What a difference 34 years can make. When the Carter Administration installed solar panels at the White House back in 1979, photovoltaic cells were space age technology that most households could not afford, aside from the rare DIY-er. Now the price of solar power has been sinking like a stone, … [continued]
This article first appeared on RenewEconomy A new Silicon Valley developer of thin film solar PV modules, backed by an Australian venture capitalist, has claimed an engineering breakthrough that could cut the manufacturing costs of PV modules by one third. RSI has broken cover after five years of development to … [continued]
Getting tired of solar technology advancements? Me neither. The latest one we’ve got for you is about ever-popular peel-and-stick solar cells. Check out the news, reposted from Le Solar Love: Thanks to intelligence and academic investigation, solar may soon get more convenient and more easily accessible for application and use. … [continued]
National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) Director Dan Arvizu recently gave a keynote speech during the 2013 International Renewable Energy Conference (part of Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week), which I was lucky enough to attend*. His speech covered a large variety of cleantech topics, and most of the points he made have been covered extensively here on … [continued]
Solar industry manufacturing consortium PVMC and NREL aim to help reduce the installed cost of thin-film CIGS solar PV by 75%, an effort that falls right in line with targets set out in PVMC’s thin-film PV industry roadmap and President Obama’s SunShot Initiative.
Solar innovator First Solar has just announced a new word record for solar cell conversion efficiency, for its cadmium-telluride (CdTe) thin film solar cell. That’s significant because CdTe solar cells can be made more quickly and cheaply than conventional silicon solar cells, bringing down the cost of solar power. The … [continued]
This article was originally published on RenewEconomy: Showa Shell, the Japanese subsidiary of global oil giant Royal Dutch Shell, has predicted that its solar unit Solar Frontier will be able to cut production costs of its solar modules by half in the next few years as it seeks to emerge … [continued]
A new world efficiency record has been set for thin film silicon solar cells by EPFL’s Institute of Micro-engineering, reaching an impressive 10.7%. That is a significant increase in efficiency from the previous record of 10.1%. The new single-junction microcrystalline silicon solar cell had it’s record independently verified by the … [continued]
Update: Some sentences and links have been added to this post to provide better context and comparison. Update #2: I’ve published two articles on energy subsidies in response to comments on this post regarding that matter. They are: “Energy Subsidies — Clean Energy Subsidies vs Fossil Subsidies” and “Oil Subsidies & … [continued]
A new conversion efficiency record of 20.4% has been set for thin-film solar cells by researchers at Empa and the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology. The new record of 20.4% is a big improvement over the previous record achieved by this team (18.7%) in May 2011. The … [continued]
