The New Future of Solar Cells

The New Future of Solar Cells is looking very bright. We recently had a chance to look at some of the new technology behind these little cells that capture the natural light of the sun. These little cells are capturing more light than ever.

The best solar cells on the market are made up of multiple layers of semiconductor material. Each of these layers is designed to be able to capture a different spectrum of light. Now though, a crack research team at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab have come up with a way to make a single semiconductor that can do the job of many. The new seminconductors should be fairly inexpensive also.

The folks at Berkeley are not alone though. There are many groups working on ways to capture more energy in from the light of the sun. The long running problem (ie.e going all the way back to the first solar cells of the 1960's) has always been that making solar cells can be expensive, and the needed components were hard to make.

With the breakthrough of the Berkeley Lab, the new cell is capable of converting almost half of the sunlight it receives into electricity. This rate is nearly 3 times the current best cells on the market. This ability has the potential of really driving down the cost of solar cells. In theory, you would then only need a single layer of semiconductor material to accomplish the same results as the current multi-layered versions.

The magic behind the new semiconductors is a substance called gallium arsenide. With some modification, the Berkeley Lab has figured out how to free multiple photons, which cause an electron to be freed. Typically, this material requires high-energy photons to generate electricity. But the folks at the Berkeley Lab have now modified the gallium arsenide, so that the energy from more than one photon is used to free an electron—energy adds up until an electron is freed. Some of the arsenic atoms in the material end up being replaced with nitrogen atoms, which creates tiny areas that act as stepping stones for electrons that have absorbed some energy from low-energy photons, where they can wait to receive energy from more photons. It's pretty amazing.

So, get ready. You have one day be able to power your laptop, or smartphone from the power of the sun. Solar cells definitely have a bright future.