The US Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has confirmed Longi's achievement of a world record-breaking efficiency rating of 33.9% for a perovskite-silicon tandem solar cell.
The materials that do the absorption are not effective across the entire wavelength spectrum of the sun. They can only absorb at a certain wavelength range, but the spectrum range of the sun is very wide.
Edit. Also other reasons, like recombination rate where the photon hitting the panel generates an electron-hole pair which is then collected and used for evegy, but electrons and holes tend to want to recombine, after which we cannot use them for evergy. We want this rate to be zero, but it never is, it is a probabilistic process. So even if you can absorb everything, you can’t utilise everything you absorb.
In my very limited understanding there are too many loses between material to endpoint. The old limit used to be 35% before they made new materials so maybe we can improve the potential in future.
Yes. It is not 1:1 especially on these test conditions, but currently the truthful seller says the real-world effiency-% is around 15%. So probably with this new technology we can start saying the real-world effiency-% as around 20%, which is significant leap.
I am not going to pretend to be smart enough to understand any of it but I think it’s good news?
I would be keen to have solar panels or a solar array on my property but they are so damn expensive.
The theoretical limit we can get out of the sun with panels is 40-45% so we are getting pretty close to that.
Do you know what is theoretically limiting it to 40-45% in the physical process we are using?
The materials that do the absorption are not effective across the entire wavelength spectrum of the sun. They can only absorb at a certain wavelength range, but the spectrum range of the sun is very wide.
Edit. Also other reasons, like recombination rate where the photon hitting the panel generates an electron-hole pair which is then collected and used for evegy, but electrons and holes tend to want to recombine, after which we cannot use them for evergy. We want this rate to be zero, but it never is, it is a probabilistic process. So even if you can absorb everything, you can’t utilise everything you absorb.
In my very limited understanding there are too many loses between material to endpoint. The old limit used to be 35% before they made new materials so maybe we can improve the potential in future.
Apparently commercially available solar panels are around 20% efficiency.
https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/photovoltaic-energy-factsheet#
Yes. It is not 1:1 especially on these test conditions, but currently the truthful seller says the real-world effiency-% is around 15%. So probably with this new technology we can start saying the real-world effiency-% as around 20%, which is significant leap.