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Understanding Solar Energy

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261 points chmaynard | 1 comments | 20 Mar 25 12:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.234s | source
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pjc50 ◴[20 Mar 25 14:19 UTC] No.43423893[source]▶
Good longread.

What I'd like to have a better understanding of, and I'm hoping to crowdsource here, is exactly how the solar panel cost has come down so precipitously. Part of it is simply manufacture scaling - almost everything is much cheaper in large quantities. But part of it must be a thousand incremental tech advances. Things like the reduced kerf diamond wire saw.

Also of note: I think monocrystalline has won completely? People experimented with all sorts of alternate chemistries and technologies, like ion deposition and the extremely poisonous CIGS, but good old "Czochralski process + slice thinly" has won despite being energy intensive itself.

Perovskites remain an unknown quantity.

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1. pfdietz ◴[20 Mar 25 14:27 UTC] No.43424000[source]▶
CdTe is still out there, from First Solar, but it's not much of the market (and has scalability problems due to the need for tellurium, even if the active layer is much thinner than in silicon cells.)

One little advance that swept the industry a couple of years ago was replacement of boron as a dopant by gallium. Boron doped silicon has light induced degradation, which was determined to cause a small loss in efficiency due to formation of boron trapping centers under prolonged light exposure. Gallium-doped silicon doesn't have this problem.