Solarati

A University of Delaware-led consortium has achieved a record-breaking combined solar cell efficiency of 42.8 percent from sunlight at standard terrestrial conditions, and will team with DuPont in a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency project to transition the lab-scale work to an engineering and manufacturing prototype model.

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Researchers have shown that a new and important effect called multiple exciton generation (MEG) occurs efficiently in silicon nanocrystals. MEG results in the formation of more than one electron per absorbed photon.

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Renewable does not mean green. That is the claim of Jesse Ausubel of the Rockefeller University in New York. He explains that building enough wind farms, damming enough rivers, and growing enough biomass to meet global energy demands will wreck the environment.

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Researchers have developed an inexpensive solar cell that can be painted or printed on flexible plastic sheets. “Someday homeowners will even be able to print sheets of these solar cells with inexpensive home-based inkjet printers. Consumers can then slap the finished product on a wall, roof or billboard to create their own power stations,” according to the scientists.

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Using plastics to harvest the energy of the sun just got a significant boost in efficiency thanks to a discovery made at UC Santa Barbara. Nobel laureate and Alan Heeger, professor at UC Santa Barbara, worked with Kwanghee Lee of Korea and a team of scientists to create a new “tandem” organic solar cell with increased efficiency. The discovery, explained in the July 13 Science, marks a step forward in materials science.

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A team of chemists at Yale is working to increase the nation’s energy supply through effective use of solar power under the auspices of the US Department of Energy program for basic research on solar energy utilization.

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