Abstract
Previous studies have shown that renewable energy is one of the effective ways to fight global climate change and emissions not to mention the increasing price of fossil fuels. Among the various renewable energy sources which include wind, solar, biofuel, geothermal and tidal waves, solar power has attracted much attention especially here in Africa because of the abundance of solar radiation. A lot of studies have been done on various photovoltaic (PV) cells ranging from silicon to thin film and most recently multi-junction solar cells. In this paper, we focused on concentrated photovoltaic cells (CPV) which are promising ways of converting solar energy to electricity. It is expected that if the most cost effective ways of converting solar energy to electricity is used, both the cost of installation and the running cost of concentrated photovoltaic cells will equate the utility grid electricity cost in a few years to come.
Highlights
Most of the solar power systems in the market today can be divided into two major classes: the direct and the indirect solar power
The direct solar power refers to a system that converts solar radiation directly to electricity using a photovoltaic (PV) cell
The indirect solar power refers to a system that converts the solar energy first to heat and thereafter to electrical energy, as in the case of concentrated solar power (CSP)
Summary
Most of the solar power systems in the market today can be divided into two major classes: the direct and the indirect solar power. Concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) cell is the hybridization of the direct and the indirect solar power systems. In CPV, concentrated solar flux (about 300 suns) is focused on highly efficient solar cells such as the multijunction solar cell (about 40% efficient) This results in a superior output many times that of the ordinary photovoltaics. We review different types of multi-junction solar cells, methods of concentrating light and the economy of scale that is capable of reducing the price of electricity produced from CPV within 5 years. Single junction solar cells are typically made of silicon semiconductor and are limited to 30% maximum efficiency because they have only one junction and one energy band. Triple junction splits the solar spectrum to three energy bands (1.8, 1.2, 0.7eV) with a maximum efficiency of 42% [4]. Limitations specific to tandem solar cells are series-connection the need for current matching, variation of solar spectrum throughout the day, resistance in intermediate recombination layer, transmittance of top cells and light management with textured substrates [5]
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