Photovoltaic future technologies

Alongside hydropower and wind energy, photovoltaic systems are gaining increasing importance and offer great potential: the solar energy reaching the Earth alone could easily meet all the energy needs of the world’s population—if we were able to capture it efficiently. Therefore, if photovoltaics are to become an even more viable solution in the future, the electricity generated must be economically competitive, and the land use of photovoltaic installations must be optimized.

Solution approach

The funded research project at the Georgia Institute of Technology for advancing widely used silicon photovoltaics addresses this research demand in several ways. By combining materials science, chemistry and physics with chemical and electrical engineering, photovoltaic cells with a new structure are being developed that achieve a significantly higher efficiency and thus lower electricity production costs. A higher efficiency also enables reduced material and land use, as the same amount of energy can be generated with fewer solar modules than before.

About Georgia Institute of Technology

The Georgia Institute of Technology is one of the leading public research universities, and its engineering and computer science faculties are among the largest and best in the United States. Researchers at Georgia Tech have been working intensively on photovoltaics since the mid‑1980s. In 1992, Georgia Tech became home to the first university‑based Center of Excellence for photovoltaic research and education in the United States.