Solar technology has gone a long way

Since it was first introduced on a mass scale in the 1950s photovoltaic technology has been developing at an incredible rate. As the demand for renewable energy sources rises along with energy prices in Europe, solar panel technology could be the first one to gain. This excessive demand brings with it resources that weren’t allocated to this sector before and can push this technology further and faster than ever before. After previously covering fundamentals like what are solar panels made of, or the historical journey of photovoltaic technology.
It is time to look ahead and discuss the future of solar technology.

What are the technical barriers we need to overcome in order to take our usage of solar a few steps forward? Additional concepts we will cover are new potential usages, like alternatives to silicon-based photo voltaic cells, PV color for roads, as well as improving the currently used solar technologies.

Pushing The Solar Panels Price Per Watt Lower

Price per watt has decreased gradually over the last decade and yet it has a long way to become before we could see it installed on every house or commercial building. Especially since subsidies for solar will not stay here forever. There are a few approaches to achieving this goal.

Manufacturing techniques – We keep on finding new manufacturing techniques for solar panels. That fact helps make this market more competitive and to push the PPW for solar panels lower even faster than ever before. One such technique is this robot that can fastly manufacture thin-film perovskite solar panels.

Consumer choices – as a consumer when we choose to buy solar we support companies that work on developing those technologies. In the same manner, when we choose to buy products from carbon-neutral factories obtaining their energy supply from solar panels, we help fund the development of alternatives and lowering PPW.

Alternative materials – From this field of research, most of the latest developments in solar panel technology arrive. It surely has a big part in the future of solar technology, and for that, we dedicate a full section to it.

Exploring Alternative Materials For Solar Panels

A single junction silicon PV cell has a theoretical limit of 33% as the laws of thermodynamics suggest. and without proper cooling, we even see even lower performance than that. Since that limit, we have developed cells that could both reach a higher energy conversion rate and that we can make in different methods. One such example is using multi-junction cells to reach  47% of efficiency. The current efforts on research in this field are concentrated on the two following aspects

Different materials than silicon cells – The ability to convert solar power to electricity is not limited to silicon cells. In fact, in recent years we saw many alternative options successfully go from the sketching tables of engineers to manufacturing. Some of the alternative technologies to produce PV cells are Perovskite, Dye-Sensitized Solar Panels, quantum dots, and even organic solar power cells. The benefit of diversifying the cell type we are using are countless varying from durability, efficiency, and cost efficiency to even different ways to apply to cells. One example of the last benefit is how organic photovoltaic cells are flexible and hence we can use them in different geometric shapes rather than the classic square solar panel.

Different ways to use the traditional silicon cells – by using multiple layers, different junction types, or even different qualities of the traditional silicon photovoltaics we can make many products in different finish levels that are suitable for different applications. One possible challenge it could solve is the decay in efficiency our solar panels have, exploiting that to produce longer durability and more financial reasoning to domestic scale systems.

Improve Efficiency Of Energy Storage

As our panels become more efficient in converting the sunlight into electricity the main concern in order to rely on this energy source is to improve the ways we store the power. Power storage is the technological barrier that could allow us to rely on solar systems alone. There are many possible ways to store energy besides the common lithium batteries. For that reason, many companies from the field try to research and build new utility-scale storage facilities. To improve the efficiency of power storage we have two obstacles to tackle.

Cost efficiency  – the current cost of storing the energy is around a few hundred dollars per Kw/hour. While solar panel costs have fallen by about 400% in the past decade storing costs had a much subtle decrease. Further decrease in the cost of power storage especially for domestic scale systems could be a game changer in the industry. Currently, the cost of battery storage for solar is estimated at around 10-40 thousand dollars for a domestic scale system. For that reason, it is not very common for home solar systems to include storage capacity.
We hope to see a significant decrease in the storing cost per Kw/hour with new technologies that are now researched entering both domestic and utility-scale markets.

Energetic efficiency – the current efficiency of electric energy storage is at around 50%, with new experimental batteries reaching even 70%. The wasted energy becomes heat, which lowers the efficiency even further. Moreover that it requires utility-scale storage systems to have a cooling solution which requires even higher installation costs.  More efficient batteries can not only further decrease the cost but also terminate the need for cooling systems and in turn, make them more accessible for all scales of use.

Provide Lower Installation Costs

A big chunk of the costs around the solar system is the installation price with labor prices constantly going up as well as new options for anchoring systems available. With the growth of the solar industry, there is also a growth in the opportunities to buy non-degradable parts (racks, converters, etc) second hand starts to appear. Besides the apparent sustainability benefits of reusing components from old systems, it can also make solar energy more accessible to the wide public.
Another approach to lowering costs taken by some solar manufacturers is to automate the installation process by using robots to protect the price from raising labor costs.  One example of such a robot is the AES atlas solar installation robot which you could see in action here.

Alternatives to Solar panels to harvest the sun’s power

There are many more ways to harness solar energy besides solar panels. When the investors’ eyes check the solar industry as a good bet for the future it is likely that we will see some breakthroughs in some of those methods as well. The investment money flooding the industry is a good accelerator for the development of such technologies.  Among the other technologies, you could find molten salt solar plants, solar water heaters, and solar paints. Some of those technologies are already in commercial use and just like with Photos Voltaics lowering the costs per watt could widespread use of them.

To Conclude

The future of solar technologies sure looks bright, with many of our finest minds working daily on developing it further. We have gone a long way since we started using solar energy and it seems like we found the preferred use of it – the generation of electricity. Now all that we have to do is keep on lowering the prices of systems and improving their efficiency by finding some new creative ways to harness the sun’s power for that cause.
We believe if we keep on going in this direction we can expect solar energy to be a part of the electricity supply of our world in the upcoming decades, and help us build a more sustainable and resilient future.

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