Solar power gets supercharged

Researchers from Boston College and MIT have improved the efficiency of solar-thermal flat panels by seven to eight times, opening up the possibility of expanding the technology's economic potential, says Mother Nature Network.

At the moment, solar-thermal flat panels take sunlight to heat water and generate thermal energy. They don't produce much electric power.

However, the scientists reported in a paper published this month that they were able to generate a sizable amount of electricity by adding two innovations. First, they used nanostructured thermoelectric materials to create a better light-absorbing surface. Second, they placed the material within an energy-trapping, vacuum-sealed flat panel.

Boston College Professor of physics Zhifeng Ren, a co-author of the report, said to Earthtechling that existing solar-thermal technologies do a good job of generating hot water but this product adds electricity into the mix and “promises to give users a quicker payback on their investment”.

The research was supported as part of the Solid State Solar-Thermal Energy Conversion Centre, an Energy Frontier Research Centre funded by the US Department of Energy.

The co-authors, according to Eureka Alert, include MIT's Soderberg Professor of power engineering Gang Chen, Boston College and MIT graduate students and researchers at GMZ Energy, a Massachusetts clean energy research company co-founded by Ren and Chen.

The findings open up a promising new approach that has the potential to achieve cost-effective conversion of solar energy into electricity, an advance that should impact the rapidly expanding residential and industrial clean energy markets, according to Ren.

“Existing solar-thermal technologies do a good job generating hot water. For the new product, this will produce both hot water and electricity,” said Ren.

“Because of the new ability to generate valuable electricity, the system promises to give users a quicker payback on their investment. This new technology can shorten the payback time by one-third.”