Breakthrough: Micro-Electronic Photovoltaics

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have developed tiny glitter-sized photovoltaic (PV) cells that could revolutionize solar energy collection. The crystalline silicon micro-PV cells will be cheaper and have greater efficiencies than current PV collectors. Micro-PV cells require relatively little material to form well-controlled, highly efficient devices. Cell fabrication uses common microelectronic and micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) techniques. From 14-20 μm thick, they are ten times thinner than conventional cells, yet perform at about the same efficiency.

Transcript

00:00:12 Sandia National Laboratories has taken its work in developing microsystem Electronics to shrink the photovoltaic panel down to the size of glitter Microsystems enabled photovoltaics or mepv allows high performance concentrated photovoltaic technology to be incorporated ated Into Thin lightweight modules that can be mounted on lowcost sun trackers these tiny cells

00:00:37 are less than 1 mm on a side but have a large field of view light is concentrated into a uniform intensity spot by an array of wide acceptance angle optically efficient refractive microoptics being able to take photons and turn them into electrons and then use that use those electrons use that power source for doing whatever and having that in a form

00:01:03 factor that's not limiting in a sense that you can take that you can put it in clothing you can put it on the roof you can put on a satellite wherever the interest associated with this particular technology is ultimately residing in terms of the potential for reducing cost and enhancing the versatility of solar if you can deploy it in ways that are flexible and uh can be applied onto

00:01:30 different objects then it opens up the possibility for industry to power all sorts of devices that are important to their various markets by applying microsystem Technologies to solar power Sandia is creating new highperformance solar cell architectures improving Optical efficiency and decreasing system costs