The History of the Solar Generator

Date: 20/05/24

You might think that solar generators, like the ones available from Think Hire, are a relatively new idea. However, mankind has been harnessing the power of the sun for thousands of years.

In this Olympic year, we’ve already been reminded of how the ancient Greeks used solar energy to light ceremonial torches. The Romans also understood the benefits of solar energy, orienting their bathhouses to capture the heat from the sun.

But how did we get from these ‘passive’ solar installations, to the modern photo-voltaic (PV) solar panels that power Think Hire’s solar generators. The story goes back as far as 1839, and it includes giants of science such as Einstein along the way. But who invented solar generators depends very much on how you look at it.

The birth of solar generators

The first scientist to discover that two metal electrodes placed in an electrolyte solution produced more energy when exposed to light was the young Edmund Becquerel. However, it was almost 35 years before the effect was formally described in a scientific paper by Willoughby Smith in 1873 entitled ‘The Effect of Light on Selenium during the passage of Electric Current’.

It was longer still before the first working photo voltaic cell was created by Charles Fritts in 1873. This cell used selenium, rather than the silicone used in modern PV cells. The first silicone PV cell was not created until 1954 by Daryl Chaplin, Gerald Pearson and Calvin Souther Fuller at Bell Laboratories.

This means that the invention of the PV cell can be dated to anytime between 1839 and 1954, and can be credited to any of half a dozen or more individuals. Even Einstein weighed in with his Nobel Prize winning paper ‘On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light’ in 1905.

The challenge of efficiency

One of the biggest problems with early PV cells was their very low efficiency. The first selenium PV cells converted as little as 1% of the energy they received, and this only rose to around 4% with the introduction of silicone in 1954.

One of the driving forces behind the drive to boost solar generators was the advent of the space race. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, the focus of the scientific community was on boosting this efficiency level to make PV cells more practical for solar generators. With vehicle weight at a premium, the ability for spacecraft and satellites to create their own electricity was hugely important.

This work lifted the efficiency to around 14%, where it stayed until 1985, when a breakthrough level of 20% was first reached. Since then, this has been constantly nudged upwards, with the University of New South Wales reaching an impressive 34.5% efficiency in 2016. The current record is the 47.6%, achieved by a German team in 2022.

Solar generators powering the globe

Today, renewable energy is going from strength to strength, with solar generators playing a big part in the battle against climate change. The International Energy Agency estimates that in 2022, 1,300 Terawatt hours of solar energy were produced, making up 4.5% of global power. A terawatt is a million million watts, with 1,300TWh equivalent to around a third of annual the electricity used by the United States each year.

We’ve come a long way in the 185 years since those first pioneering PV cells that 19 year-old Edmond Becquerel created in his father’s lab. Here at Think Hire, we combine all this history, development and technology into the very latest PV solar generators to help your site run more sustainably, and more cost-effectively.

To find out more about solar generators from Think Hire, get in touch today.

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