On April 25, 1954, American researchers presented the first prototype of a usable solar panel. The return at the time was around 6%. A lot has happened since then.
Exactly 70 years ago today, scientists from Bell Labs in the US state of New Jersey presented the first practical ‘solar battery’ to the public. The New York Times reported at the time that “this invention could mark the beginning of a new era – harnessing the virtually limitless energy of the sun for human civilization.”
However, it took decades for this vision to become tangible. The global growth of PV has only really gained momentum over the past decade. While 1 GW of PV power was installed worldwide in 2004, this amounted to 1 GW per month in 2010. Five years later, the installation reached 1 GW per week and most recently around 1 GW per day, Carsten Pfeiffer, head of strategy at Germany’s Federal Association of Neue Energiewirtschaft, said in a recent Twitter thread. “We will probably see an annual increase of 1 TW within this decade,” he said.
American scientists Daryl Chapin, Gerald Pearson and Calvin Fuller were initially tasked only with developing a reliable energy source for remote telephone systems where conventional batteries were ineffective. Solar cells made from the semiconductor material selenium had already been developed, but their efficiency was too low for useful applications.
The systematic, months-long development of a silicon solar cell resulted in the functioning prototype of the first usable solar panel, which was presented on April 25, 1954. The return at the time was only 6%. This initially increased slowly over the following decades. Only in the last twenty years, due to the industrialization of PV production and accelerated technical progress, has this increased to around 25%, which is close to the physical limit established for silicon solar cells.
Even today, Bell Labs – which was then part of AT&T and now operates under Nokia Bell Labs – calls ‘the solar cell’ one of its ‘greatest innovations’. The three scientists were posthumously honored for their invention in 2008 by being inducted into the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame.
In 2004, the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) published a report article in celebration of the cell’s 50th anniversary.
Author: Thomas Seltmann
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