Intense summer sun can spike temperatures of solar panels, causing their electrical production to plummet. By Robert F. ServiceLike humans, solar panels don’t work well when overheated.
Now, researchers have found a way to make them “sweat”—allowing them to cool themselves and increase their power output.It’s “a simple, elegant, and effective [way] to retrofit existing solar cell panels for an instant efficiency boost,” says Liangbing Hu, a materials scientist at the University of Maryland, College Park.Today, more than 600 gigawatts of solar power capacity exists worldwide, providing 3% of global electricity demand.
That capacity is expected to increase fivefold over the next decade. Most use silicon to convert sunlight to electricity. But