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Re: Advances in solar tech news and discussion

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Rachellewinegar
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Re: Advances in solar tech news and discussion

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weatheriscool wrote: Thu Oct 07, 2021 2:49 am Building efficient and thermally stable perovskite solar cells using Ti₃C₂TₓMXene

by University of Queensland
Credit: University of Queensland

A new generation of cheap, sustainable and efficient solar cells is a step closer, thanks to scientists at The University of Queensland.

Researchers at UQ's Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN) modified a nanomaterial to make solar cells as efficient as silicon-based cells, but without their high cost and complex manufacturing.

Professor Joe Shapter said the finding addressed an urgent need for alternative environmentally friendly energy sources capable of providing efficient and reliable energy production.

"Silicon-based solar cells remain the dominant first-generation product making up 90 percent of the market, but demand was high for cells that could be manufactured without their high prices and complexity," Professor Shapter said.

"Among the next-generation technologies, perovskite solar cells (PSCs) have attracted enormous attention because of their high efficiency and ease of fabrication.

"The technology has undergone unprecedented rapid development in recent years.

"But the new generation of solar cells still have some drawbacks such as poor long-term stability, lead toxicity and high material costs."

Professor Shapter said his team studied a nanomaterial that showed great promise in overcoming some of the new cell's drawbacks and used doping, a common method of modifying the new cell's nanomaterial to enhance its electrical properties.
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-10-eff ... solar.html
If I understand correctly, however, is it possible to receive solar energy without doing any damage to nature?
Last edited by Rachellewinegar on Thu Dec 01, 2022 9:40 am, edited 2 times in total.
weatheriscool
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Re: Advances in solar tech news and discussion

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Researchers unveil multi-mode reactions in perovskite solar cells
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-11-unv ... solar.html
by Liu Jia, Chinese Academy of Sciences
As a promising photovoltaic material, metal halide perovskite yields high efficiency in solar cells. However, the deep-level traps of minority carriers at the surface of the p-i-n perovskite solar cells can suppress nonradiative recombination. The precise passivation of deep-level traps has been a major focus in raising the power conversion efficiency (PCE) to the theoretical Shockley-Queisser limit.

Recently, a research group led by Prof. Xu Jixian and Prof. Wu Xiaojun from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and their collaborators from Suzhou Institute of Nano-Tech and Nano-Bionics of CAS revealed the perovskite/polymer multi-mode interactions and their correlation with the passivation of the deep-level traps, and discovered a new in-situ protonation process that significantly reduces the deep-level traps of minority carriers. This work was published in Joule.

Previously known interaction modes at the perovskite/polyethyleneimine (PEI) interface include conventional physisorption and metal-chelation, which either shows minor passivation effects or tends to passivate the majority carrier traps. To overcome these problems, the researchers used high-sensitivity X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and sum-frequency-generation spectroscopy to identify in-situ protonation process of the amine group at the perovskite/PEI surface.
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Re: Advances in solar tech news and discussion

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Researchers realize perovskite-based phase heterojunction solar cells
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-11-per ... cells.html
by Ingrid Fadelli , Tech Xplore

Over the past few decades, engineers and material scientists have created increasingly advanced and efficient solar technologies. Some of these technologies are based on photovoltaics with a so-called heterojunction structure, which entails the integration of two materials with distinct optoelectronic properties.

Researchers at Technische Universität Dresden have recently realized a different type of solar cells, referred to as phase heterojunction (PHJ) solar cells. These cells, introduced in a paper published in Nature Energy, were fabricated using two polymorphs (i.e., structural forms) of the same material, the perovskite CsPbI3, instead of two entirely different semiconductors.

"The realization of a PHJ requires the ability to fabricate two different phases of the same perovskite composition on top of each other," Yana Vaynzof, lead author of the paper, told TechXplore. "While the fabrication of 𝛽-phase CsPbI3 perovskite by solution-processing is well established in the literature, we needed to develop a method to deposit a 𝛾-phase perovskite without dissolving the underlying 𝛽-phase layer, so we decided to use thermal evaporation for this purpose."

In one of their previous studies, Vaynzof and her team devised a strategy to evaporate 𝛾-phase CsPbI3 perovskites by heating them. This strategy proved to be crucial for the experimental realization of their new PHJ solar cells.
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Re: Advances in solar tech news and discussion

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Can a new technique for capturing 'hot' electrons make solar cells more efficient?
https://phys.org/news/2022-12-technique ... solar.html
by Vittoria D'Alessio, University of Bath

A new way of extracting quantitative information from state-of-the-art single molecule experiments has been developed by physicists at the University of Bath. Using this quantitative information, the researchers will be able to probe the ultra-fast physics of "hot" electrons on surfaces—the same physics that governs and limits the efficacy of silicon-based solar cells.

Solar cells work by converting light into electrons, whose energy can be collected and harvested. A hot solar cell is a novel type of cell that converts sunlight to electricity more efficiently than conventional solar cells. However, the efficiency of this process is limited by the creation of energetic, or "hot," electrons that are extremely short lived and lose most of their energy to their surrounding within the first few femtoseconds of their creation (1 femtosecond equals 1/1,000,000,000,000,000 of a second).

