Australia’s solar researchers have successfully converted over 40% of the sunlight hitting the solar system into electricity. This is the highest efficiency ever reported.
The efficiency record was achieved during outdoor tests in Sydney, before being independently confirmed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) at their outdoor test facility in the United States.
“This is the highest efficiency ever reported for sunlight conversion into electricity,” UNSW Scientia Professor and Director of the Advanced Center for Advanced Photovoltaics (ACAP) Professor Martin Green said.
“We used commercial solar cells, but in a new way, so these efficiency improvements are readily accessible to the solar industry,” added Dr. Mark Keevers, the UNSW solar scientist who managed the project.
This new record is the latest in a long line of achievements by UNSW solar researchers spanning four decades. These include the first photovoltaic system to convert sunlight to electricity with over 20% efficiency in 1989, with the new result doubling this performance.
“The new results are based on the use of focused sunlight, and are particularly relevant to photovoltaic power towers being developed in Australia,” Professor Green said.
The power towers are being developed by the Australian company, RayGen Resources, which provided design and technical support for the high efficiency prototype. Another partner in the research was Spectrolab, a US-based company that provided some of the cells used in the project.
A key feature of the prototype’s design is the use of a custom optical bandpass filter to capture sunlight that is usually wasted by commercial solar cells on towers and convert it to electricity at a higher efficiency than the solar cells themselves ever could.
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