Solar Cells Just Achieved an “Impossible” Efficiency Breakthrough

A new “spin-flip” breakthrough could let solar panels generate more energy than they receive.

Credit: Kyushu University

The new innovation may overcome a long-standing efficiency barrier after researchers used a “spin-flip” metal complex to capture and multiply energy from sunlight - achieving about 130 percent efficiency. This could lead to much more powerful solar panels in the future, says Science Daily. Whilst the world has enjoyed the rapid reduction in the costs of solar panels - over the past decade, the cost of solar panels has decreased globally by 90 percent - increases in their energy conversion efficiency has not been nearly as speedy. High-end panels can exceed 23 percent efficiency, but standard modern panels only convert roughly one-fifth of the sunlight they receive into usable electricity. That means that a whopping 80 percent of sunlight is wasted.

Now, researchers from Japan and Germany may have conjured up a “dream technology” that could one day supercharge solar energy conversion to levels around 130 percent, compared with the 20-something percent levels we see today.

In a recently published paper, a research team led by Kyushu University in Japan, in collaboration with Johannes Gutenberg University (JGU) Mainz in Germany, demonstrated a technique capable of generating and harvesting more solar energy than ever before. It's very complicated as it spans fields such as nuclear fission, energy transfer, and quantum mechanics. As Renew Economy explains, even the paper’s summarised introduction - which is normally written in order to try to provide a precis that mere mortals can more easily comprehend - is a minefield of scientific terms and high-level science.

So, OGN is going to skip over the technical details and simply tell you that the researchers hope that their work can help establish a new design strategy for massively boosting energy extraction from the sun's rays, though they recognise their current experiments are only at the proof-of-concept stage. The really good news will be when they succeed in integrating their "impossible" breakthrough into working solar cells that we can all afford to buy.