The ultra-short lifetime of hot electrons and the corresponding short distance they can travel mean probing and influencing the properties of hot electrons is experimentally challenging. To date, there have been a few techniques capable of circumventing these challenges, but none has proven capable of spatial resolution—meaning, they can't tell us about the crucial connection between a material's atomic structure and the dynamics of hot electrons within that material.

Manipulating a target

The researchers from Bath's Department of Physics studied hot electrons using a scanning tunneling microscope (STM). This device is designed to image individual atoms and molecules. By injecting a small electrical current (a beam of hot electrons) into a single target molecule, the device can also manipulate a target—moving it, rotating it, breaking a chemical bond or making a new chemical bond.
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Re: Advances in solar tech news and discussion

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Paper-thin solar cell can turn any surface into a power source
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-12-pap ... power.html
by Adam Zewe, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MIT engineers have developed ultralight fabric solar cells that can quickly and easily turn any surface into a power source.

These durable, flexible solar cells, which are much thinner than a human hair, are glued to a strong, lightweight fabric, making them easy to install on a fixed surface. They can provide energy on the go as a wearable power fabric or be transported and rapidly deployed in remote locations for assistance in emergencies. They are one-hundredth the weight of conventional solar panels, generate 18 times more power-per-kilogram, and are made from semiconducting inks using printing processes that can be scaled in the future to large-area manufacturing.

Because they are so thin and lightweight, these solar cells can be laminated onto many different surfaces. For instance, they could be integrated onto the sails of a boat to provide power while at sea, adhered onto tents and tarps that are deployed in disaster recovery operations, or applied onto the wings of drones to extend their flying range. This lightweight solar technology can be easily integrated into built environments with minimal installation needs.

"The metrics used to evaluate a new solar cell technology are typically limited to their power conversion efficiency and their cost in dollars-per-watt. Just as important is integrability—the ease with which the new technology can be adapted. The lightweight solar fabrics enable integrability, providing impetus for the current work. We strive to accelerate solar adoption, given the present urgent need to deploy new carbon-free sources of energy," says Vladimir Bulović, the Fariborz Maseeh Chair in Emerging Technology, leader of the Organic and Nanostructured Electronics Laboratory (ONE Lab), director of MIT.nano, and senior author of a new paper describing the work.

Joining Bulović on the paper are co-lead authors Mayuran Saravanapavanantham, an electrical engineering and computer science graduate student at MIT; and Jeremiah Mwaura, a research scientist in the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics. The research is published today in Small Methods.
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Re: Advances in solar tech news and discussion

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weatheriscool
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Re: Advances in solar tech news and discussion

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Korean firm plans $2.5B in new solar panel plants in Georgia
Source: AP

By JEFF AMY an hour ago

ATLANTA (AP) — A South Korean solar panel maker will invest more than $2.5 billion to build factories in Georgia, hiring 2,500 new employees and making components usually manufactured outside the United States, the company announced Wednesday.

Qcells, a unit of Hanwha Solutions, will build a new factory in Cartersville that will employ 2,000 people, with construction starting within weeks and production starting before the end of 2024.

The company also announced a third phase of its Dalton plant, already the largest maker of solar panels in the Western Hemisphere. Qcells will add nearly 500 jobs in Dalton, raising employment above 1,500 once all expansions are complete there.

“We are seeking to further expand our low-carbon solar investments as we lead the industry towards fully American-made clean energy solutions,” Qcells CEO Justin Lee said in a statement.

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/biden-busine ... f789e3174a
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Re: Advances in solar tech news and discussion

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Stability of perovskite solar cells reaches next milestone
https://techxplore.com/news/2023-01-sta ... stone.html
by Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres
Perovskite semiconductors promise highly efficient and low-cost solar cells. However, the semi-organic material is very sensitive to temperature differences, which can quickly lead to fatigue damage in normal outdoor use. Adding a dipolar polymer compound to the precursor perovskite solution helps to counteract this.

This has now been shown in a study published in the journal Science by an international team led by Antonio Abate, HZB. The solar cells produced in this way achieve efficiencies of well above 24 %, which hardly drop under rapid temperature fluctuations between -60 and +80 Celsius over one hundred cycles. That corresponds to about one year of outdoor use.

The material class of halide perovskites is seen as a great hope for even more solar power at even lower costs. The materials are very cheap, can be processed into thin films with minimal energy input and achieve efficiencies that are significantly higher than those of conventional silicon solar cells.
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Re: Advances in solar tech news and discussion

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Majority of Texans back shift to solar energy

by Rashda Khan, University of Houston
https://techxplore.com/news/2023-02-maj ... nergy.html
Two years after Winter Storm Uri wreaked havoc on Texas' power grid, a majority of Texans support expanding the country's reliance on solar and other alternative sources of energy, according to the most recent survey report released by the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston.

While 64% of Texans favor expanding U.S. reliance on solar power plants, 59% favor reliance on geothermal plants and 57% favor reliance on wind turbine farms.

In comparison, 42% favored increasing reliance on nuclear power plants and natural gas-fired power plants. The majority of the 41% who preferred expanding U.S. reliance on onshore conventional oil and gas came from the Boomer/Silent Generation.

Texans also overwhelmingly (90%) supported net-metering legislation that would allow homes and businesses with solar panels to sell any extra power they generate back to the electric grid for the same price that the utility charges consumers to buy the electricity. And 82% supported tax incentives for homeowners and businesses to install rooftop solar panels and battery storage.
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