

Princeton’s nanomesh nearly triples solar cell efficiency - bane
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/142962-princetons-nanomesh-nearly-triples-solar-cell-efficiency

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sbierwagen
As usual, the numbers in the pop media news article are nonsense.

From the paper's abstract:

    
    
      In harvesting scattered light, the Omni acceptance can 
      increase PCE by additional 81% over ITO-SC, leading to a 
      total 175% increase (i.e. 8% PCE).
    

PCE is power conversion efficiency-- 100 watts of sunlight in, 8 watts of
electricity out.

Very good for an organic solar cell. Pretty bad for a silicon solar cell.
(which will do 27%) Absolutely terrible for a multijunction cell. (44%)

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jbellis
I looked for the actual paper but couldn't find it, can you post the link?

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mbell
[http://www.princeton.edu/~chouweb/publications/223%20Chou_Ul...](http://www.princeton.edu/~chouweb/publications/223%20Chou_Ultrathin%20high-
efficiency%20broad-band_OpticsExpress_2012.pdf)

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jerf
If we combine all of these efficiency improvements to solar cells that have
been posted to HN over the past five years, we can produce solar cells that
are, oh, about 800% efficient.

Honest question: Have any of these reached production? I am genuinely curious
to hear positive answers to that question.

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sp332
A lot of improvements have reached production. Solar cells are much cheaper
per watt than they were just a few years ago. However, as the first comment on
that page explains, this article has some pretty confused numbers.

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revelation
Thats because of economics of scale (read: cheap chinese stimulus money), not
because of dramatic advancements in the technology.

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mbell
Misleading title.

They have tripled the efficiency of a specific type of solar cell (organic
photovoltaics), that is extremely inefficient to begin with. They are still
almost an order of magnitude away from the efficiency of the best solar cells
that have been built.

~~~
sp332
However, they are pretty cheap. Tripling the efficiency of a cheap solar cell
without adding too much cost would be pretty noteworthy. Of course it remains
to be seen if the decade-old manufacturing technique can really live up to the
hype.

~~~
mbell
It'll be noteworthy when they get close to current cheap silicon PV cells
(which they still need to get 3-4 times more efficient to reach). Keep in mind
the efficiency they managed to achieve is only 4.4%. Not saying it isn't an
important achievement, just that they have a very long way to go still to
change anything in the current solar market.

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Wingman4l7
I've found this graph handy as a primer for the trends of and relationships
between the different major types of photovoltaic cells and their
efficiencies: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PVeff(rev121211).jpg>

It will put a lot of these news articles in perspective when you know that,
for instance, a 100% increase in efficiency in a thin-film tech only means
that it's approaching the efficiency of existing multijunction tech _(ignoring
price-per-watt)_.

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cagenut
Please please please please ban "extremetech.com" its this exact same annoying
pattern over and over.

