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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/24690127

Solar energy experts in Germany are putting sun-catching cells under the magnifying glass with astounding results, according to multiple reports.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems team is perfecting the use of lenses to concentrate sunlight onto solar panels, reducing size and costs while increasing performance, Interesting Engineering and PV Magazine reported.

The "technology has the potential to contribute to the energy transition, facilitating the shift toward more sustainable and renewable energy sources by combining minimal carbon footprint and energy demand with low levelized cost of electricity," the researchers wrote in a study published by the IEEE Journal of Photovoltaics.

The sun-catcher is called a micro-concentrating photovoltaic, or CPV, cell. The lens makes it different from standard solar panels that convert sunlight to energy with average efficiency rates around 20%, per MarketWatch. Fraunhofer's improved CPV cell has an astounding 36% rate in ideal conditions and is made with lower-cost parts. It cuts semiconductor materials "by a factor of 1,300 and reduces module areas by 30% compared to current state-of-the-art CPV systems," per IE.

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[-] anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz 61 points 1 week ago

What are concentrating photovoltaics? One of the ways to increase the output from the photovoltaic systems is to supply concentrated light onto the PV cells. This can be done by using optical light collectors, such as lenses or mirrors. The PV systems that use concentrated light are called concentrating photovoltaics (CPV). The CPV collect light from a larger area and concentrate it to a smaller area solar cell. This is illustrated in Figure 5.1.

Also, from the article - 33.6% efficiency in real-world conditions:

A 60 cell-lens prototype was studied for a year. In "real-world" conditions, CPVs achieved up to 33.6% efficiency. The 36% mark was posted at 167 degrees Fahrenheit. The prototype showed no signs of degradation, according to IE.

[-] callouscomic@lemmy.zip 49 points 1 week ago

Wait for something fucking idiotic like:

"U.S. government to implement 5,000% tax on new solar technology...."

[-] match@pawb.social 24 points 1 week ago

"also, revenue from new tax will be used to build new coal mines staffed by concentration camp inmates 1"

[-] stringere@sh.itjust.works 43 points 1 week ago

The only thing slowing down the transition from fossil fuels to renewables is the same impediment it has always been: oil money protecting itself.

[-] msprout@lemmy.world 31 points 1 week ago

I am not a scientist so please correct me if I am off base, but did it really take them this long to attempt to focus light onto PV cells using a fresnel lens?

My hobby as a 15 year old was buying broken projectors to harvest the fresnel lenses in the lamp on top. They could focus sunlight so powerfully that you could burn shit. I didn't do that, surprisingly. I was like Marge Simpson, I just thought they were neat.

[-] brendansimms@lemmy.world 32 points 1 week ago

Adding to what the others wrote, solar cells become less efficient at power conversion (light -> electricity) as the temp of the solar cell materials (semiconductors) increases. So the issues is how to get more photons to the semiconductor without heating it up.

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[-] dogslayeggs@lemmy.world 18 points 1 week ago

OK, take that Fresnel lens that you were using to melt pennies and then focus it on a PV cell that is also made of metal. What might be the expected response? The science in this case is making PV cells that can handle the intense heat.

[-] msprout@lemmy.world 16 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

That makes sense. If I understood everyone clearly, it's not the idea to use a fresnel that's new here, it's the fact that we just haven't yet had anything capable of withstanding those temperatures and still allowing for the piezoelectric effect to happen.

[-] frezik 7 points 1 week ago

IIRC, this sort of thing has been floated before. The issue is that you can't just focus that much light on the solar cell. It'll burn out.

[-] don@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 week ago

Not being any kind of solar energy expert, my initial thought was how the cell’s would hold up under the increased heat, and what technology (if any) they’d be using to monitor/mitigate. The article does briefly mention the cells achieving ~33% @ ~167° F, and does mention (what seems to be tangential) technologies that allow for cells to be nailed down as if they were shingles.

My guess is that it isn’t that they finally using techniques that seem obvious to us, but that they’ve developed supporting tech to mitigate the detrimental effects of using magnification.

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[-] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 30 points 1 week ago

Solar panels are already quite cheap. What we need is much cheaper grid forming inverters so we can stop destabilizing the grid with solar.

[-] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 18 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

If the cost of panels drops significantly, there would be more capital available to spend on inverters, even if they stay at the current prices, still decreasing the cost of deployment. But yes. 😄

[-] BrightCandle@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

Grid forming will just mean the keep running the house when the power goes off, it's not safe for them to be pushing power when it's disappeared, that has been set by regulation in many countries.

