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New Solar Panel Technologies Will Drive Down Costs
New Solar Panel Technologies Will Drive Down Costs
7/28/15
New solar panel technologies are poised to drive down the cost of solar power even more. Recently, we reported on new technology that makes solar panels out of perovskite modules. In fact, Varun Sivaram, Samuel Stranks, and Henry Snaith have written an article for Scientific American about the wonders of perovskite solar cells, which have achieved stunning results in the laboratory. Sivaram says, “[M]any of us believe this is the field’s biggest breakthrough since the original invention of the solar cell sixty years ago.”
...Snip...
A more comprehensive way to compare solar technology is the energy payback time (or energy return on investment, EROI), which also considers the energy that went into creating the product. Perovskites lag behind silicon in conversion efficiency, but they require much less energy to be made into a solar module. So perovskite modules pull ahead with a substantially shorter energy payback time — the shortest, in fact, among existing options for solar power.
One of the motivations for this study was the need to improve technology so that solar energy can be scaled up in a big way. “Soon, we’re going to need to produce an extremely high number of solar panels,” one of the authors of the study says. “We don’t have time for trial-and-error in finding the ideal design. We need a more rigorous approach, a method that systematically considers all variables.”
“Appreciating energy payback times is important if we want to move perovskites from the world of scientific curiosity to the world of relevant commercial technology,” says Seth Darling, an Argonne scientist and co-author on the paper...
Read more~
http://planetsave.com/2015/07/28/new-solar-panel-technologies-will-drive-down-costs/
7/28/15
New solar panel technologies are poised to drive down the cost of solar power even more. Recently, we reported on new technology that makes solar panels out of perovskite modules. In fact, Varun Sivaram, Samuel Stranks, and Henry Snaith have written an article for Scientific American about the wonders of perovskite solar cells, which have achieved stunning results in the laboratory. Sivaram says, “[M]any of us believe this is the field’s biggest breakthrough since the original invention of the solar cell sixty years ago.”
...Snip...
A more comprehensive way to compare solar technology is the energy payback time (or energy return on investment, EROI), which also considers the energy that went into creating the product. Perovskites lag behind silicon in conversion efficiency, but they require much less energy to be made into a solar module. So perovskite modules pull ahead with a substantially shorter energy payback time — the shortest, in fact, among existing options for solar power.
One of the motivations for this study was the need to improve technology so that solar energy can be scaled up in a big way. “Soon, we’re going to need to produce an extremely high number of solar panels,” one of the authors of the study says. “We don’t have time for trial-and-error in finding the ideal design. We need a more rigorous approach, a method that systematically considers all variables.”
“Appreciating energy payback times is important if we want to move perovskites from the world of scientific curiosity to the world of relevant commercial technology,” says Seth Darling, an Argonne scientist and co-author on the paper...
Read more~
http://planetsave.com/2015/07/28/new-solar-panel-technologies-will-drive-down-costs/
This sounds encouraging....?
8 replies
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