A Michigan Technological University researcher has made a solar
cell that brings more to the rooftop: it’s good at making
electricity, and it’s great at capturing heat to warm your home
and your water. Solar photovoltaic thermal energy systems, or
PVTs, generate both heat and electricity, but until now they
haven’t been very good at the heat-generating part compared to a
stand-alone solar thermal collector. That’s because they operate
at low temperatures to cool crystalline silicon solar cells,
which lets the silicon generate more electricity but isn’t a
very efficient way to gather heat. That’s an economics problem.
Good solar hot-water systems can harvest much more energy than a
solar-electric system at a substantially lower cost. And it’s
also a real estate problem: photovoltaic cells can take up all
the space on the roof, leaving little room for thermal
applications. In a pair of studies, Joshua Pearce, an associate
professor of materials science and engineering, has devised a
solution in the form of a be