Australia Engineers Set New Solar Energy World Record With 34.5% Sunlight To Energy Efficiency (unsw.edu.au) 110
An anonymous reader writes: Australian engineers have edged closer to the theoretical limits of sunlight-to-electricity conversion by photovoltaic cells with a device that sets a new world efficiency record. A new solar cell configuration developed by engineers at the University of New South Wales has pushed sunlight-to-electricity conversion efficiency to 34.5% -- establishing a new world record for unfocused sunlight and nudging closer to the theoretical limits for such a device. The record was set using a 28-cm2 four-junction mini-module -- embedded in a prism -- that extracts the maximum energy from sunlight. It does this by splitting the incoming rays into four bands, using a hybrid four-junction receiver to squeeze even more electricity from each beam of sunlight.
I love a sunburnt country! (Score:4, Funny)
Bloody good onyaz! Big ups, UNSW! :D
Re:I love a sunburnt country! (Score:5, Insightful)
While progress on efficiency is nice, the important criteria is watts/$, not watts/m^2. We have plenty of space on rooftops, over parking lots, and in deserts. But we need to continue to bring down the cost.
Feel the burn (Score:5, Funny)
Still, I bet they were just beaming with pleasure, excitement lighting up their faces, coloring everything they said, reflecting their deep satisfaction with the realization of what was originally just a glint in their eyes. Their laser-like focus on area efficiency illuminates just what it takes to blaze through challenges like this; it's not just about brilliance, it's about focus and resolution. Clearly, this was a very bright idea, sourced from a rainbow of possibilities.
[runs away, trailing frightened shadow]
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My, my, I can't tell if this was incredibly sharp or just ambient.
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I take a dim view of it.
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Mor lite, then.
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After careful reflection on the matter, I must inform you that it was thoroughly incidental.
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Or they could sell to a market where energy density is an important factor; like say LEO satellite manufacturers, solar powered vehicles, those portable road signs used by construction crews etc. For the life of me I will never be able to guess why the author thought that this was useful to static buildings. This is miniaturization which benefits mobile appliances.
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Or they could sell to a market where energy density is an important factor; like say LEO satellite manufacturers
Hardly. For space applications, the current optimum is the OrbitalATK's breed of lightweight, flexible, foldable solar panels, not some sort of a heavy prism-based beam-splitting contraption.
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I'd imagine watts/m^2 very quickly turns into watts/$ when it comes to maintaining ever larger fields of panels.
When exactly one is more valuable to research than the other is up so some particularly smart person to work out (not me), but both aspects are valuable to improve over the long term.
Not to mention this has a direct impact on raw materials required to produce said panels.
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I'd imagine watts/m^2 very quickly turns into watts/$ when it comes to maintaining ever larger fields of panels.
This is what a big solar plant looks like, does it look like land [scatecsolar.com] comes at a premium? As for people, you power 80000 households with 80 permanent jobs [abengoasolar.com], one of their new projects is 90000 households with 35 permanent jobs. For the most part they just sit there, it's probably cheaper to just let them gather dust for the most part and even a small improvement in reliability probably means much more than watts/m^2. Doesn't matter if you get a little lower efficiency, you really do make it up on volume.
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That is correct, but watt/m^2 is highly correlated with watt/$, because installation and maintenance costs already dominate the cost of the panels, and those costs are correlated with the total area of the panels. Higher efficiency panels are cheaper to install and keep clean. As the cost of panels drops further, you might naively think that efficiency doesn't matter: With panels so cheap, you'll just buy more. In reality efficiency becomes more important as the cost of the panels becomes irrelevant.
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In the US, perhaps. In most parts of the world, however, your economic gains from higher-efficiency panels are going to be negative, and this is going to stay that way for quite some time.
What? I have heard of American Exceptionalism, but do basic economic principles really work differently in America? Why would better solar panels have negative economic consequences anywhere, other than a few gas exporting countries (Russia would be the biggest loser [wikipedia.org])?
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Because the US has some outrageously high price points regarding installation and permitting costs.
I was quoted $30k to install solar on my roof, and $15k of that was for installation, permitting, and administration, which seemed ridiculously expensive. I didn't realize that other countries have better control over those extraneous costs.
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I recently was quoted $AUD28,000 for a full installation. Very little of that was *not* hardware.
The poor guy musn't have heard me properly -
"Our agent is in your area this week, would you like an obligation-free quote?"
"Sure, do you do off-grid?"
"We haven't encountered many people off-grid, what's it like?" - first alarm bell
"Well, It's been working pretty well for a while now but it's time to replace some of my older panels. Could you give me a quote on say, six panels, some electrical work to replace in
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In the US, perhaps. In most parts of the world, however, your economic gains from higher-efficiency panels are going to be negative, and this is going to stay that way for quite some time.
