Clever solution: Organic solar concentrators collect and focus different colours of sunlight. Solar cells can be attached to the edges of the plates. By collecting light over their full surface and concentrating it at their edges, these devices reduce the required area and therefore cost of solar power. Image demonstrates how light is concentrated at the edges.
Credit: MIT
Silicon cells are usually the most expensive part of a solar panel, so the MIT team was trying to develop cells that used cheaper organic compounds as semiconductors. The cells they developed had superior optical qualities, but their electrical properties couldn't match silicon-based cells.
"The [concentrator] was an effort to divide and conquer: to use the organics for their optical properties and inorganic semiconductors for their electrical properties," Mapel said.
However, Martin Green, a leading photovoltaics expert at the University of New South Wales in Australia, thinks Mapel and his colleagues are being overly optimistic. "The projected… efficiency is not yet high enough for major commercial impact," he commented.
