Future of solar power systems?
As more people seek to use renewable energy, some companies are trying to give photovoltaics a more competitive edge through the use of optics and mirrors to concentrate sunlight. Pyron Solar uses such a system and in a NREL test they were able to achieve a 37.3% conversion efficiency. Another such company is Energy Innovations, which has developed an interesting low-cost method for allowing a field of focusing mirrors to track the sun. More details can be found in an article by Wired Magazine
posted by chris at 12:28 PM
3 Comments:
Indeed one of the main obstacles of PV cells is that they are very expensive. Increasing the efficiency of the cells from a 10-15% to near 40% will certainly improve the economics. Of course one needs additional installations and additional surface area. The journal PROGRESS IN PHOTOVOLTAICS publishes a yearly article by Martin Green with a summary of solar cell efficiencies. the latest one can be found in Prog. Photovolt: Res. Appl. 2006; 14:45–51. Those who can not get this article mail me.
One thing I realized from the journal article was that it seems that the concentrator systems don't increase the actual efficiency of the individual solar cells that much (the pyron cells are already about 31% efficient in normal sunlight and 37% efficient at a concentration of 400 suns). The optics/mirrors seem to just allow you to use significantly fewer of these very expensive modules in order to achieve the same effect as a whole panel made out of these... So maybe 400 suns means 400x less solar cells? It would be interesting to see some numbers showing this.
Solar power systems have great future in my opinion. Because converting solar energy into usable energy gives off no pollution, morover Solar power is essentially infinite, so it never runs out, unlike fossil fuels. The amount of solar energy intercepted by the Earth every minute is greater than the amount of energy the world uses in fossil fuels each year. Usage of solar power has even more advantages.
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