In Los Angeles, Solarmer Energy have just broken their own record in solar efficiency. Solarmer produce plastic solar cells as opposed to the common photovoltaic silicon bases solar cells. Their previous record was a 6.77% conversion of solar in to electricity and now they have increased that to 7.6%. This conversion is much lower than photovoltaic panels but the specific [...]

The Japanese electronics giant, Sharp, have announced development of their latest efficient photovoltaic solar cell. With a conversion rating of 35.8% this improves on their previous incarnation which ran at 31.5%. Increasing the efficiency of solar cells allows for higher electricity production without increasing the surface area requited. It also would improve the charge back time of small consumable gadgets [...]

The efficiency of photovoltaic solar panels, in plain language, can have two meanings. Without getting in to boring technical and mathematical  explanations, hopefully this quick explanation of solar efficiency will help. The first one is how well the solar cells themselves convert the suns energy in to electrical power. For the second meaning this applies to how well they work [...]