Solar Energy in the Mile High City

This year I had the honour of attending the IEEE’s 40th Photovoltaic Specialists Conference (PVSC) in Denver, Colorado on behalf of the Photovoltaic Innovation Network (PVIN). PVSC is one of the largest solar energy conferences in the world, bringing people from all over the world together to discuss the recent advances in photovoltaics and the next steps and challenges we face as a community. By far the most impressive talk I saw this year was from a representative from SunPower Corporation. SunPower is a company that produces and sells solar modules. For many years they have held the record of having the highest efficiency cells for commercial single junction crystalline silicon solar cells. Their solar cell is an all-back contact solar cell, meaning that the metal contact fingers used to extract electrons generated by light are all on the back side of the cell. This innovation completely eliminates the problem more traditional solar cells face, where light is reflected off
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