Group items tagged

Egbe has achieved an efficiency of four percent and is trying to find out how to improve the efficiency in general. Not only for his system, but also for other systems researchers are working on. "The efficiency of organic solar cells has already reached eight percent and commercial products are on the market," he said.

The size, shape and organization of light-harvesting complexes such as chlorosomes are critical factors in electron transfer to semiconductor electrodes in solar devices. Understanding how chlorosomes function in nature could help scientists mimic the chlorosome's efficiency to create robust biohybrid or bio-inspired solar cells.

"Combining these traits and achieving large-scale patterning could enable a wide range of practical applications, such as energy-generating solar windows, transparent solar panels, and new kinds of optical displays," said co-author Zhihua Xu, a materials scientist at the CFN.

From concentrated solar power to floating wind turbines and from printable organic solar cells to biomass gasification, power-technology.com picks six of the most promising new green power technologies. Concentrating solar power technology Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) technology involving the use of mirrors to focus sunlight onto a receiver that captures and converts the solar energy into heat for electricity generation has been in use since 1980s.

A new class of economically viable solar power cells--cheap, flexible and easy to make--has come a step closer to reality as a result of recent work at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, where scientists have deepened their understanding of the complex organic films at the heart of the devices.