Photovoltaic solar generation

Assembled from 33 blocks · 3 evidence · 23 related

1. Story
2. The direct conversion of light into electricity in a semiconductor junction, and the clearest case in the energy system of a manufactured rather than constructed technology. The practical silicon cell dates from Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1954, at an efficiency of around six per cent and a cost that confined it to spacecraft for two decades. Commercial crystalline-silicon modules now convert roughly twenty to twenty-three per cent of incident energy, against a single-junction thermodynamic ceiling — the Shockley–Queisser limit — of about thirty-three per cent; laboratory perovskite-on-silicon tandem cells have passed thirty-four per cent by stacking junctions with different band gaps, which is how that ceiling is legitimately exceeded. What changed the technology's place in the energy system was not efficiency but price: module cost has fallen by roughly three orders of magnitude since the mid-1970s, and Chinese module spot prices fell below ten US cents per watt during the 2023–2024 manufacturing glut. The supply chain is the most geographically concentrated in the energy system — China holds a very large majority share at every stage from polysilicon through wafers and cells to finished modules, with the wafer share the highest of all. A PV plant has no moving parts, no fuel, no thermal cycle and almost no marginal cost, and it produces nothing at night.
3. Knowledge
4. The experience (learning) curve
5. Photovoltaic solar generation
6. Connections
7. The experience (learning) curve
8. The duck curve
9. Bhadla Solar Park
10. Electrolytic (green) hydrogen
11. Bell Telephone Laboratories announce the practical silicon solar cell
12. The conventional start of the photovoltaic module price series
13. Germany's Renewable Energy Sources Act takes effect
14. Chinese manufacturing takes over the photovoltaic supply chain
15. The photovoltaic learning curve is popularised as Swanson's law
16. The first Global Stocktake calls for tripling renewable capacity
17. Theodore Paul Wright
18. Photovoltaic solar generation
19. The horizontal-axis wind turbine
20. Lithium-ion battery storage
21. Nuclear fission power
22. International Energy Agency
23. Wright publishes the airframe cost-quantity relationship
24. The conventional start of the photovoltaic module price series
25. Germany's Renewable Energy Sources Act takes effect
26. Chinese manufacturing takes over the photovoltaic supply chain
27. The photovoltaic learning curve is popularised as Swanson's law
28. Vogtle Unit 4 enters commercial operation
29. Empirically grounded technology forecasts and the energy transition
30. Evidence
31. Supports the finding that probabilistic forecasts built on observed cost-versus-cumulative-deployment relationships have outperformed the expert and official projections used in energy planning, and that solar, wind and storage costs have fallen at rates those projections repeatedly failed to anticipate. V55 verification basis: the paper was not retrieved in this session; the citation follows the reference declared in the Journey catalogue and the substance is stated from author knowledge. The fitted learning rates and their intervals were NOT read and are not quoted.
32. The reference source for world energy balances, final energy consumption by carrier, generation mix, technology cost trends and scenario pathways used throughout this pack. V55 verification basis: no edition was retrieved in this session — iea.org was refused by the network egress proxy — so every figure attributed to this series is stated as a magnitude with the specific gap named on the citing record, and no current-year quantity should be presented to a reader without confirmation against a named edition.
33. Supports statements about recent annual global energy demand growth, electricity demand growth outpacing total energy demand, and the continued absolute growth of fossil fuel consumption alongside record renewable additions. V55 verification basis: not retrieved in this session; the direction of each statement is stated from author knowledge of the series and no numeric total is quoted from it.