Homely Scientist

Remember me talking about wind-power hitting a tipping point and how solar was almost there?  In a case of news almost made to order is this bit of news:

The University of Delaware has inched up the record for solar cell efficiency with a new device that can convert 42.8 percent of the light that strikes it into electricity.

That beats the old record of 40.7 percent hit in December. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has been funding research to get efficiency up to 50 percent.

The cell, created by Christina Honsberg and Allan Barnett of UD, splits incoming light into three buckets: high energy, low energy, and medium energy light. The light is then directed to different materials, which then extract electrons out of the photons that make up sunlight.

The device also has an optical concentrator, sort of like a lens that directs more sunlight to the solar cell than would occur naturally and thereby increasing efficiency. Source: A new record in solar cells | Tech news blog – CNET News.com

While this might not seem huge, the combination of technologies is extremely important.  By using three different materials to extract the electrons and a concentrator the stage is set for more improvements to follow.  This development isn’t something we’ll see on people’s houses anytime soon, they are going to be very expensive to produce at first, but all innovations, all breakthroughs aren’t mystical bolts from the blue, they all build on the work done before.  This is just one of those steps or pieces of the puzzle.

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