Energy Department provides $12 million to accelerate solar cell efficiency.

The Energy Department on January 25 announced a new $12 million funding for innovative, to develop highly efficient solar equipment, the the gap with the theoretical limit of efficiency. This limit is defined as the highest possible proportion of sunlight converted directly into electricity. Currently there is still a considerable gap between the efficiency of laboratory and commercial solar photovoltaic (PV) and the predicted maximum efficiency of different solar cell materials. Shortening of the breakthroughs in solar cell efficiency helps reduce the total cost of solar energy.

The new initiative - the Basic program for the advance cell efficiency II (FPACEII) - aims to speed up record-breaking conversion efficiency, the gap with this theoretical limit for a wide variety of PV cells, including silicon-based technology and thin-film materials such as cadmium telluride and Cooper-Indium-Gallium diSelenide. The new possibility of funding initiative FPACEI builds the SunShot projects awarded in September 2011, which reached cells in the laboratory and produced the efficiency of typical cells on production lines to eliminate the gap between the efficiency of the best prototype.

In the current advertising FPACEII seeks proposals by collaborative teams of researchers from national laboratories, universities and industry, the materials of model systems develop and manufacture prototype devices that the theoretical limit can achieve efficiency in the vicinity. See the alert DOE progress and the funding opportunity announcement.

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