Elon Musk's Tesla has just discovered a new method for producing solar energy. New solar panel promises to be much cheaper, lighter and easier to produce.

A solar energy industry is currently embroiled in fierce competition to grow fast, and recently, billionaire Elon Musk, owner of companies like Tesla and SpaceX, came up with a new cell that could revolutionize the solar energy market. In terms of technology, the solar panel can offer an enormous amount of energy at a very low cost. 

Learn how Elon Musk's new solar energy technology works

Os conventional solar panels, consisting of black and copper solar cells, have been in use since the 1950s, yet Elon Musk's new product is a game-changer. Currently, crystalline silicone dominates 90% of the global solar panel market and the market is experiencing an average annual growth of 30%.

Recently Tesla made a revolutionary discovery with a material that is cheaper, lighter and easier to produce, thus generating a powerful solar panel solution called ferroelectric crystals, which are so thin that they have the capacity to power an entire house.

The cost of critical components, mainly polysilicon, for manufacturing solar panels has reached an all-time high due to excessive demands and production delays. Before using silicone to produce silicon, the material must first be purified to achieve a purity of 99,99%, preventing it from crystallizing as it develops on silicon bars in the center of the reactor.

Due to a recent innovation involving the layering of thin material, Elon Musk's Tesla sought a replacement for silicone, thus generating ferroelectric crystals that have an energy output in solar cells that can be increased by a factor.

Tesla's Solar Panel Technology Differences

Ferroelectric crystals gain prominence in the common solar panel because they can produce the photovoltaic effect without a PN junction, that is, it is not necessary to add layers of cells that are positively and negatively doped.

According to researchers, this change can make the construction of solar panels simpler. In this way, the Elon Musk's company does not need to spend investments on highly skilled labor or sophisticated equipment to support production. The estimate is that this new panel costs up to 10 times less per Watts compared to common solar panels.

With Tesla's new technology, the expectation is that the production cost will be 22 cents per Watt. Until then, the cost of producing silicon panels was a concern, which can be solved with Tesla's solar panel.

Elon Musk talks about new technology

According to Musk, Tesla's new cell is a game changer, as it produces more energy than other technologies. To achieve this increase in solar energy generation, the researchers built crystalline layers with barium, strontium and calcium titanate, which they use to separate negative from positive charges in a single solar device, stacking one on top of the other.

The researchers found that combining different materials in thin layers can significantly increase the solar energy yield. For this, a high-power laser was used to vaporize crystals, resulting in a material 200 nanometers thick and 500 layers.

Elon Musk's Tesla solar panel generated a current flow a thousand times greater than that of pure titanium from pure barium with the laser. The advancement of ferroelectric cells is an important milestone for Tesla and the solar energy industry, as it could help Elon Musk supply electricity to the entire United States.