European Research consortium raises multicrystalline silicon solar cell efficiency to 18%
Tue Nov 14, 2006 11:33am ET30
Source: Reuter News
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?
type=scienceNews&storyid=2006-11-14T163256Z_01_L14702690_RTRUKOC_0_US-ENERGY-SOLAR.xml&src=rss
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – A European consortium has improved the efficiency of silicon solar cells, hoping to reduce the cost of generating solar power, the Dutch energy research center ECN said on Tuesday. “Researchers increased the conversion (from sunlight to electricity) efficiency of large-area multicrystalline silicon solar cells to a record value of 18 percent,” ECN said in a statement.
mportant for renewable energy sources, such as wind, solar and biofuels, as it is key to reducing costs and allowing them to compete with fossil fuels. Solar electricity currently costs more than eight times as much as that produced from fossil fuels. The market is growing at a rate of over 30 percent a year but solar power still produces less than one percent of the world’s energy.
The solar cell research is done by a consortium of European companies and institutes, including ECN, under a European Union-supported project called CrystalClear, which aims to develop low-cost, highly efficient silicon solar modules. The consortium also developed a process for manufacturing extremely thin solar cells, allowing efficient use of high-purity silicon material, the statement said.
Silicon is the ingredient in a photovoltaic cell that transforms energy from the sun into electricity. The world silicon market is currently in shortage with solar cell makers competing with the electronics sector for supplies. The bottleneck is expected to ease by 2008. ECN said the consortium believed that its new technologies could halve the cost of producing cells.
“The consortium has performed detailed cost calculations showing that the technologies now successfully under development may be produced at around one euro per watt of module power, which is about half of today’s cost,” ECN said. Manufacturing should be done in large volumes to achieve the cost reduction, it added.
The consortium includes companies such as BP Solar, Shell Solar, German Deutsche Cell, Deutsche Solar and RWE Schot Solar, Norway’s Scanwafer, French Photowatt as well as Dutch, Spanish, German, French and Belgian universities and research institutes.