Four pioneers behind silicon solar cells win this year's Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering.
When Australian Martin Green started investigating solar energy following the oil crisis of the 1970s, solar cells were used largely just on satellites in space.But Prof Green's persistence kicked off a revolution. And with Drs Blakers, Zhao and Wang in his University of New South Wales laboratory, the team not only managed to drive up efficiency but do it in a way that became relatively straightforward to manufacture.
"Replacing that crude back metal contact with a more sophisticated contact served both purposes and led to quite significant increases in cell efficiency." The country's supremacy can be laid directly at the feet of Drs Zhao and Wang and other Chinese students who studied in Prof Green's lab and then returned home to initiate manufacturing."There are two provinces that do most of the manufacturing today. China dominates because of cost; it's so much cheaper to produce solar panels there," added Dr Wang.
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