A lot of people are excited about solar energy, and with good reason: It’s clean, renewable, and as manufacturing capabilities ramp up, an increasingly realistic way to power our world. On April 30th, 2017, Germany met 85% of its power needs from energy collected by solar panels.
And that’s with solar cells only capturing about 25% of the available solar energy. Now a team from GW School of Engineering and Applied Science has produced a remarkably designed solar cell that collects nearly half of it. It’s been believed that the upper limit for the efficiency of conventional solar cells is about 30%, so this could be a big deal.Scientists at GW School of Engineering and Applied Science have designed a multi-layered, stacked cell that operates as a sort of “solar sieve.” Each layer grabs a portion of the light spectrum as sunlight passes through on its way to the next layer down.
As lead author of the just-published research Matthew Lumb explains, “Around 99 percent…
The post New Solar Cells Capture Double the Amount of Energy from the Sun appeared first on FeedBox.