Development of technology within the solar panel industry has come from a wide range and sometimes obscure sources over the years. From using the excess heat from London subways to warm up the surrounding offices to converting sugar into hydrogen to power cars, the level of ingenuity often seems in abundant supply when it comes to researchers who are looking for better ways to live and prevent climate change.
Could we beam the charged particles from solar winds from satellites down to earth to provide power? Apparently some researchers think it is entirely possible and that it could supply electricity to the whole world.
Closer to home there are scientists who believe that we could use our own human waste to power everything and there is currently a Californian municipal operation that is turning 700,000 metric tonnes of dried sludge into useful electricity.(1) There’s a nightclub in Rotterdam that uses floor vibration to create the power for its light display (2)and in a research bunker somewhere scientists are trying to use certain kinds of jellyfish to make fuel.
So what’s so strange about using a moth to make better solar cells?
One of the problems that we have with solar panels is their reflectivity which can cause damage to the surrounding environment – if you ever been blinded by the sunlight glinting off an object, you’ll know what we mean. In the past, scientists have been working to produce non-reflective surfaces that also have a high enough efficiency for electricity production. It’s not been an easy job.
Scientists have found that moth eyes don’t reflect much. Light hits one of the millions of pin posts and is absorbed straight into the cornea. They believe that this way of doing things for the moth developed so that it could see better at night and that light wouldn’t reflect of its surface attracting predators. This mimicking is not entirely new – we’ve been using it on our flat screen TVs for a while now – but the idea of utilizing polymers called block copolymer to create a surface for the solar cells is and has been developed at Brookhaven Center for Functional Nanomaterials in the United States.
According to Chuck Black at the Center: “The surface nanotexture…drastically cuts down on reflection of many wavelengths of light simultaneously.” (3)What’s more, whilst decreasing the amount of reflection, these new films could increase the efficiency of our solar PV cells allowing them to produce more electricity. Scientists at the Centre say that the current incarnations of the nanotechnology outperforms a single layer of anti-reflective coating by almost 20%.
Don’t forget our humble bacteria
Moths aren’t the only source of inspiration for our future technology. Scientists at the University of Cambridge are looking at deep sea bacteria that have developed ingenious ways to cope with the low amount of light at the bottom of our oceans. The Green Sulfer Bacteria in question are able to undertake photosynthesis more efficiently which means they convert light to energy without losing much energy along the way – something that has huge implications for the efficiency of solar cells if the technology can be harnessed.
Greater efficiency of solar PV
The average efficiency of our current silicon solar cells is between 10% and 19% and the battle has been on for some years with manufacturers trying to get ever more power out of each cell. The latest expertise believes that our solar cells could reach efficiencies of between 30 and 50% (4)which could have major implications for the development of the industry. MIT though have come up with further technology that uses heat to create greater efficiency and scientists see no reason why this could not be increased to almost 80% for the silicon solar PV cells that we have at the moment.
There’s no doubt that how we get our solar PV cells to create more electricity is the subject of some intensive research at the moment, whether it is using the natural world to provide inspiration or developing new and more complex nano technologies. The solar industry knows that it needs this innovation to survive particularly if the sun is to become our prime source of energy in the future.
Other Resources:
(1) http://biomassmagazine.com/articles/5068/sludge-to-power-process-tested
(2) http://www.elementalled.com/academy/blog/sustainable-dance-floor-powers-dutch-nightclub/
(3) http://www.bnl.gov/newsroom/news.php?a=11685
(4) https://gigaom.com/2013/07/18/is-the-50-efficient-solar-cell-on-the-horizon/
