company news about Australia to develop new materials to make solar cells better and cheaper

Australia to develop new materials to make solar cells better and cheaper

The PERC technology pioneered by the photovoltaic team led by Martin Green of the University of New South Wales (UNSW Sydney) has been adopted by the world's solar manufacturing industry

Over 80% of the world's new solar cells are powered by Australian-developed PERC technology

The cost of converting sunlight into electricity has fallen by more than 90 percent over the past decade. Solar energy is currently the cheapest way to generate electricity from new energy sources.
Currently, solar energy helps us reduce emissions significantly at a very competitive cost, but since solar energy provides less than 5% of the world's electricity, there is still much more work to be done on this front.
Australia is likely to play a key role in global progress. Australia has been at the forefront of solar technology development and application for decades. Australia has held the performance record for silicon solar cells for 30 of the past 40 years. Australia now has more solar deployment per capita than any other OECD country, covering nearly 15% of their electricity needs. More than 80% of the world's new solar panels are solar cells based on PERC technology, which was successfully developed in Australia.

So what's next for solar power? Hundreds of researchers across Australia are focused on two goals: cutting costs further and harnessing incoming sunlight to generate as much electricity as possible i.e. increasing photovoltaic efficiency.

Why does solar energy need improvement?

Solar power has the potential to transform our industry, transportation and our way of life - if we take the technology to the extreme.

Ultra-cheap electricity opens up enormous possibilities, from converting water into green hydrogen for energy storage or for use in industrial processes, to powering transportation, energy systems and everything else we use fossil fuels for.

Last year, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency laid out its vision for ultra-low-cost solar. The goal is ambitious but achievable.
The agency hopes to increase the efficiency of commercial solar cells from the current 22% to 30% by 2030. It wants massive full system costs (panels, inverters and transmissions) to be reduced by 50 per cent to $0.30 per watt.

This requires in-depth research. More than 250 Australian researchers are working towards these goals at the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics, a partnership between six universities and CSIRO.
In search of new materials beyond silicon solar cells convert sunlight into electricity without moving parts. When sunlight hits the silicon material commonly used in solar cells, its energy releases an electron that allows it to move through the material, just as an electron moves through a wire or battery.

The solar panels on your roof may start out as desert sand, melted into silica, refined into silicon, and then refined into 99.999% pure polysilicon. This versatile material has been at the heart of solar success for decades. Importantly, it is scalable—from pinhead-sized to arrays covering square kilometers.

But to absolutely maximize the amount of sunlight hitting these panels, we need more than just silicon. We cannot achieve 30% efficiency with silicon alone.

Take a look at the tandem cell - a solar sandwich. Since silicon can only absorb up to 34 percent of visible light, the researchers focused on adding layers of other materials to capture different wavelengths of light.

Perovskites are an option. The material can be printed or coated from a liquid source, making it inexpensive to process. When we stacked this material on top of silicon, we could see a giant leap in solar cell efficiency.

While the prospects are promising, there are still some issues to be worked out—specifically, how to ensure that perovskites will last over 20 years as we've come to expect from silicon slabs.

Researchers are also looking at other materials, such as polymers and chalcogenides, a group of common minerals that includes sulfides that show promise in thin, flexible solar cells.

Any new material must not only be good at converting sunlight into electrons, but also be abundant in the Earth's crust, inexpensive, and stable enough to ensure longevity. For example, chalcogenides are composed of common elements such as copper, tin, zinc, and sulfur.

If it can achieve 30% efficiency, it will bring huge benefits. The cost of building a large solar power plant will be slashed. With more efficient solar cells, fewer panels and less land are needed for the same power output.