Boosting Solar Energy Efficiency Even Further with a Newly Designed Solar-Cell Coating:

Photo: Scitecdaily

The current limit to the efficiency of devices in converting sunlight into electricity called the 'Shockley-Queisser efficiency limit' at 34 percent has been broken. Researchers at MIT did this by using the 'singlet exciton fission' principle
which has been published in the journal Science.
How it works -- In a standard PV cell, each photon knocks loose exactly one electron inside the PV material. That loose electron then can be harnessed through wires to provide an electrical current. In the new technique, each photon can instead knock two electrons loose.
This makes the process much more efficient: In a standard cell, any excess energy carried by a photon is wasted as heat, whereas in the new system the extra energy goes into producing two electrons instead of one. The research was performed in the Center for Excitonics and supported by the U.S. Department of Energy. MIT has filed for a provisional patent on the technology. Like us to stay on top of this story...