Optical Overlayer Innovation Doubles Efficiency of Residential Solar Panels

Insolight, a startup company based in EPFL's Innovation Park, has developed solar panels that could deliver up to twice as much energy as traditional panels. The company created a thin structure that directs the sun's rays to the small surface area of very high performance solar cells and the result is a highly efficient flat photovoltaic system. They introduce a prototype with a yield - the quantity of electricity produced from the light energy received - of 36.4%, while solutions currently available on the market offer throughput of only around 18-20%. The crux of the innovation lies in the microtracking system, patented by the startup, that captures 100% of the sun's rays regardless of the angle of incidence. The transparent plate, which is injection-molded, is equipped with an array of millimetric lenses, which act as a small network of magnifiers. It is moved several millimeters during the day by a metallic frame. This slight movement, which takes place in real time as a sensor detects the sun's position, maximizes the yield.

Transcript

00:00:04 our goal is to double solar panel efficiency to bring it to 35% most of the in Industry Focus so far on cost but we want to focus on efficiency to truly decrease the cost of electricity so we are using uh very high efficiency solar cells from the space industry and since they are very expensive we need to shrink the area down so we need these uh lens arrays

00:00:28 that act as a magnify glass so they concentrate light on the very small solar cells and we have a mechanical structure to translate the lens array above the solar cells and to keep the focus uh on the solar cell during the entire day we have 35% efficiency in the lab obviously the next step would be to go into the outside world to prove that it

00:00:51 works outside so there a whole industrialization phase and a test site that needs to be done in order to prove that we still have the 35% efficiency in real world conditions