How much electricity does a silicon solar cell use?

All silicon solar cells require extremely pure silicon. The manufacture of pure silicon is both expensive and energy intensive. The traditional method of production required 90 kWh of electricity for each kilogram of silicon. Newer methods have been able to reduce this to 15 kWh/kg.

How much silicon is in a PV panel?

Fthenakis has published more on the subject than anyone, to my knowledge. His LCA lists a whole bunch of factors, but it's roughly 1.5kg of silicon in the PV itself. But a module also has 16.1kg of tempered low-iron glass for a 210 Wp panel (p32). Glass is 60-80% silica, and silica is about half and half silicon and oxygen by weight.

What is the thickness of silicon solar cells?

The thickness of silicon solar cells is on average 180 um. About 10 years ago silicon solar cells were made with a thickness of around 300um. So how thin can we make a silicon solar cells? Theoretically a 50um silicon solar cells still absorbs most of the light, which means we can cut the silicon material costs with over 60%!

How are single crystalline silicon solar cells made?

Single crystalline silicon solar cells are made using the Czochralski process, an energy-consuming process. The purity of the silicon is paramount for the uniform formation of the crystalline structure. This means impurity concentration has to be reduced to 10% or below.

How efficient are silicon solar cells?

As one of the PV technologies with a long standing development history, the record efficiency of silicon solar cells at lab scale already exceeded 24% from about 20 years ago (Zhao et al., 1998).

What is the device structure of a silicon solar cell?

The device structure of a silicon solar cell is based on the concept of a p-n junction, for which dopant atoms such as phosphorus and boron are introduced into intrinsic silicon for preparing n- or p-type silicon, respectively. A simplified schematic cross-section of a commercial mono-crystalline silicon solar cell is shown in Fig. 2.