Good news for Australian industry and job creation with renewable energy efficiency
Posted
in Updates
@ Jun 28th 2013 11:27am
- By Garry Larden
.
Good news for Australian industry and job creation with renewable energy efficiency
Australian scientists from the University of NSW have come up with improvements in photovoltaic panel design that had not been expected for another decade and they have found a way of hugely increasing the efficiency of solar panels while substantially reducing their cost.
The breakthrough involves using hydrogen atoms to counter defects in silicon cells used in solar panels. As a consequence, poor quality silicon can be made to perform like high quality wafers.
The process makes cheap silicon "actually better than the best-quality material people are using at the moment", the head of the university's photovoltaic centre of excellence, Silicon wafers account for more than half the cost of making a solar cell. "By using lower-quality silicon, you can drastically reduce that cost," Professor Stuart Wenham, said.
At present, the best commercial solar cells convert between 17% and 19% of the sun's energy into electricity. UNSW's technique, patented this year, should produce efficiencies of between 21% and 23%.
“This has really got the industry very excited, not only in China, but elsewhere as well,” said Richard Corkish, head of the university’s School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering. Alumni of the school hold senior positions at many of the leading PV producers globally.
The price of solar panels has fallen by about 65% in two years, partly due to a huge rise in production in China. Australians have been taking advantage of lower prices, with the number of homes with solar panels exceeding 1 million.
The prospect for future work within the renewable energy industry is very exciting for Australia, with the evolution of Solar, Geothermal, Wind and Wave power. This industry is already on track at about $100 billion a year, the solar industry alone is expected to swell to about $140 billion by 2018, according to estimates published in April by Transparency Market Research.
