Journal
IEEE JOURNAL OF PHOTOVOLTAICS
Volume 5, Issue 6, Pages 1791-1799Publisher
IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC
DOI: 10.1109/JPHOTOV.2015.2458571
Keywords
Concentrating solar power; concentrator; multi-junction; photovoltaic cells; solar energy; solar thermal; tandem
Funding
- Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), U.S. Department of Energy [DE-AR0000474]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
As the solar electricity market has matured, energy conversion efficiency and storage have joined installed system cost as significant market drivers. In response, manufacturers of flat-plate silicon photovoltaic (PV) cells have pushed cell efficiencies above 25%-nearing the 29.4% detailed-balance efficiency limit and both solar thermal and battery storage technologies have been deployed at utility scale. This paper introduces a new tandem solar collector employing a PVMirror that has the potential to both increase energy conversion efficiency and provide thermal storage. A PVMirror is a concentrating mirror, spectrum splitter, and light-to-electricity converter all in one: It consists of a curved arrangement of PV cells that absorb part of the solar spectrum and reflect the remainder to their shared focus, at which a second solar converter is placed. A strength of the design is that the solar converter at the focus can be of a radically different technology than the PV cells in the PVMirror; another is that the PVMirror converts a portion of the diffuse light to electricity in addition to the direct light. We consider two case studies-a PV cell located at the focus of the PVMirror to form a four-terminal PV-PV tandem, and a thermal receiver located at the focus to form a PV-CSP (concentrating solar thermal power) tandem-and compare the outdoor energy outputs to those of competing technologies. PVMirrors can outperform (idealized) monolithic PV-PV tandems that are under concentration, and they can also generate nearly as much energy as silicon flat-plate PV while simultaneously providing the full energy storage benefit of CSP.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available