Abstract
Due to increase in demand of electricity and high environment hazard cause by fossil fuel in generation electricity, renewable energy (such as solar energy, wind energy and so on) researches are becoming mandatory to researchers especially scientists and engineers and in solar energy generation an electronic device is used to convert energy from sun into electricity which is known as solar photovoltaic cell and the efficiency of this device is improving by improving the materials used in manufacturing it. This paper was aimed to review the status of these materials for solar photovoltaic cell up to date, from the review it was discovered that the materials are classified based on the generations whereby their efficiencies are increasing from first generation to third generation. And the current market is mainly covered by the first two generations. The first generation comprises well-known medium/low cost technologies that lead to moderate yields. The second generation (thin-film technologies) includes devices that have lower efficiency albeit are cheaper to manufacture. The third generation presents the use of novel materials, as well as a great variability of designs, and comprises expensive but very efficient cells. Although there is fourth generation which their performance and stability was yet to be found as the review disclosed.
Highlights
Generation of electricity from a source of energy that is sustainable and pollutants free has increases the interest of the researchers in a research environment
The power conversion efficiency of photovoltaic (PV) solar cells has been improved from 1% to over 12%, through the efforts of the last decade [9,10,11,12,13,14]
Solar photovoltaic cell efficiency depends on the quality of the materials used in manufacturing solar cell
Summary
Generation of electricity from a source of energy that is sustainable and pollutants free has increases the interest of the researchers in a research environment. Photovoltaic devices are rugged and simple in design requiring very little maintenance and their biggest advantage being their construction as stand-alone systems to give outputs from microwatts to megawatts They are used for power source, water pumping, remote buildings, solar home systems, communications, satellites and space vehicles, reverse osmosis plants, and for even megawatt scale power plants [15]. The amount of sunlight reaching the earth’s surface depends on location, time as well as weather as it falls during winter season as compared to the summer, and the Sun’s radiation is less intense [17, 18] To overcome these problems, solar energy must be stored elsewhere at night and the highly efficient solar cells and modules needs to be developed. Photovoltaic (PV) cells technology is developing fast in recent years due to its unique advantages, such as, synthetic variability of materials [19], the possibility of producing lightweight, flexible, processed, and inexpensive solar cells and environmental sustainability [20,21,22,23,24,25] and among other photovoltaic cell technology in the past is hybrid photovoltaic power generation (HPVPG) technology [26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38]
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