China’s green energy boom has seen solar panels plastered on the side of rainy mountains, on floating coastal platforms, and above bustling highways — and now, they’re even generating energy underwater.
According to EuroNews, scientists working near Weizhou Island on China’s southwestern coast successfully generated electricity from sunlight at a depth of 10 meters, or nearly 33 feet, a new record for photovoltaic research.
Their study, published in the research journal Joule, outlines a new type of solar panel built with perovskites — a calcium titanium oxide mineral — instead of silicon. By using pervoskite-based cells, the researchers were able to adjust the solar panels to capitalize on the kinds of blue and green sunlight waves that can penetrate the ocean’s surface.
According to the paper, the peak power conversion efficiency — a measure of how much sunlight hitting a panel is converted into usable energy — reached a high of nearly 35 percent. If true, that figure puts the panels in-line with recent breakthrough research in solar cell efficiency, and a notch above the long-established Shockley-Queisser limit, a theoretical cap which limited photovoltaic efficiency to about 33 percent.
Granted, the results were obtained under simulation conditions, so more rigorous testing is needed to confirm whether similar results are possible in a real-world setting. Overall, the test ran for just two hours, generating 324 milliwatt-hours, enough to power a small LED light for a few hours.
Still, even sniffing the Shockley-Queisser limit with solar panels some 30 feet underwater is a noteworthy accomplishment. And as EuroNews observes, even the decidedly small amount of electricity produced far surpassed researchers’ expectations.
As study author and Yunnan University professor of material science Wen-Hua Zhang explained, “this work presents the first functional validation of submerged solar cells practically operating at a water depth of up to about 10 meters, greatly broadening their application scope.”
Though any commercial development on this research is likely a long way off, the study could lay the groundwork for viable solar panels operating in rarely traveled portions of the world’s oceans.
More on solar energy: Solar Power Is Getting So Cheap That It’s Almost Unbelievable
The post Scientists Unveil Underwater Solar Panels appeared first on Futurism.
