Solar power news: researchers work on new conversion process

Every now and then we hear news about the development of new solar power processes, often explained quite technically and miles away from being applicable to everyday technology. But such breakthroughs, even if they are still in their infancy, give us hope for this emblematically clean renewable power technology.

Nature Materials magazine recently published a paper explaininng that SLAC and Stanford researchers have figured out how to simultaneously use the light and heat of the sun to generate electricity in a way that could make solar power production more than twice as efficient as existing methods and potentially cheap enough to compete with oil.

The new process is called PETE, which stands for â€œphoton enhanced thermionic emissionâ€ and according to a press release put out by Stanford, the new process promises to be more efficient than current photovoltaic (PV) and thermal conversion technologies.

The main difference from current PV, found in solar panels and less efficient as temperature rises, is that the new process loves higher temperatures â€“ and excels at them.

â€œThis is really a conceptual breakthrough, a new energy conversion process, not just a new material or a slightly different tweak,” said the leader of the research group Nick Melosh, who works for the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Science, a joint institute of the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University. “It is actually something fundamentally different about how you can harvest energy.”

Most importantly, the researchers say the materials needed to build a device to make the process work are cheap and easily available, which means it will be affordable. â€œJust demonstrating that the process worked was a big deal,” Melosh said. “And we showed this physical mechanism does exist, it works as advertised.”

So what do you think? Does PETE sound promising?

Source: Stanford News Service