Cutting the costs of solar power

Cost Solar Power Solar energy is a type of renewable energy that is today harnessed for producing electricity.
Though this is a source of energy that is free to the user; it is the costs that are associated in buying a solar power system with solar panels and solar cells is rather expensive.

This is why researchers and scientists are working at reducing the costs of buying equipment associated with the harnessing of solar power.

It is because an alternative to fossil fuel based electricity sources is required urgently that scientists aim at reducing the costs of solar power. Moreover, with the help of these alternative sources of energy, the environmental impact of electrical power generation is reduced while the supply of electricity for the future is well secured.

It is possible to reduce the cost of solar power generation with the use of low cost materials as this accelerates the take up of renewable energy technology. This in turn makes these alternate sources of energy more accessible to the people in the developing world.

It is with this regard that chemists, physicts, electrical engineers and materials scientists in Manchester and London have embarked on a project of developing new and cheaper means of generating solar power.
This project is scheduled to cost 1.5 million pounds and has been funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

In the three and a half years of this project, the team of researchers will work at investigating numerous novel solar cell designs so that it is possible to produce a better and cheaper form of generation of solar energy with cheaper equipment.

The research will be conducted by researchers belonging to different fields related to chemical engineering, physics, electrical engineering and materials departments. With this, the team of researchers will be conducting their research in areas like material synthesis and the characterization, system integration and device fabrication of the solar power system.

In their research, these researchers will work at finding new designs to harness solar energy by using intrinsically inexpensive materials with the help of cheap fabrication methods. They aim at manufacturing demonstration hybrid solar cells that have great potential at being mass-produced at reduced rates. With this, it would be possible to achieve solar energy efficiency of at least 10 percent.

These new cells will be made from both organic polymeric materials that are carbon based and with small particles of inorganic semiconductors.
These designs are expected to be based on nanotechnology where researchers intend to use materials called PbS nanorods in the solar power generators. These are basically small cylinders of lead sulphide that are more than 100 times smaller than a strand of human hair.

In addition to this, these researchers will also use semiconductor Quantom dots to absorb increased light in the solar cells. These semiconductor quantum dots are extremely small particles that are only one ten-millionth of an inch in length but have the capacity of absorbing large amounts of solar energy.