Solar power could be the savior in our energy crisis. When you consider its many benefits:

1. It is completely clean power with no carbon production.

2. Unlike fossil fuels we will have a really hard time running out of it. If we ever do, I promise that you will have much bigger problems than why your car that won’t run.

3. It won’t give us radiation sickness.

Now that you know why the solar cells are a good idea here is the information about the new and more perfect solar cells.

Researchers from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have discovered and demonstrated a new method for overcoming two major hurdles facing solar energy. They have developed a new antireflective coating that boosts the amount of sunlight captured by solar panels and allows those panels to absorb the entire solar spectrum from nearly any angle.

The untreated silicon solar cell which are currently on the market, only absorb on average about 67.4 percent of sunlight shone upon it — meaning that nearly one-third of that sunlight is reflected away and thus unharvestable. From an economic and efficiency perspective this is just a waste of potential energy. In these new cells the coated materials were able to absorb 96.21 percent of sunlight shone upon it — meaning that only 3.79 percent of the sunlight was reflected and unharvested. A significantly reduced waste.

Lin’s new coating also successfully tackles the tricky challenge of angles.

Most surfaces and coatings are designed to absorb light — i.e., be antireflective — and transmit light — i.e., allow the light to pass through it — from a specific range of angles. Eyeglass lenses, for example, will absorb and transmit quite a bit of light from a light source directly in front of them, but those same lenses would absorb and transmit considerably less light if the light source were off to the side or on the wearer’s periphery. This same is true of conventional solar panels, which is why some industrial solar arrays are mechanized to slowly move throughout the day so their panels are perfectly aligned with the sun’s position in the sky. This was a waste of power, but a needed one to keep things moving.

What do the researchers have to say about the new panel technology?

“To get maximum efficiency when converting solar power into electricity, you want a solar panel that can absorb nearly every single photon of light, regardless of the sun’s position in the sky,” said Shawn-Yu Lin, professor of physics at Rensselaer and a member of the university’s Future Chips Constellation, who led the research project.  “Our new antireflective coating makes this possible.”

If you want to know more about the project, the research behind it and some future applications you can check out the results of the year-long project  in the paper “Realization of a Near Perfect Antireflection Coating for Silicon Solar Energy,” published this week by the journal Optics Letters.