Sde Boker makes solar energy viable

The afternoon Negev sun shone brightly on the solar panels at the National Center for Solar Energy near Sde Boker. The center’s director, physicist Prof. David Feiman, squinted into the light. “After 30 years of research on solar energy, my life’s work of experiments in how to produce electricity from the sun, I can say this year that I know how to manufacture solar energy that will compete with conventional energy,” he says.

A few months ago, the center’s scientists managed to develop a new technology of solar, or photovoltaic cells, that Feiman says will make the production of solar energy so efficient that the cost of the photovoltaic cells that convert solar energy into electricity will be negligible.

In an ordinary solar panel of the type in use today, the silicon that makes up the cells is very expensive, making it a costly product. According to Feiman, photovoltaic cells carry out two functions: First, they change the light into electricity, their essential task; second, they store the light.
“The principle is to focus the light using little material,” Feiman says. “We constructed a large, parabola-shaped glass plate. It not only absorbs the light, it also focuses it on one point, a thousand times more than regular sunlight.”

According to Feiman, “an ordinary photovoltaic cell, which is 10 by 10 centimeters, normally produces one watt of electricity. We managed to extract more than a thousand times more – 1,500 watts. In this way, the cost of a cell is 1,500 less, becoming almost nothing.”

“No one has ever produced so much electricity from a solar cell at this strength,” he says.

Haaretz