Twin Creeks Technologies is a new inauguration that says it hassliced the price of producing solar gore in half — using an ion cannon . agree to the company , it can produce solar cells for about 40 penny per W compared to the 80 centime it costs now .
bring on solar panels is expensive in part because it ’s costly and uneconomical to produce the tiptop - slender silicon wafers which make up solar cells . As Technology Reviewreports :
The conventional path to make the crystalline silicon wafer - which account for the mass of solar cell - involve cut blocks or cylinder of atomic number 14 into 200 - micrometer - thick wafer , a process that turns about half of the silicon into waste . The industry uses 200 - micrometer wafer because wafers much thinner than that are brickle and run to break on the fabrication line . But in theory , they could be as tenuous as 20 to 30 micrometers and still be just as efficient , or more efficient , at converting sunlight into electrical energy .
That ’s where the ion cannon comes in . Twin Creeks habituate a huge Hyperion speck accelerator to slit the wafers . concord to Twin Creeks the Hyperion is ten prison term more sinewy than any other ion cannon used in commercial industry . This admit the companionship to produce solar cells near the theoretic minimal width . Not only does this mean Twin Creeks is using less silicon per wafer , but the ion cannon ’s precision think there ’s almost no waste produced in the process .
Twin Creeks has secured $ 93 million to build its solar factory so hopefully these cheap solar cells will be hitting the marketplace — and making solar tycoon far more viable than it has been in the past tense — presently . [ Technology ReviewviaExtreme Tech ]
range via Technology Review
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