There's not a chance in hell that they are going to replace picturesque roofs in most of Europe, or sod roofs in the rural UK, with shiny, black, gridded, The Matrix-like solar panels.
Can you imagine putting angled roofs and black solar panels on all the buildings on Santorini? It would be fugly enough to drive away the residents, let alone the tourist trade.
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No it's not. You've spent $12k installing a solar system on your house. The marginal cost of adding anther 10 panels is very low. Another 2 hours of labor.
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Oh, there's only one important criteria, and it's cost, not efficiency? Thanks for setting the world of R&D straight, ShanghaiBill.
Re:I love a sunburnt country! (Score:4, Interesting)
The important criteria is no longer watts/$. It is storage.
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Batteries are the most expensive and least reliable part of the whole mess.
Ferret
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If we have cheap, reliable, and plentiful storage then why bother with solar power?
I'm not trying to be flippant here but if storage technology is necessary for solar power to "win" then can solar power ever be viable? There are numerous energy sources available to us that have limitations like solar power that prevent them from becoming a primary energy source that energy storage could solve.
Any power plant that relies on boiling water has the problem of matching demand, or load following. This is inhere
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Improving the watts/m2 has a tendency to also improve the watts/$
It does mostly the opposite, actually. Perhaps with a few exceptions if you can get 1D trackers cheaply and have them work in a highly insolated location to recoup their extra cost.
Wholesale pricing for panels is approaching $0.50USD/W.
And the total system cost is approaching $1/W, meaning that your total system cost still benefits from you using optimum cost panels.
Re:I love a sunburnt country! (Score:4, Interesting)
While progress on efficiency is nice, the important criteria is watts/$, not watts/m^2. We have plenty of space on rooftops, over parking lots, and in deserts. But we need to continue to bring down the cost.
You obviously do not live in the Bay Area.
You can't lie the solar panels flat (they have to be angled), and if you have a flat roof, that means building up at least framing. Much of the roof space in the San Francisco Bay Area is flat.
More framing means more $/watt, so an improvement in watts/m^2 is an area squared improvement in cost.
In my personal area, mid-peninsula, I don't have enough usable roof area to hit break-even with the current panels SolarCity is trying to get people to buy for them so they can sell the property owners their electricity. A more efficient panel and two "power walls" would solve this break-even problem for me, but it turns out that once you are locked into a contract, they will not replace the panels, other than as a result of maintenance, for the next 20 years.
A more efficient panel would be a godsend, but until it happens, I'm either buying my electricity from both SolarCity and PG&E, or just from PG&E, and the up front cost amortized over 20 years of time value of money actually makes PG&E the cheaper option (for now).
Note that for rental properties, you might be talking 3 families in a 3 story building, and you have to fit the panels for everyone on the roof area that's pretty narrow, and pretty built upward already. I know of a large number of properties in the Inner Sunset and up towards the Outer Richmond, Sea Cliff, and Richmond districts that literally *can't* install solar panels without a zoning variance. It would make the building too tall to build the angle racks, or roof over the flat roofs with angled roofs, instead -- since the Solar providers won't guarantee against roof leaks, with an angled panel install, anyway.
No, solar is far from a solved problem, and increased energy density helps a lot more in dense areas than putting a lot of panels *everywhere* in a relatively limited area.
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I agree with your points, but I think I'm missing a step in your math. Wouldn't framing be more $/m^2, instead of more $/watt?
Certainly, better efficiency (more w/m^2) results in less area given a constant load and therefore less framing and less money for framing, but I don't see how you get "area squared" savings...
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Apart from your other issues,
"the Solar providers won't guarantee against roof leaks, with an angled panel install, anyway."
is sheer sloppiness. My panels are on a framework, and there's never been a leak from that. I suspect they just don't want to use the slightly more costly waterproof fasteners.
Smaller panels for a given output would be a boon. You'll be able to fit panels where you previously couldn't due to space and mechanical constraints.
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watts/m^2 is more important than watts/$ for many applications such as those in space. The article did not mention which type of applications, if any, are targeted.
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On satellites, watts/m2 is very important.
Not for this stuff (Score:2)
While progress on efficiency is nice, the important criteria is watts/$, not watts/m^2. We have plenty of space on rooftops, over parking lots, and in deserts. But we need to continue to bring down the cost.
That's where dirt cheap big silicon wafers come in. This stuff is for satellites and other situations where surface area of mass is at a premium and you want to get as much energy out of the photons that hit your available surface as you can.
