Solar Company Claims They Made the Most Efficient Solar Panels
First Solar is a company that claims to have turned up to twenty-two-point-one percent of sunlight energy into electricity with some trial cells created with cadmium telluride. Ninety-five percent of the global solar power market excludes this technology.
First Solar is a company that claims to have turned up to twenty-two-point-one percent of sunlight energy into electricity with some trial cells created with cadmium telluride. Ninety-five percent of the global solar power market excludes this technology. So far, First Solar cells for commercial use boast a conversion efficiency of up to sixteen-point-four percent.
Compared to silicon solar panels, cadmium telluride cells’ maximum conversion efficiency is above thirty percent. Being the only main producer of cadmium telluride solar panels in the US, First Solar has been extremely busy trying to bring its technologies closer to the limit mentioned above.
Cadmium telluride solar panels could be more efficient than silicon-based ones that make up to ninety percent of the solar power market now.
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Offering a very thin-film cell technology, cadmium telluride operates very close to its efficiency limit, especially, when installed in hot, humid regions. These thin-film cells are less expensive to come up with too; although, they have been less recognized in the past few years.
First Solar does not do rooftop solar panels installations. Instead, it has made solar farms that are considered the largest worldwide. Some of these include the Californian Topaz and Desert Sunlight projects that produce up to 550 megawatts.
A cadmium telluride thin-film cell is cheaper to make with few resources, and a simpler production process is needed to create the amount of power that the traditional silicon technology creates. Principally, this should reduce the cost of electricity.
But in reality, and according to GTM Research, in the coming year, the cost of silicon panels will reduce to zero-point-three-six dollars per watt. As for the First Solar’s 2013 production cost figures, its cost per watt was at zero-point-five-seven dollars.
For More Info Visit The Company’s Website
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Rachel Kowalski
Rachel Kowalski is the Cybersecurity Analyst at TrendinTech, where she covers vulnerabilities, ransomware, supply chain attacks, nation-state operations and the security rules shaping organizations in the United States and Europe. Before moving into journalism she worked as a threat intelligence analyst at a security vendor and later reported for CyberScoop and the security desk at Wired, covering the SolarWinds compromise and the ransomware wave that hit hospitals and pipelines. Rachel holds a Master of Science in Cybersecurity from the Georgia Institute of Technology and attends Black Hat and DEF CON in Las Vegas each year, where she follows research from the security community. She writes to make risks and countermeasures understandable to people who are not specialists.
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