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Photonic design principles for ultrahigh-efficiency photovoltaics

Nature Materials volume 11, pages 174–177 (2012)Cite this article

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For decades, solar-cell efficiencies have remained below the thermodynamic limits. However, new approaches to light management that systematically minimize thermodynamic losses will enable ultrahigh efficiencies previously considered impossible.

Ever since serious scientific thinking went into improving the efficiency of photovoltaic energy conversion more than 50 years ago, thermodynamics has been used to assess the limits to performance, guiding advances in materials science and photovoltaic technology. On the basis of this approach, photovoltaic technology has advanced considerably, resulting in single-junction solar cells with a record efficiency of 28.3% (ref. 1) and multi-junction cells with an efficiency (under concentrated illumination) of 43.5% (ref. 2). Worldwide photovoltaic manufacturing capacity is expected to surpass 40 gigawatts per year in 2012, and is steadily growing3. The cell efficiencies for most of this manufactured output, however, remain in the 10–18% range. As impressive as these advances are, these record efficiencies and the manufactured cell efficiencies fall far short of the thermodynamic limits to photovoltaic energy conversion.

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Figure 1: Solar-cell characteristics.
Figure 2: Light-management architectures for reaching ultrahigh efficiency.
Figure 3: Multi-junction solar cells.
Figure 4: Scalable inexpensive large-area layer transfer and nanofabrication techniques.
Figure 5: Thermodynamic losses in solar-energy conversion.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge helpful discussions with Eli Yablonovitch, John Rogers, Paul Braun, Nathan S. Lewis, Ralph Nuzzo and Enrique Canovas. The Caltech portion of this work was supported by DOE Office of Basic Energy Sciences 'Light–Material Interactions in Energy Conversion' Energy Frontier Research Center under grant DE-SC0001293. Work at AMOLF is part of the research programme of FOM which is financially supported by NWO; it is also supported by the European Research Council. This work is also part of the Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP).

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  1. Albert Polman is in the FOM Institute AMOLF, Science Park 104, 1098 XG Amsterdam, the Netherlands,

    Albert Polman

  2. Harry A. Atwater is in the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena California 91125, USA,

    Harry A. Atwater

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Correspondence to Albert Polman or Harry A. Atwater.

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Polman, A., Atwater, H. Photonic design principles for ultrahigh-efficiency photovoltaics. Nature Mater 11, 174–177 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat3263

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