Brief 

It seems counterintuitive to say that solar panels can work at night. And yet, researchers at UC Davis have cracked it.The key, according to researchers, is a specially designed photovoltaic cell that could generate up to 50 watts of power per square meter under ideal conditions at night. That’s about a quarter of what one conventional solar panel can generate during the day.

 

Insight

ut differently, these thermoradiative cells, as they’re called, generate power by radiating heat to their surroundings. If one were to point this thermoradiative cell at the night sky, it would emit infrared light— precisely because it is warmer than outer space.

“We were thinking, what if we took one of these devices and put it in a warm area and pointed it at the sky,” Munday explained.The key to making it all work is by maintaining temperature difference between the cell and the sky.This technique is not new— people have been using this phenomenon for nighttime cooling for hundreds of years, Monday explained. But in the last five years, “there has been a lot of interest in devices that can do this during the daytime,” he said.

The new nocturnal solar panel can also work during the day. Depp and Munday estimate that “if a retractable nighttime [photovoltaic] unit were rolled out on top of the standard solar modules after sunset, a solar farm could produce an additional 12% more electricity.”Monday and Depp are developing prototypes of these nighttime solar cells that can generate small amounts of power. The prototype is meant to further refine the product and make it even more powerful and energy efficient.

As global markets continue moving towards carbon neutrality and humans continue to innovate, as the paper concludes: “the sun is not the only sky-facing option for power generation.”

 

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