Mitsubishi’s Organic Photovoltaic Modules (Solar Panels)
Filed Under: Green Technology on July 3, 2009
This is pretty awesome right here. Mitsubishi, along with partners Tokki Corporation and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), have created highly-integrated, organic solar photovoltaic (OPV) modules.
These are meant as a replacement for the more expensive, damaging, and less sustainable silicon-based PVs that are what’s on the market now. These new panels have a P-N diode junction using CuPc and C60 (phthalocyanine and fullerene – see diagram at right). The group has been working on this for years and finally broke the efficiency barrier of power output.
In 2005, they saw significant improvement when they raised them to 4% light exchange efficiency (current standard PVs are generally under 7%).
The new breakthrough is in the integration of the various parts of this idea and in the reduced steps of manufacture (2 major steps in silicon-based PVs are eliminated with this) and this new model should increase sunlight conversion efficiency by 50-100%.
The key to their new efficiency numbers is in that “highly integrated” phrase. As the picture above shows, a standard cell has a lot of empty space–required for the connections between cells. In a highly integrated model, space is not wasted, which dramatically improves efficiency.
So far, no new numbers for how well these are performing have been released, though the companies were undergoing testing and presenting at the PV Japan event June 24-26.
For more information, go to Mitsubishi’s site here.
