Solar Power World

Thin is in — for solar cells

Left to right: Aaswath Raman, graduate student in applied physics, Shanhui Fan, associate professor of electrical engineering, and Zongfu Yu, postdoctoral researcher in electrical engineering. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences will publish Fan and Yu’s work. (Photo: Linda A. Cicero, Stanford University News Service) Engineers are trying to make solar power an affordable energy source. Those at Stanford have conducted research finding that light ricocheting around... Read More

New solar energy conversion process could reduce the costs of solar energy production

Stanford University engineers have figured out how to simultaneously use the light and heat of the sun to generate electricity in a way that could make solar power production more than twice as efficient as existing methods and potentially cheap enough to compete with oil. A small PETE device made with cesium-coated gallium nitride glows while being tested inside an ultra-high vacuum chamber. The tests proved that the process simultaneously converted light and heat energy... Read More