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"But Green and his colleagues built their super-efficient system with commercially available materials, rather than with special, laboratory-produced photovoltaic cells. This helped keep the cost of the system down.
Lab-produced solar cells have even higher efficiencies than the 40 percent achieved by Green and his team. Earlier this month, the German-based Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE announced that it had developed a solar cell that can convert 46 percent of the sunlight that hits it into electricity."
From the cited article.
It will be interesting to see how soon they can push this to commercially available systems
According to some PV will never work for anyone other than about 1% of the population... But glad to see advancements are being made.
That's why I posted the thread on how the sun provides more than enough energy to provide ALL of the energy used by mankind, many times over, because so much of the resistance to implementing solar energy more fully is based on ignorance about how much of this free, clean, renewable energy is available for our use.
Locations further from the Equator which get less sun can be served by long distance transmission lines from areas where the sunshine is most powerful. Sure, there will be transmission losses, but harvesting more sunlight can compensate for those losses. And besides, PV panels don't require direct sunshine to generate useful amounts of energy, but in fact keep working under hazy conditions.
An acquaintance has a house along the Columbia River, where it is cloudy and grey much of the time. Yet he derives 100% of his power from his solar installation. How? By putting more panels up than he would need if it were in a sunnier location. His take on it all? "Panel prices are down to about 75 cents a watt. When I started this they were about $5 a watt, and they made economic sense then. Now, it's just a no-brainer to add more capacity if you need it." And since solar energy is being used in Maine and Vermont, and even above the Canadian border, the kind of pessimism some still express is sounding more and more outdated each day.
And once we have flexible solar film available which can be added anywhere, including over windows... which may well be practical within 2-3 years... I predict the percentage of the population who will use it will soar.
^^^ Stay on topic and stop using this thread to advertise your own. This isn't another dream thread, it is about the technological merits or a new discovery and its potential.
My guess is we are already past 1% of the population having PV.
1% is only about a million households.
The estimate I have seen is that 1.5 million households are off-grid. Add to that grid connections at half that rate and you are probably pushing 3 million people using solar in some sort of fashion is sticks and bricks home.
RV'ers, of course, add to those numbers. And folks like me that have an off-grid business, but live connected to the grid. Not sure where we fall into the statistics.
Of course, if your off-grid you are not eligible for Federal tax breaks, so probably it is harder to track those folks.
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