He began his talk at PV Korea 2009 by saying that there were some long-standing misconceptions about solar cell technology. First, many people think that it is too expensive. Second, some people think that the contributions of solar cells are too small to matter. The way to counter these misconceptions, he said, was with further technological development. And this is just what his company is doing.
He continued by illustrating the differences between normal solar cells and his company’s latest technologies. He said that normal solar cells were approximately 15% efficient in converting sunlight to electricity, while his company’s existing products that are in the field today are already 22% efficient, and the highest experimental efficiency achieved in the lab has been 23.4% so far. Also, he pointed out that his company makes the thinnest silicon wafers at 145 microns thick, which saves a lot of money on silicon purchasing due to the extremely volatile silicon market. Finally, his company makes a base to mount the solar panels on that automatically tilts to catch the sun during the day, which gives an extra 30% more capacity to their solar panels when compared to competitors.
He then went on to illustrate how many states in the US are utilizing solar cell technology, with the most prominent being California. However, at least half of the other states in the US have plans to get a significant fraction of their power from renewable energy sources in the next few years, and solar cell technology is the most attractive renewable energy source these days. He showed a chart explaining that historically, wind power was the most desirable renewable energy in the past based on the numbers, but now solar cells are overtaking their rotatory brethren.
