Since the invention of the modern silicon solar cell, the performance of solar cells has improved greatly. The first silicon solar cell was created by Bell Labs and shown to the public for the first time on April 25, 1954. It had an efficiency of about 6%, meaning that it converted about 6% of the sun’s energy it collected to electricity.
While it may not seem like much, this was actually a huge improvement over the previous type of solar cell, the selenium solar cell. The efficiency rating for selenium solar cells was only about 0.5%.
Since then, the bulk of the research in this area has been put toward the task of increasing the efficiency of solar cells, and bringing down the cost of manufacturing them. Cells with as much as 40% efficiency have been built using exotic materials. The manufacturing cost for these cells is over 100 times higher than that of the current standard, 8% efficient cells. Reducing production cost is perhaps even more important than improving efficiency when it comes to encouraging more users to adopt solar power.
The sun delivers about 1,000 watts of power per square meter under ideal conditions. This figure is the standard for defining the output of a specific solar cell. Dust, pollution, elevation, temperature, weather and other factors can have an impact on sunlight intensity. Sunlight intensity can even be reduced on a worldwide scale and over long periods of time due to events like volcanic eruptions. Elevation affects solar cell efficiency in that greater elevation actually leads to increased efficiency. This is because, as elevation gets higher, the air gets thinner, and the effects of dust and pollution are decreased.
At present, multicrystalline solar cells output at approximately 14-19% efficiency. However, this type of cell is not expected to progress much beyond that point. Much of the current research being done concerns amorphous silicon cells, which currently operate at about 8% efficiency.
Even without any huge improvements in solar cell efficiency, the goal of replacing fossil fuel-based power generation with solar power isn’t unthinkable. A little over 10,000 square miles of space would have to be dedicated to solar panels in order to supply all of the electricity currently produced in the United States. There is much more suitable territory than that presently unused.
In order to have power even when the sun isn’t out, solar power systems need to involve some form of power storage as well. This need is usually satisfied through the use of batteries. Batteries may also represent an answer to the problem of spikes in demand presented by hot days.
Since they were first introduced, solar cells have improved substantially in terms of efficiency, from 0.5% to as high as 40%. Although the efficiency of commercially available solar cells is not considered likely to improve by much in the short term, solar cell prices continue to decrease.
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