The Importance Of Solar Energy

Solar energy is a promising field for an efficient renewable energy source. However, for the time being solar energy isn’t as dependable as oil and other unrenewable sources, mainly because of the lack of efficiency in converting that sunlight into electricity in solar cells. In these past 10 years, there have been big improvements on the efficiency of solar cells, especially in thin film solar cells.
Solar cells are devices that convert sunlight into electricity. The uses of solar cells may seem more familiar than you may think so. They are used in solar panels, satellites, and in solar farms where solar energy are harvested in huge quantities. Solar cells are important because they allow for another type of energy source, a renewable source unlike its counterpart the fossil fuel. However, even though renewable energy source sounds good, it’s far too expensive for commercial use. The reason to that is because solar cells require a lot of material in the manufacturing process for the solar cell to be considered efficient. For example, the most efficient solar cell is one of the most expensive because “the only problem is that silicon does not absorb sunlight as efficiently as other materials, so silicon solar cells need to be 10-100(s) of times thicker …show more content…
The goal of the research was to make a more efficient thin film solar cell. In pursuing their goal, they broke a world record by passing the previous efficiency of 19.9% (2). What they achieved was a “new certified world record efficiency of 20.1 and 20.3% for Cu(In,Ga)Se2 thin-film solar cells” (3). This allowed the researchers to push the boundaries of thin film solar cells such as increasing the solar cell’s efficiency and show the potential of thin film solar