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The University of Delaware is leading a consortium of 15 universities, corporations, and laboratories that plans to develop high efficiency solar cells with 50 percent efficiency in production. Allen Barnett, the principal investigator and research professor in UD's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering says, "This project requires the consortium to invent, develop and transfer to production this breakthrough solar cell. One rarely gets an opportunity such as that." DARPA is supporting the consortium, and is calling upon the consortium to develop 1,000 Very High Efficiency Solar Cell (VHESC) prototypes that are at least 50 percent efficient. DARPA's interest is in powering portable devices for the military; however, this certainly has wide civilian applications. Currently, production solar cells are only 15-20 percent efficient. Efficiency is how completely a device functions. For instance, if a motor is 80 percent efficient, 20 percent of that energy is wasted as heat and light. With solar cells, efficiency measures the percentage of possible power that the cell converts into electricity. If you have an array of solar cells on your roof, you can double the power output using the same square footage of solar cells if you double the efficiency. The technology being developed by the consortium would more than double the current efficiency, which makes it much easier to power a home off of solar power.
For more information on this project, see this article
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