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Both is also really cool and in reality you sought of need to do them separately and bring them back together in a compromise solution to achieve the greatest cost efficiency. Of course someone often makes a break through and some else adds to that and wham everyone else;'s production facility goes tit's up. New industries take quite a while to settle and solar energy and storage seem to be on the verge of those best solutions. The very old can become very new, like nickel iron batteries and carbon nano tub
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While progress on efficiency is nice, the important criteria is watts/$, not watts/m^2. We have plenty of space on rooftops, over parking lots, and in deserts. But we need to continue to bring down the cost.
Installation costs are a significant portion of the installed watts/$, and they are directly related to m^2.
Additionally, we do not actually "have plenty of space on rooftops".
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WTF? So this is in fact all about unfocused sunlight. Even on Slashdot, I have never seen such an awkward, self-defeating attempt at an argument.
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Re:Not actually the most efficient (Score:5, Informative)
Since focusing involves making light rays converge and prisms generally make light rays diverge, I'm going to answer no.
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Wont the prisms collect dust, and how do you clean an array of prisms?
ACME Prism Polish(tm).
The hard part is training the cartoon coyotes to apply it for you, rather than them converting your installation into a giant, solar, anti-roadrunner death beam.
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Focused is like using a magnifying glass on an ant.
You take several square meters of light and focus them onto a smaller area of solar panels. Given more light, the panels produce more electricity for fewer solar cells and fewer inverters. There are limits to this (you don't want to melt the solar panel for example).
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I would consider this more 'targeted' than 'focused' because you're splitting the beam into its primary components and then targeting your cell junctions for high conversion efficiency in that wavelength range.
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That's ok we have enough oil to last forever.
Explain in layman terms... (Score:1)
Re:Explain in layman terms... (Score:5, Insightful)
,,, why if harnessing wind-power can affect the local climate, why harnessing solar power doesn't affect how long the sun is going to continue to burn?
Anyone who seriously asks this won't even understand layman terms, they'll need neanderthal terms. And that's probably denigrating neanderthals. Ook. Grunt.
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And it's awkward and silly.
A better question would be why this wouldn't effect the local climate, though I suspect it would.
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If the albedo of the surface the sunlight would otherwise hit were high (e.g. ice, a white roof, etc.), adding solar panels might raise the ambient temperature a little. However, if the electricity generated were then transmitted somewhere else then it might lower the ambient temperature in the vicinity of the panels and raise it in the vicinity of the energy use instead (but that also depends on the efficiency of the panel and transmission system being sufficiently high, and I'm not sure it is).
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I'll give it a shot.
If someone is tossing gold coins at a wall, catching a few of them doesn't stop them from throwing gold coins at the wall. (solar).
If someone is tossing gold coins at a wall, catching a few of them does stop a few of them from hitting the wall. (wind)
---
The sun is going to shine on the same patch of ground regardless of whether it heats a black carpet, dries some water, or hits a solar cell. It doesn't lower the sun's energy.
Moving air molecules around takes energy. When you extract
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Quad Junction? 4 reasons for Nope! (Score:4, Insightful)
This does make for a nice press release...but there are SINGLE junction panels, commercially available, that can do 20% efficient. 3 more junctions is a much more expensive device to manufacture - cheaper to just make the panels bigger.
Another problem is that right now, the wholesale prices for panels are below 50 cents a watt. The inverters are generally more expensive now. Effectively, quad junction panels just mean more watts per panel, which might mean less cost per watt but probably won't, but the major drivers of cost are unaffected.
It's cool, it's just solving the wrong problem. The problem is there's too much sunlight at midday, producing more electricity than people need, and no sunlight when the weather is bad.
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I can go for that, it'd make my desert mining more tolerable mid-day!
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Maybe one day we'll invent a way of storing the energy for use later in the day.
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That "way" is expensive as heck. The batteries only last for about 1000 cycles and they cost $800 per kilowatt hour. See the problem?
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Batteries come in all kinds of qualities and cycle ratings. Lead acid batteries (still really common) also have cycle curves that are based heavily on temperature and DoD (depth of discharge) - most offgrid set ups are trying to keep worst case DoD below 20-30% (aka SoC 70-80%) to keep total cycles up above 3000. There's usually a nice knee in the curve there: http://www.rpc.com.au/pdf/rayl... [rpc.com.au] (page 11).
The LFP/LiFePO4 lithium batteries that are gaining in popularity achieve that kind of cycle life but with
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If you cycle only 1/5 to 1/3 the battery's capacity through each cycle, but it lasts 3 times longer, you haven't accomplished much. The total amount of energy stored and recovered is the same. In the case of solar, the problem is that widespread panel deployment will eventually mean there are so many solar panels that a bunch of energy produced exceeds the entire demand for the local electric grid during certain hours of the day.
