Solar Cells May Become Obsolete by this Technology

Solar Cells Will be Made Obsolete by 3D Rectennas Aiming at 40-to-90% Efficiency

A new kind of nanoscale rectenna (half antenna and half rectifier) can convert solar and infrared into electricity, plus be tuned to nearly any other frequency as a detector. 

Next Big Future | September 29, 2015

Right now efficiency is only one percent, but professor Baratunde Cola and colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech, Atlanta) convincingly argue that they can achieve 40 percent broad spectrum efficiency (double that of silicon and more even than multi-junction gallium arsenide) at a one-tenth of the cost of conventional solar cells (and with an upper limit of 90 percent efficiency for single wavelength conversion). 

Schematic of the components making up the optical rectenna--carbon nanotubes capped with a metal-oxide-metal tunneling diode. Source: http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327819

<more at http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/09/solar-cells-will-be-made-obsolete-by-3d.html; related links: http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327819 (Solar Cells Made Obsolete. 3D rectennas aim at 40-to-90% efficiency. September 28, 2015) and http://www.gizmag.com/carbon-nanotube-rectenna-light-electricity-georgia-tech/39631/ (Breakthrough rectenna converts light into DC current. September 20, 2015)>