Eco Friend yesterday ran an article about some promising new solar innovations. It mentioned Dye Sensitive Solar Cells, which Ohio researchers are working on. We have covered this topic before with this blog post about Professor Michael Grätzel, Director of the Laboratory of Photonics and Interfaces at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). Grätzel won the 2010 Millennium Technology Prize with his research on dye-sensitized solar cells. And what is this technology? Dye-sensitized solar cells are described as “artificial photosynthesis†and they present an alternative to standard silicon photovoltaics. The advantages? Low cost materials and easier manufacturing.
Efficiency is a big issue in solar power research so when a scientist achieves a 43% rate of efficiency of incident solar radiation, we should take notice. The breakthrough was achieved by an Australian researcher at the University of South Wales in Sidney. But there’s a setback: the semiconductors are expensive materials such as Indium, Gallium, Phosporus etc. Still, it shows it is possible to turn more solar radiation into electricity.
Another interesting technology described in the blog post is Day4’s panels. Day4 is a Canadian company who has reduced the cost of solar energy by 25%. They’ve done so by replacing with copper wires the bus-bars that transfer solar energy absorbed, thus avoiding the formation of excess heat and increasing the interface between solar radiation and PV cells. As a consequence, there will be a larger energy output. The company estimates its panels offer an increase of 14-17% over conventional panels.
Apart from these, Energy Refuge has been following two promising solar companies whose technologies have the potential to be game changers. One of them is Hypersolar, who is developing the first thin and flat light magnification layer to be applied directly on top of standard solar cells to increase their power output. Check out an in-depth interview we carried out with Hypersolar’s CEO Tim Young.
The other solar power company we’ve been following is New Energy and its SolarWindow trademark invention. The promise is to generate electricity on see-thru glass windows. The company has been working to increase the size of the prototype in order to make its product commercially viable.
Solar is the most renewable type of energy and this is where efforts should be concentrated on, alongside wind power. As this article argues, trying to make energy from trees, a trend that has gained momentum of late, is a dangerous distraction from the pursuit of really sustainable, alternative energy resources.
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