TECH FOCUS PHOTOVOLTAICS
Power from the dark side
US researchers have proposed a photovoltaic cell that could generate power throughout the night
L
ast year, almost three- quarters of new electricity generation capacity
installed across the world was renewable, to the point where more than one third of the world’s power is now generated by renewable sources. Although solar power
provided 55 per cent of this new capacity1, and continues to show a lot of promise in helping the global push toward carbon
26 Electro Optics June 2020
neutrality, the photovoltaic (PV) technology involved still has one fundamental flaw. It only works during the day. This means that throughout the night there is a continual need to switch over to other sources of energy, most notably fossil fuels. Professor Jeremy Munday and
graduate student Tristan Deppe of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at
University of California, Davis, have therefore taken it upon themselves to design a new PV technology that can be deployed at night. Together, the two researchers have proposed a device that they say under ideal conditions could generate up to around 50W of power per square metre, even after the sun has set – about a quarter of what conventional solar panels are able to generate during the day. Described in January’s ACS Photonics2
, the device, known
as a thermoradiative cell, would work in a similar way to a normal photovoltaic cell, but in reverse.
To sky (3 K)
emission
earth as hot side (300 K)
The proposed nighttime thermoradiative photovoltaic cell absorbs heat from the earth and radiates it into deep space
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