现在全世界要应对的不只有气候危机。即使现在全球面临疫情，科学家也在推进可再生能源解决方案。目前在有多达三项纪录被打破了。

Today, the world is grappling with more than just the climate crisis, and yet even now, in the face of a global pandemic, scientists are marching on with renewable solutions.

 

Just this month, no less than three records have been broken in solar panel efficiency. The first and the second were achieved by scientists in the United States at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

 

Their unique "six-junction" solar cell has unprecedented¹ energy conversion², turning intensified³ light into electricity at 47.1 percent efficiency - the most efficient in the world under concentrated light conditions. This record beat the previous contender established just a couple of years ago by one percent.

 

"This device really demonstrates the extraordinary potential of multijunction solar cells," says John Geisz who works at NREL.

 

The achievement was helped by concentrating sunlight until it was a sizzling 143 times more intense. But even under the illumination of a single Sun, the solar cell is better than any other.

 

This is the second record broken - the team tested another version of their six-junction cell without concentrating the light, and achieved an unprecedented 39.2 percent efficiency.

 

Essentially⁴ this means that even more of the Sun's energy can now be converted into electricity.

 

The third record broken this month, for instance, was achieved by something called a tandem⁵ cell. This is a device, only a few micrometres thick, that combines two different semiconductors⁶, one for the visible parts of the light spectrum⁷ and the other for infrared⁸ light.

 

Engineers from the German research centre Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin created a new kind of tandem cell made from stacked silicon⁹ and perovskite with a certified¹⁰ efficiency of 24.16 percent.

 

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