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JAKARTA (Rambu Energy) – The development of solar power in Indonesia as well as on global scale has been slow, partly due to inefficiency of solar energy. That might change following a breakthrough by researchers at an Australian university.
Recently, solar researchers at University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, managed to convert over 40 percent of the sunlight hitting a solar system into electricity. This is highest efficiency ever reported.
The new record efficiency was achieved in outdoor tests in Sydney, and later independently confirmed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) at their outdoor test facility in the United States.
The work was funded by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) and supported by the Australia–US Institute for Advanced Photovoltaics (AUSIAPV) .
“This is the highest efficiency ever reported for sunlight conversion into electricity,” UNSW Scientia Professor and Director of the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics (ACAP) Professor Martin Green said in a media statement.
“We used commercial solar cells, but in a new way, so these efficiency improvements are readily accessible to the solar industry,” added Dr Mark Keevers, the UNSW solar scientist who managed the project.
The 40 percent efficiency milestone is the latest in a long line of achievements by UNSW solar researchers spanning four decades. These include the first photovoltaic system to convert sunlight to electricity with over 20 percent efficiency in 1989, with the new result doubling this performance.
“The new results are based on the use of focused sunlight, and are particularly relevant to photovoltaic power towers being developed in Australia,” Professor Green said.
Power towers are being developed by Australian company, RayGen Resources, which provided design and technical support for the high efficiency prototype. Another partner in the research was Spectrolab, a US–based company that provided some of the cells used in the project.
A key part of the prototype’s design is the use of a custom optical bandpass filter to capture sunlight that is normally wasted by commercial solar cells on towers and convert it to electricity at a higher efficiency than the solar cells themselves ever could.
Such filters reflect particular wavelengths of light while transmitting others.
The 40 percent efficiency achievement is outlined in a paper expected to be published soon by the Progress in Photovoltaics journal. It will also be presented at the Australian PV Institute’s Asia-Pacific Solar Research Conference, which was held at UNSW on Dec. 8). (*)