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[-] gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 25 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I'm not sure what to think about the Fraunhofer institute in general. They have made some nice discoveries/inventions in the past, such as audio compression algorithms and such. That is why i hyped them for a bit.

But they really disappointed me with their writings on solar panels in the past few years.

They said that the efficiency of solar panels today is too low to deploy them widely in practice, which is simply not true. They tried pushing Perovskite solar cells for no reason.

I'm not sure what to think about this article's idea. On one hand, adding lenses to solar parks makes them significantly more complicated and therefore expensive to build. Also, if the parks have complicated physical forms, they're more susceptible to wind, and that could damage them.

On the other hand, yes, adding lenses means you need fewer actual solar panels for the same amount of energy harvested.

I'll therefore put it in the category of inconclusive inventions, together with the idea of adding a motor to the solar panels so they can track the sun. That would also make the solar panels more efficient, but also more complicated and more prone to mechanical failure.

[-] r_deckard@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago

I'd like to know what they're going to do about the heating issue. Concentrating solar radiation carries with it an increased heat load. And heat reduces solar PV efficiency. I'm already losing about 30% in summer when the panels heat up.

[-] Quexotic@infosec.pub 5 points 1 week ago

This was my first question too! I thought heat makes them wear out faster.

[-] themurphy@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 week ago

It does. Also seems weird nobody thought of a magnifying glass before.

But its also the beauty in science. Now somebody else thought about it, and they might work harder to fix the next problem: Heat.

If that gets better now, solar panels will increase in output even more. There are so many technologies going into one product, and each field have its own experts.

I'm excited.

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[-] humanspiral@lemmy.ca 24 points 1 week ago

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10938951

This is 36% MODULE efficiency with expensive cooling. 30% actual year long efficiency without it. Requires dual axis tracking. Seems heavy as its very tall/deep.

Headline of cost reduction is very unlikely. Especially on a per acre/fairly large area basis. Dual axis tracking requires more spacing than fixed orientation rows, and loses benefits under cloudy conditions. While power at 7am and 5pm is more valuable when competing against high penetration solar, batteries are now more competitive than tracking, and can serve edge of day and night power needs. Tracking solar tends not to be built anymore, due to low cost of panels. The cooling infrastructure is also not as useful as it is on rooftops because the heat capture has useful benefits for homes.

It is also unclear how this has advantage over parabolic mirror.

Agri PV is a real use case, where more free land means more land use, even if most of it gets more shade, except around noon.

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[-] tobiah@lemmy.world 21 points 1 week ago

"The lens makes it different from standard solar panels that convert sunlight to energy with average efficiency rates around 20%, per MarketWatch. Fraunhofer's improved CPV cell has an astounding 36% rate in ideal conditions"

Why would I want to compare one panel's average efficiency to another panels efficiency in ideal conditions?

[-] eleitl@lemmy.zip 10 points 1 week ago

Marketing. Fresnel lenses are not going to do well with diffuse light.

[-] simplejack@lemmy.world 18 points 1 week ago

Remember gang, stuff like this means 10-15 years before you see it in market.

[-] svcg 16 points 1 week ago

If I had a penny for every time I heard about new advancements about to revolutionise solar panel technology, I'd have glazed the bloody Sahara with them by now.

[-] Blum0108@lemmy.world 53 points 1 week ago

Would the cost chart of PV cells look something like this?

[-] rbos@lemmy.ca 21 points 1 week ago

Even crazier that it's a logarithmic graph.

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[-] shaggyb@lemmy.world 14 points 1 week ago

Banned in North America in 3... 2...

[-] pulsewidth@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago

Hey it's those guys that invented MP3s.

[-] hakunawazo@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago

It really whips the sun's ass.

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[-] whyNotSquirrel@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 week ago

is it a real thing or an obligatory overestimated result to get grants because the system is fucked?

[-] brendansimms@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago

I just skimmed the IEEE paper (peer-reviewed, solid journal); The usage of 'slash costs' in the title is entire sensational. The tech gave a SLIGHT increase in efficiency (which is good news - marginal improvements are still very good and can be game-changing if scaled up), but there is no cost/benefit analysis in the paper regarding the additional costs of lenses and whether the increased PV efficiency would offset those costs at scale.

