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A Xerox Machine for Super Solar Panels
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601097/a-xerox-machine-for-super-solar-panels/[font face=Serif][font size=5]A Xerox Machine for Super Solar Panels[/font]
[font size=4]Researchers at PARC are working on a way to cheaply print efficient solar cells at a large scale.[/font]
by Mike Orcutt March 25, 2016
[font size=3]The technology giant that’s synonymous with photocopied documents has set its sights on highly efficient solar panels.
Researchers at PARC, an R&D-focused subsidiary of Xerox, say they’re developing a new digital printing process that could make it much cheaper to mass-produce concentrated solar photovoltaic systems. Such systems can dramatically increase the efficiency of solar cells by using lenses to concentrate and focus the sunlight onto small cells.
Increasing efficiency could be an effective way to bring down the cost of solar modules, whose price has already fallen dramatically during the past several years. Much of the cost of conventional silicon systems is now due to things like wiring, installation, and permitting. More efficient panels would mean we need fewer of them to produce the same amount of power—which in turn cuts the costs of hardware and installation. But concentrated photovoltaic technology has so far failed to gain traction because it’s still too expensive and bulky to compete with conventional silicon solar panels.
PARC hopes to make the technology more competitive by shrinking the components and designing a new flat-panel form factor, and by developing a relatively inexpensive manufacturing process. The new process will build on a larger effort by PARC researchers to invent a new kind of printer that can precisely deposit “inks” made of tiny semiconductor chips, called “chiplets,” by using assembly principles similar to those behind Xerox photocopiers.
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[font size=4]Researchers at PARC are working on a way to cheaply print efficient solar cells at a large scale.[/font]
by Mike Orcutt March 25, 2016
[font size=3]The technology giant that’s synonymous with photocopied documents has set its sights on highly efficient solar panels.
Researchers at PARC, an R&D-focused subsidiary of Xerox, say they’re developing a new digital printing process that could make it much cheaper to mass-produce concentrated solar photovoltaic systems. Such systems can dramatically increase the efficiency of solar cells by using lenses to concentrate and focus the sunlight onto small cells.
Increasing efficiency could be an effective way to bring down the cost of solar modules, whose price has already fallen dramatically during the past several years. Much of the cost of conventional silicon systems is now due to things like wiring, installation, and permitting. More efficient panels would mean we need fewer of them to produce the same amount of power—which in turn cuts the costs of hardware and installation. But concentrated photovoltaic technology has so far failed to gain traction because it’s still too expensive and bulky to compete with conventional silicon solar panels.
PARC hopes to make the technology more competitive by shrinking the components and designing a new flat-panel form factor, and by developing a relatively inexpensive manufacturing process. The new process will build on a larger effort by PARC researchers to invent a new kind of printer that can precisely deposit “inks” made of tiny semiconductor chips, called “chiplets,” by using assembly principles similar to those behind Xerox photocopiers.
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