved in outdoor tests in Sydney, before being independently confirmed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) at their outdoor test facility in the United States.
“This is the highest efficiency ever reported for sunlight conversion into electricity,” said Professor Martin Green, University of New South Wales (UNSW) Scientia Professor and Director of the Australian Center for Advanced Photovoltaics (ACAP).
“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 managed the project.
The 40 percent efficiency milestone is the latest in a long line of achievements by UNSW solar researchers spanning four decades. These include the first photovoltaic system to convert sunlight to electricity with over 20 percent efficiency in 1989, with the new result doubling this performance.
“The new results are based on the use of focused sunlight, and are particularly relevant to photovoltaic power towers being developed in Australia,” Green said.
Power towers are being developed by Australian company, RayGen Resources, which provided design and technical support for the high efficiency prototype. Another partner in the research was Spectrolab, a US–based company that provided some of the cells used in the project.
A key part of the prototype’s design is the use of a custom optical bandpass filter to capture sunlight that is normally wasted by commercial solar cells on towers and convert it to electricity at a higher efficiency than the solar cells themselves ever could. Such filters reflect particular wavelengths of light while transmitting others.
———-
Source: University of New South Wales.
Disclaimer: This article does not necessarily reflect the views of AsianScientist or its staff.
