Trigger
Just read an article in the renown MIT Technology Review titled “Record-Breaking Solar Cell Points the Way to Cheaper Power Panasonic reveals a design that surpasses a 20-year-old mark for solar cell efficiency.”
Well, a title and subtitle like this gets you immediately excited to read this article …
A Bad Joke
Once I finished reading this boisterous article, I felt seriously duped by MIT.
Here are the highlights from this article (emphasis added):
- “The new cell converts 25.6 percent of the energy in sunlight into electricity, edging past the long-standing record of 25 percent. ”
Seriously, the efficiency was improved by 0.6 percentage points!
I do not know of the top of my head what the current theoretical limit of conversion efficiency is for silicon based solar cells, but a puny increase like this in 20 years of intensive research is dismal.
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