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Household solar is easier said than installed

Analysis of longitudinal survey data has explored the link between intended and actual solar panel adoption in UK households. It finds that while most households that had intention of installing solar in 2012-13 were yet to do so by 2021-22, serious intention to install solar still increases the likelihood of adoption more than other factors such as income and environmental perceptions.

Intention to install household solar in the U.K. has not often translated to actual adoption, new research suggests.

The research paper “Do intentions matter in household solar panel adoption? New evidence,” available in the journal Energy Economics, analyzes the link between stated intentions and actual adoption of UK household solar installations by using data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study. The survey is considered one of the world’s largest panel surveys, with a sample size of 40,000 households and approximately 100,000 individuals.

"Spin-flip" system pushes solar cell energy conversion efficiency past 100%

Energy can never be created or destroyed. That's basic Physics 101. You simply cannot create energy out of thin air. Yet researchers at Kyushu University in Japan say they have developed a technology that pushes the energy conversion efficiency of solar cells to 130%!

At first glance, the results of the research, conducted with collaborators at Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany, sound fanciful at best. However, the reality is far more nuanced. Using a molybdenum-based “spin-flip” metal complex paired with a singlet fission material, the scientists managed to generate more usable energy carriers than incoming photons.

At any given moment during the day, the Earth receives roughly 89,000 terawatts of solar energy – almost 5,000 times the global human energy consumption annually. However, modern solar technologies capture only a fraction of it.

Scientists Set New Record for Solar Cell Efficiency

Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech

What’s not to love about solar energy? Using photovoltaic cells — tiny semiconductors that convert light directly into electricity — we’re able to harness the power of the Sun itself, turning it into wattage to power our homes.

It’s great in theory, but there’s a huge catch. Of all the power our star graciously beams to us, only about 33 percent of it can ever be turned into usable electricity, and most commercial solar panels don’t even come close to that.

This ceiling is known as the Shockley-Queisser limit, named after the two physicists who first theorized it back in 1961. The reason comes down to thermodynamics: sunlight comes to us as a vast rainbow of light energy, but we can only convert a narrow slice of that spectrum into usable electricity. The rest either passes through, or is lost as excess heat.

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