Comment by josefritzishere
Comment by josefritzishere 9 hours ago
The solar panel conversion of sunlight to usable energy to around 20%, with a theoretical max of 30%. So it's better than that.
Comment by josefritzishere 9 hours ago
The solar panel conversion of sunlight to usable energy to around 20%, with a theoretical max of 30%. So it's better than that.
That can't be true. The current record for non-concentrating cells is 39.5% efficiency using triple junction cells [1]
Concentrating cells are at 47.6% [2]
[1] https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(22)00191-X
[2] https://publica-rest.fraunhofer.de/server/api/core/bitstream...
The innovation here is you have a system that emits monochromatic light, and you have solar cells tuned specifically for that bandgap, plus the system is also "naturally" concentrating because the light output is incredibly bright. 3000 suns vs 500-1000 suns in typical CPV, plus they also do waste heat recycling. End-to-end efficiency of 40% is definitely feasible as advertised.
It's only true for a single junction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley%E2%80%93Queisser_limi...
Multi-junction cells beat that limit, but they're still horribly expensive to manufacture which confines them to niche uses like spacecraft.
But sunlight is wide spectrum, and a lot of the reasons why the efficiency of regular solar panels is low, is that they don’t absorb all of the spectrum equally well. That’s why there’s all this talk of tandem solar cells with perovskites these days. The two solar cells can be tuned to extract energy from different wavelengths of light.
Since the light they’re making is nearly monochromatic, it’s a lot easier to get higher efficiency. That’s kind of the whole point of the invention.