what is the prospect of solar cells becoming really succesful?

Question

Solar cells have two problems: 1 high cost 2. low efficiency What are the prospects that either of these is going to change ?

Answer 1

Pretty good. The real question is how long will it take for either to change.

First off, the efficiency of solar cells has already grown by leaps and bounds, with the disadvantage being that the methods with the greatest efficiency are very expensive.

There's a couple of ways to improve the efficiency, perhaps without the associated increase in cost.

1) Increase the spectrum of light that can be converted to electricity. Currently, solar cells only convert a very small range of light frequencies to electricity. You could theoretically expand that range by combining different materials in a solar array, but if the crystal lattices of the different materials differ too much efficiency also suffers.

A new development, discovered during development of LEDs rather than solar cells, could expand the range of frequencies that could be converted to electricity without increasing the cost. Indium gallium nitride holds the promise of increasing efficiency to 50 to 70 percent (the best current solar cells run around 30%). The material is very defect tolerant, meaning the crystal lattices don't have to match so precisely, decreasing the cost of production, plus it has a high heat capacity. Of course, a p-type version compatible with indium gallium nitride still needs to be developed, but if one is found, the efficiency of solar cells would leap while the cost would plummet.

2) Increase the number of electrons emitted in response to being struck by photons of light. Current solar cells can convert one photon of solar energy to one electron with the rest being lost as heat. Nanotechnology could increase that to three electrons per photon of solar energy, increasing solar cell efficiency to around 65%.

Answer 2

The very latest solar cells are now at about 35-45% efficiency. They are expensive. There are some lab samples that are approaching 70% efficiency but large scale production of this is being held back by quality, durablity and production capacity problems. However, in just 6 months the cost from introduction of current products has dropped by 50% as production has ramped up. The real reason for higher cost right now is the huge demand. The 5 major producers are sold out until the end of next year. There are 12 new major plants being built that are going to septuple the production capacity and begin to catch up with demand. The big thing is that government must understand that solar cell production must be given a very high priority in the form of incentives for capitol investment or the industry will constantly be behind the demand and hence prices will only come down to affordable levels on outdated lower efficiency products.

Answer 3

Success depends not only on the cost and efficiency of solar cells, but the cost of producing energy by other means. As oil gets more and more scarce, and global warming provides a sufficient incentive for us to stay away from fossile fuels (i.e. coal) to generate energy, perhaps solar energy (photovoltaic) will become more and more worth the cost.

Answer 4

Currently, the solar cells can only absorb less than 3-10% of solar energy. So, how do you define sucessful? If sucessful is 50% then maybe in the next 10 years, more than 80% will take a much longer time than that!

Answer 5

the technology has to improve before solar cells become more cost effective & efficient. There is a great possibility of that, it is only a matter of time. How much time it will take, we cannot say.