The coronavirus global pandemic has dominated headlines and rightfully so. But it’s still important to pay attention to Climate Change related issues, such as shifting our energy production methods to migrate away from fossil fuels and towards clean energy sources. And a new innovation that lets solar panels “sweat” could do exactly that.
As Science Magazine put it:
“Like humans, solar panels don’t work well when overheated. Now, researchers have found a way to make them “sweat”—allowing them to cool themselves and increase their power output.
It’s ‘a simple, elegant, and effective [way] to retrofit existing solar cell panels for an instant efficiency boost,’ says Liangbing Hu, a materials scientist at the University of Maryland, College Park.”
The article goes on to add a further explanation for just how important this new breakthrough is:
“Today, more than 600 gigawatts of solar power capacity exists worldwide, providing 3% of global electricity demand. That capacity is expected to increase five-fold over the next decade. Most use silicon to convert sunlight to electricity. But typical silicon cells convert only 20% of the Sun’s energy that hits them into current. Much of the rest turns into heat, which can warm the panels by as much as 40°C. And with every degree of temperature above 25°C, the efficiency of the panel drops. In a field where engineers struggle for every 0.1% boost in power conversion efficiency, even a 1% gain would be an economic boon, says Jun Zhou, a materials scientist at Huazhong University of Science and Technology.”
This breakthrough reminds me of Moore’s Law and all of the continual technological breakthroughs that make computer processing power more efficient every few years. Perhaps solar power is now on a similar trajectory with continued innovations increasing the efficiency of solar cells on an ongoing basis. And if so we may finally get to the point where we can rely entirely on solar power for our energy needs. Not the measly 3% that we do now.
Are solar panels that sweat the Greatest Idea Ever?
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