New research suggests that there might be other ways to generate solar energy than just trying to make individual solar cells super-efficient.
New research suggests that there might be other ways to generate solar energy than just trying to make individual solar cells super-efficient.
Scientists are always on the lookout for ways to make our world a better place, and one area they're focusing on is solar energy. One idea in this area is to make solar cells more efficient by concentrating more solar light onto them. While investigating this recently, a group of scientists at the Cavendish Laboratory and AMOLF (Amsterdam NL) have found that improving solar cells efficiency in this way is harder than we might think but have discovered other avenues by which it might be possible to improve solar energy capture anywhere on the planet.
The researchers were interested in finding out if solar cells, devices that turn sunlight into electricity, could be tweaked to perform better in different parts of the world, where concentration of solar light may be higher. To examine this, they used machine learning models and neural networks (AI) to understand how the sun’s radiation would behave in different spots on Earth.
They integrated this data into an electronic model to calculate the solar cells’ output. By simulating various scenarios, they could predict how much energy the solar cells could produce at various locations worldwide.
Read more at University of Cambridge
Image: Photo of a light concentrating device outside the Maxwell Centre at Cambridge. (Credit: Tomi Baikie via University of Cambridge)
