SolarCity, the 9-year-old solar energy company that counts Elon Musk as a co-founder and current chairman, announced this morning that it has reached a new record for solar panel efficiency. At its most potent, new design is able to use tiny fraction above 22 percent of the suns’ rays. Top performance, usually hovers between 15 to 17 percent. SolarCity says that the increase in efficiency will make panels that are equal in size to competitors’, but produce “30-40 percent more power.”
Â
We don’t know much about the technology that made the new record possible (“proprietary,” says the company), but it came from Silevo, the solar manufacturer that SolarCity bought last year for $200 million. Silevo specializes in designing high-efficiency panels that are, crucially, cheaper and faster to manufacture. The key is in details like using copper instead of silver, and slimming down the manufacturing process to just six steps. The company details its simplified production process in this video