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Record
Efficiencies Show Promise for Concentrating Solar Cells
Spectrolab, a Boeing company, announced in June that it has built
a concentrating solar cell that converts 39 percent of the sunlight
hitting it into electricity, a new world record. Concentrating
solar power systems use lenses or mirrors to focus sunlight onto
high-efficiency solar cells. Spectrolab, working under contract
to US DOE and DOE's National Renewable
Energy Laboratory (NREL),
achieved its record under sunlight concentrated by a factor of
236 (referred to as "236 suns"), using a "multijunction" solar
cell. These solar cells consist of multiple layers of semiconductor
materials, with each layer designed to capture different frequencies
of sunlight, allowing the cell as a whole to convert a large part
of the solar spectrum into electricity. Spectrolab's achievement
bested its sponsor, NREL, which had announced a record efficiency
of 37.9 percent under 10 suns during a conference in May.
According to NREL, concentrator manufacturers such as Amonix,
Inc. and electric utilities like Arizona's APS believe that solar
concentrators could be competitive in the near future. A recent
NREL press release quotes an APS executive, who said that when
the industry starts producing 10 megawatts of solar concentrators
per year, the economies of scale should drop the cost to about
$3 per watt. We'll soon see if that's true, since Amonix and Guascor,
a Spanish company, have teamed up to build a 10-megawatt-per-year
assembly plant in Spain by year's end. See the NREL
press release, and for more information about concentrating
solar cells, see the DOE fact sheet "PV
FAQs: What's new in concentrating PV? (PDF,
796 KB)."
This story is from EERE Network News of July 20, 2005
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