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[Richard230]

According to a one-minute report on the local TV news tonight, a Stanford University researcher announced at an East Coast meeting today that they had found a way to triple the efficiency of normal solar panels. They say they have developed a nano-coating that can be installed over the panels to vastly increase its efficiency.

A 300% efficiency increase, by just by placing a micro-thin coating over the panels, seems almost too good to be true though. I hope it all pans out in the real world. I'll bet Stanford hopes so too. They no doubt stand to make a ton of money licensing this technology if it works as advertised.   

[gasdive]

I think the media must have scrambled the story.  Increase of efficiency of 300% isn't possible as far as I can see.  It goes beyond the maximum possible level.   There's simply a limit to how much energy you can extract from photons a mess of different energy photons.  Each photon has a set amount of energy.  Any energy above the amount needed to knock out the electron is wasted.  Any photons with less than the required energy simply won't do anything.  I can't see how a film of anything could change that unless it's converting photons of higher energy to a shower of lower energy photons that are only slightly above the band gap energy.

=:)

[Richard230]

It appears that the "breakthrough" story might have been a little bit of old news. Here is a short article about this technology from last year:

http://www.solarthermalmagazine.com/2010/08/03/solar-thermal-and-pv-efficiency-breakthrough-stanford-solar-energy-researchers-make-big-claims/

On the other hand it doesn't seem like vaporware.

[gasdive]

when I said "wasted" I meant "wasted as heat".  If you're going to capture that heat and count it, then yes, you can get higher effiecency.  However judging by the tone of that article, it was more in expectation than in experience.

=:)