Question

How can a monocrystalline silicon PV cell generate electricity when exposed to sunlight? Describe the mechanism of PV effect, starting from doping.

Answer 1

Solar power is amazing. On average, every square meter of Earth's surface receives 164 watts of solar energy (a figure we'll explain in more detail in a moment). In other words, you could stand a really powerful (150 watt) table lamp on every square meter of Earth's surface and light up the whole planet with the Sun's energy! Or, to put it another way, if we covered just one percent of the Sahara desert with solar panels, we could generate enough electricity to power the whole world. That's the good thing about solar power: there's an awful lot of it—much more than we could ever use.

But there's a downside too. The energy the Sun sends out arrives on Earth as a mixture of light and heat. Both of these are incredibly important—the light makes plants grow, providing us with food, while the heat keeps us warm enough to survive—but we can't use either the Sun's light or heat directly to run a television or a car. We have to find some way of converting solar energy into other forms of energy we can use more easily, such as electricity. And that's exactly what solar cells do.