So you need to store that energy if you don't want to waste it. And the cost
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I don't get why this inverter topic is coming up all the time on /. when we talk about batteries or solar energy!
The inverter is probably the cheapest or second cheapest part of a solar plant!
10kW installation:
75c per Wp, 10kW: 7500Euro
Inverter: 2000Euro
Cable: 100m, 500Euro
Framing: 1500 Euro
Labour: 1000Euro
Grid management: 150Euro
Total: 12,650 Euro for 10kWp
The rule of thump for a quick calculation is 1600Euro per 1kWp on average over germany. The above is cheaper, no idea, must be my location.
The inverter
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I don't know where your numbers are coming from. Mine from from sunelec.com. The inverters are 50 cents a watt, they have deals for panels that are under that.
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My numbers come from a vendor installing you the stuff for the prices I quoted.
The rule of thumb is: 200Eur per kWp.
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Those prices include mark up for the vendor's profit. Also, in Europe you may have to pay various taxes on the panels that don't apply the same way to the inverters. So your numbers aren't a realistic reflection of cost - it's more accurate to use the price of oil as a basis for calculating worldwide petrol prices than the price at a particular gas station.
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The prices I gave where from a vendor, no idea what you want to say.
Also, in Europe you may have to pay various taxes on the panels that don't apply the same way to the inverters.
How exactly should that work? All products have hidden costs like the CO2 tax used in producing them. And then you simply have the price the vendor sets, for what ever reason, and VAT on top of that.
Except for alcohol, tobacco and 'oil' nothing has a 'special tax' here.
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No idea. The point is that my numbers are more accurate than yours. Maybe the vendor you quoted decided to mark up their panels and not the inverters. But every online direct - sale store for solar equipment directly on the internet, the inverters are generally more expensive per watt than the panels. Do you dispute this?
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the inverters are generally more expensive per watt than the panels.
I live in Germany. And my question was exactly aimed at "why the fuck does this inverter cost so much" come up in threats like this all the time (from the USA).
The cost of an inverter is not even 20% of the cost of a panel.
Do you dispute this? YES, I do!
Why the fuck would something so simple as an inverter cost more than a panel? That does not make any sense at all!
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You're paying massively inflated prices for panels then. It is only possible explanation. Again, go to sunelec.com. Or Ebay USA. Or Wholesalesolar. Or 50 other sites. And look for yourself.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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became territorial during testing and was found to be both predatory as well as bioluminescent. it occupies a classroom on the second floor and to date is consuming around a post doc per month.
CRIKEY!
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I have no earthly clue what "euphoric constipation" might be, but I can't stop laughing about it nonetheless. Sounds like it would be a great name for a rock band.
Which record? (Score:2)
Alta devices has a record efficiency of 28.8% (not 24%, as quoted in the article) specifically for a single junction solar cell. This cell technically has four junctions, for which I'm not aware of any world records; however, Boeing spectrolab created a five junction cell with the world record for non-concentrated light (38.8%). I'm not aware of the records for spectrum splitting cells, so it's possible that Alta made a spectrum splitting cell with 24% efficiency and that this is the new world record for su
What are some comparison figures, solar geeks? (Score:2)
And I mean solar geeks in the nicest way.
For a given panel of 1 sq m, how does the actual electricity output of this cell compare to:
1) The best mass produced, commercially available panel?
2) A run of the mill generic panel?
It sounds groovy but is the likely increased cost worth the electric output increase for any but the most niche application?
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1. We've got mass-produced triple-junction panels with 30+% efficiency. 34.5% for diverged and targeted color bands using 4 junctions isn't exactly special in comparison.
2. Far more economical to just coat your roof with cheaper run of the mill 22-25% efficiency panels as-is, it's still more than enough solar power to handle all but the most hungry or ignorant of power users.
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I could have guessed #2 would be the case, but do you have any idea what (or how to calculate) what the actual electrical output improvement would be?
Uh-oh (Score:2)
They can expect a prior art lawsuit from Pink Floyd any day now.
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Good call.
Theoretical limits? (Score:2)
Limits, do they even exist? [youtube.com]
Impressive but pointless (Score:1)
In the lab... (Score:2)
And let us know once these things reach actual production...
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Oh give it up already, grandad. Your pessimism is not an attractive trait.
Newscorp headline: (Score:4, Insightful)
Taxpayer-Funded Terrorists Attempt to Sabotage Vital Coal Industry
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Are republicans building a dyson sphere? Otherwise solar panels steal sun how?
So you're saying that they climbed the fence from mexico just so they could be forced to work for crackers? I doubt that even in mexico it's unlikely you would find anyone that would try to pay you with crackers. Drugs maybe but crackers? No.
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