Researchers have created a new material that overcomes two of the major obstacles to solar power: it absorbs all the energy contained in sunlight, and generates electrons in a way that makes them easier to capture.
Ohio State University chemists and their colleagues combined electrically conductive plastic with metals including molybdenum and titanium to create the hybrid material.
“There are other such hybrids out there, but the advantage of our material is that we can cover the entire range of the solar spectrum,” explained Malcolm Chisholm, Distinguished University Professor and Chair of the Department of Chemistry at Ohio State.
Sunlight contains the entire spectrum of colors that can be seen with the naked eye — all the colors of the rainbow. What our eyes interpret as color are really different energy levels, or frequencies of light. Today’s solar cell materials can only capture a small range of frequencies, so they can only capture a small fraction of the energy contained in sunlight.
This new material is the first that can absorb all the energy contained in visible light at once.
The material generates electricity just like other solar cell materials do: light energizes the atoms of the material, and some of the electrons in those atoms are knocked loose.
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I noticed that the article did not mention the efficiency. A similar announcement was made in November 2002 ( http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/MSD-full-spectrum-solar-cell.html ) but you didn’t hear anything after that. Hopefully this will pan out better.
I think ultimately the Concentrated Photovoltaics (CPV) will win out. Companies like Amonix (www.amonix.com), SolFocus (www.solfocus.com) or possibly separating the light while you concentrate it like Sol Solutione (www.sol-solution.net).