July 22, 2005—Spectrolab, a Boeing company, has announced that it has built a concentrating solar cell that converts 39 percent of the sunlight hitting it into electricity, a world record.
Concentrating solar power systems use lenses or mirrors to focus sunlight onto high-efficiency solar cells. Spectrolab, working under contract to the US Department of Energy (DOE) and DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), achieved its record under sunlight concentrated by a factor of 236 (referred to as “236 suns”), using a “multijunction” solar cell. These solar cells consist of multiple layers of semiconductor materials, with each layer designed to capture different frequencies of sunlight, allowing the cell as a whole to convert a large part of the solar spectrum into electricity.
According to NREL, concentrator manufacturers such as Amonix, Inc. and electric utilities like Arizona’s APS believe that solar concentrators could be competitive in the near future. For more information, see the NREL Web site.