[-] frezik 4 points 1 week ago

Honestly, we don't need the technology to get any better than it is. It's nice, but not necessary. Labor costs of deployment are the biggest limiting factor.

[-] albbi@piefed.ca 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Wouldn't better efficiency lead to less physical requirements for the same output which leads to lower labour costs?

[-] frezik 7 points 1 week ago

My numbers were wrong:

https://www.nrel.gov/solar/market-research-analysis/solar-installed-system-cost

Hardware costs (module, inverters, etc.) are about half the price of the installed residential cost. The rest is "soft costs", and labor is included in it, but it's a pretty small fraction of it. The "other" soft costs are the big thing--stuff like permitting and planning and sales taxes. Better efficiency might somewhat lower it, but not a lot.

Notice that when things get to utility-scale, those soft costs shrink a lot. The best way to do solar is in large fields of racks, and it isn't even close. The solution to this is community solar, where you and your neighbors go in on a field. Some states ban this, and that should change.

[-] gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Yeah, community solar parks are really the best because they remove a whole lot of these soft costs.

These soft costs include:

  • bureaucracy (you need 1 permit instead of 100 permits),
  • nobody needs to climb on a roof,
  • shipping many panels at once to the installation site is much more efficient than only shipping 5-8 modules at a time

additionally, any kind of fixed-cost complexity is spread over a bigger field.

i.e., you should add circuit breakers to make sure the solar panels don't feed into the grid when the energy prices are already negative. adding that breaker has a fixed and constant price. adding one breaker to a large park is more efficient than adding 100 breakers into just as many households.

[-] frezik 4 points 1 week ago

Thanks. There's way too many people who don't see the problems with rooftop residential solar. Commercial/industrial rooftop can work out, but fields are the cheapest electricity you can get.

[-] vollkorntomate@infosec.pub 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

If you get efficiency gains of around 50% (factor 1.5 from ~20% efficiency to ~30%) with the same deployment costs, this should nonetheless make it more cost-effective.

[-] EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com 8 points 1 week ago

I thought this has already been done. Guess there's some nuance to it that is above my understanding of it.

Anyhow, advancements in solar are cool in my book.

[-] Prior_Industry@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago

US Government - not on my watch....

[-] sqgl@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 week ago

That is Fraunhofer who are the people most responsible for developing MP3

[-] MaggiWuerze@feddit.org 6 points 1 week ago

Wouldn't this be negated by the fact, that the same area of roof now has less actual PV cell on it? Since the light gets concentrated on a smaller area?

[-] billwashere@lemmy.world 15 points 1 week ago

I think the idea is that it’s the same amount of light is being used but the actual expensive part of the solar cell is cheaper and designed to take the increased heat. So the same size “solar unit” on the roof collecting the same amount of light and generating the same amount of energy but cheaper overall. At least that was my take. Correct me if I’m wrong.

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[-] calculuschild@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 week ago

I think the point is that you can replace one big solar panel with one big lens and a small solar panel. The footprint on the roof is the same, but the implication is a big glass lens is cheaper than a big solar panel.

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[-] shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I have not read the article yet, but I will be doing so after posting this. But from what I understand, concentrated cells via lenses already exist. The problem with them was keeping them cool.

Going to go read the actual article now.

Edit: Well, the article was very sparse on details. From what I understand of the comments, what's really been done here is making cells that can stand the kind of heat that would be focused onto them from the glass.

I want to say I saw a video about this a year ago or so, but it was more solar thermal, where you focus a bunch of mirrors onto a single point high up on a tower, and it's cooled by molten salt. But as I said, that's solar thermal, not solar power electricity.

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[-] reddig33@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

How does concentrating the sunlight like this not start a fire? Or wouldn’t this at least cause panel electronics to overheat?

[-] JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

I would imagine they're not concentrating maximally. Just enough to increase efficiency.

[-] OhVenus_Baby@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 week ago

Just wanted to drop a comment.

I love solar. It's the best form of energy that's attainable by the average person.

[-] Vinstaal0@feddit.nl 4 points 1 week ago

The issue here in NL is with the power grid, not the price of the panels. The installing of them is already one of the most expensive parts of getting panels since you need to build scafolding for most houses.

[-] Resonosity@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 week ago

Concentrating solar cells have been around for decades, but I suppose the efficiency Fraunhofer achieved here is nothing to sneeze at.

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this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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