Eco-friendly Solar Cells from IBM

The solar cell industry is exploding! Just search for ‘solar cell’ on this website and you will know what we are talking about. The technology is being fine tuned continuously and there are numerous claims made by various parties about the improved efficiency of their product. And that of course is encouraging and great news for all of us. The effort we put in today to develop these green technologies will ultimately determine the true worth of our scientific accomplishments in the future.

The latest tweak in the technology…

Is a result of work carried out by IBM researchers. They have developed a solar cell with relatively high efficiency using abundant materials in nature.

How much of an efficiency are we talking about?

This new solar cell can convert 9.6 percent of incident sunlight into electricity. Although this may not sound too much, it’s still a 40 percent increase compared to current methods.

However…

Such an efficiency is exceeded by commercial silicone-based cells and even by thin-film solar cells which we have talked about before.

Excerpt from one of our previous articles

Then why bother?

That’s naturally what one would think about this new IBM innovation right? Well… here’s the deal. Those existing technologies use material like cadmium, tellurium, indium, gallium, and selenide to make the solar cells.

And the problem with that?

Those materials are scarce in nature. And they pose a significant threat to the environment for that reason as well. So it is a little difficult to imagine how such technologies could contribute towards a cleaner renewable energy supply in the future.

“Other solar cells which perform at similar efficiency levels are comprised of materials that have been either too costly to produce or contain elements that could limit production capacity, or have poor prospects for further improvements in efficiency, making commercialization and wide usage less likely,” said Thomas Theis, director of physical sciences at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Lab

That’s where the IBM invention comes into play…

This new solar cell uses copper, zinc, tin, and sulfur, or selenium – materials that are far more abundant in nature.

The researchers claim that they are working on achieving a 12 percent conversion efficiency and if that were to be realized then the technology could become an economically viable alternative to current methods…