On August 4th I wrote about a solar company claiming 800x improvement on the power generated and made some points about how that was attained. The article is here "Solar Cell Power Production is Increased 800x?!?".

This article is about a breakthrough regarding the actual solar cell as normally exposed to light. The world record conversion efficiency was accepted by the scientific journal - Progress in Photovoltaics (PIP), which offers a forum for reporting advances in the PV industry and independently tested by Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE in Germany.

This is a new world record conversion efficiency of 15.6% on a commercial-grade multi-crystalline silicon PV module. This conversion efficiency surpasses the previous record of 15.5% set by Sandia National Labs 15 years ago.

You can see that this is significant, but without a breakthrough, we are very much at the limit for current PV technology. This increase took 15 years to achieve and represents a 0.1% increase in efficiency.

You can see why I was so quick to point out that in the previous article claiming 800x, it was not the solar cell but the light delivery that was actually increased.

For more information on this article, click the related link below.