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Concept
Concentrator photovoltaics
Summary
Concentrator photovoltaics (CPV) (also known as concentration photovoltaics) is a photovoltaic technology that generates electricity from sunlight. Unlike conventional photovoltaic systems, it uses lenses or curved mirrors to focus sunlight onto small, highly efficient, multi-junction (MJ) solar cells. In addition, CPV systems often use solar trackers and sometimes a cooling system to further increase their efficiency.
Systems using high-concentration photovoltaics (HCPV) possess the highest efficiency of all existing PV technologies, achieving near 40% for production modules and 30% for systems. They enable a smaller photovoltaic array that has the potential to reduce land use, waste heat and material, and balance of system costs. The rate of annual CPV installations peaked in 2012 and has fallen to near zero since 2018 with the faster price drop in crystalline silicon photovoltaics. In 2016, cumulative CPV installations reached 350 megawatts (MW), less than 0.2% of the global installed capacity of 230,000 MW that year.
HCPV directly competes with concentrated solar power (CSP) as both technologies are suited best for areas with high direct normal irradiance, which are also known as the Sun Belt region in the United States and the Golden Banana in Southern Europe. CPV and CSP are often confused with one another, despite being intrinsically different technologies from the start: CPV uses the photovoltaic effect to directly generate electricity from sunlight, while CSP – often called concentrated solar thermal – uses the heat from the sun's radiation in order to make steam to drive a turbine, that then produces electricity using a generator. , CSP was more common than CPV.
Research into concentrator photovoltaics has taken place since the mid 1970s, initially spurred on by the energy shock from a mideast oil embargo. Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico was the site for most of the early work, with the first modern-like photovoltaic concentrating system produced there late in the decade.
Official source
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