Solar cells also known as photo voltaic cells have been around for a long time, despite being used on space station programs and satellites to produce energy they never found a substantial application for energy production for our daily life. The major reason is that the energy output from solar cells is very low.
Solar energy actually has two forms of energy light and heat. Solar cells only utilize the light energy leaving a major past of heat energy unused.
No one could figure out how to tap both forms of energy until now. In fact with the current available photovoltaic technology used, heat actually reduced the efficiency of a solar cell. But now Engineering from Stanford have figured it out! Both light and heat of the sun can be utilized to generate electricity which could make solar power production more than twice as efficient as existing methods and potentially cheap enough to compete with oil.
