UK firm lays claim to world solar record

UK start up QuantaSol has this week become the latest solar firm to stake a claim for the world record for photovoltaic solar cell efficiency, with the unveiling of a single junction cell with a conversion efficiency of more than 28 per cent.

The company said its cell had been independently assessed by solar research body Fraunhofer ISE and was found to deliver a 28.3 per cent efficiency at a solar concentration of greater than 500 suns.

"Our technology is the industry's best-kept secret," said QuantaSol chief executive Kevin Arthur. "This is the first time that anyone has successfully combined high efficiency with ease of manufacture, historically a bug-bear of the solar cell industry."

He added that having completed a second funding round of £2m last week, the company was now gearing up to produce multi-junction cells with higher efficiencies, which it hoped to release during the first quarter of next year.

QuantaSol, which was spun out from a research project at Imperial College London in 2007, claims to have developed a new form of solar cell that combines a number of different nanostructures consisting of two or more different alloys to create synthetic crystals which are far more effective than traditional than conventional poly-silicon crystalline wafers.

It argues that unlike current solar cell technologies, its synthetic crystalline combines the high levels of solar absorption associated with silicon with lattice spacing that allows it to be deposited quickly and easily on underlying substrates.