Advance in solar power technology

[ZenGum]

The original article includes a link to the peer-reviewed article, at http://www.opticsinfobase.org/oe/abs...=oe-21-101-A60

It has the numbers, but they are a bit disappointing.

Experimentally, the PlaCSH-SCs have achieved (1) light coupling-efficiency/absorptance as high as 96% (average 90%), broad-band, and Omni acceptance (light coupling nearly independent of both light incident angle and polarization); (2) an external quantum efficiency of 69% for only 27% single-pass active layer absorptance; leading to (3) a 4.4% power conversion efficiency (PCE) at standard-solar-irradiation, which is 52% higher than the reference ITO-SC (identical structure and fabrication to PlaCSH-SC except MESH replaced by ITO), and also is among the highest PCE for the material system that was achievable previously only by using thick active materials and/or optimized polymer compositions and treatments. 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).

Working backwards from the final result, it seems the regular cells turned maybe 3% of the sunlight into electricity. All those claims of huge percentage increases are starting from a very low base. They've tweaked this up to 8 %.

That 44% efficiency you mentioned - is that the percentage of solar energy that ends up as electricty (i.e. PCE)? or the percentage of photons which, having reached the absorbtion area, get picked up by the system? There could be a big difference. We must make sure we're comparing apples and apples, not apples and apple juice.