President Trump and his corporate allies are keen to win the AI war over China they lost the green energy battle against this adversary. Though the Americans may not realise it, Elon Musk’s Tesla is way behind Chinese EVs, thanks to their innovations around the batteries. Now, the same technology is pushing to generate solar energy underwater.
Yes, you read that right. For several years now, China’s solar panels have plastered the sides of mountains across the country, paddy fields in India, and to coastal flotillas as well as shading the highways. Now, scientists have generated electricity from sunlight from a depth of ten meters, which is hitherto unheard of in photovoltaic research.
Given Beijing’s freehanded funding to any innovation that can push China’s presence across the global supply markets, there is no doubt that someone like Musk would be worried. His grandiose plans for having orbital datacentres could end up becoming a pipe dream costing an arm and two legs if the Chinese indeed produce power underwater using solar cells.
A report published by EuroNews said Chinese researchers successfully tested solar panels at underwater depths previously considered impractical for the technology. The technology is designed to capture wavelengths of sunlight passing through seawater that keeps underwater equipment running for longer without relying on batteries.
The article said that the researchers conducted a two-hour trial near the Weizhou Islands off the southern coast of mainland China. The panels generated power from sunlight ten meters below and continued lab tests indicated that these panels can operate continuously for several years without any need for maintenance.
What’s interesting is that researchers in India too had tested underwater solar panels some six years ago. Scientists at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani – Hyderabad Campus, IIT Kanpur and DRDO, Kanpur, said submerged cells benefit from lower temperatures. They tested an amorphous cell coated with polydimethylsiloxane, a widely used silicon-based organic polymer for optoelectronic applications, at depths of up to 20cm.
The Chinese researchers went deeper and broader with their work, which has since been published in Joule research journal. The study outlines a completely new variety of solar panel built with perovskites, a calcium-titanium-oxide combination instead of silicon. By using these cells, the researchers could adjust the solar panels to use blue and green sunlight waves that penetrates the ocean surface and into the depths.
“The large-area modules demonstrated real-world functionality by generating 324 mWh of electricity upon underwater illumination for 2 h at 10 m depth, sufficient to charge lithium-ion batteries and power LEDs. This work introduces a robust materials-and-device strategy for underwater solar harvesting, enabling autonomous marine power systems and submerged Internet-of-Things infrastructure,” the study notes.
Peak power conversion efficiencies that measure the quantum of sunlight hitting a panel and then getting converted to usable energy reached nearly 35%, the study says. Once validated, this could become a breakthrough in green energy and be as important as the solar cell efficiency enhancements made in recent times.
Just to add some context to this breakthrough, scientists have for long tried to break the theoretical gap of 33% efficiencies suggested as part of the Shockley-Queisser limit. In April this year, German and Japanese scientists published a paper in the Journal of American Chemical Society of a method to breakthrough this limit.
The paper noted that by blasting a certain compound with high-energy blue light, it splits the incoming energy into two usable parts. This mean was used by the researchers to achieve around 130% quantum efficiency which means that for every 100 photos that entered, they could harvest 130 usable energy carriers.
In a press statement, the researchers said they had two strategies to break through the Shockley-Queisser limit. Yoichi Sasaki, a chemist at Kyushu University and one of the study’s coauthors said “one strategy was to convert lower-energy infrared photons into higher-energy visible photons. The other, what we explore here, is to use singlet fission to generate two excitons from a single exciton photon.”
Now, the Chinese research report comes in this background and though the outcomes were obtained and simulated conditions, the test itself has raised eyebrows. Though it ran only for two hours, generating 324 milliwatt-hours of energy was enough to power a small LED light for a few hours. And knowing the Chinese, government would have already funded the team to bolster the output and device datacentre solutions.
What is also noteworthy is that the panels used by the Chinese showed almost no loss of performance after 1,160 hours underwater. Now the team estimates that these could operate continuously at 10 metres below the ocean surface for nearly 70 months.
“This work presents the first functional validation of submerged solar cells practically operating at a water depth of up to about 10 meters, greatly broadening their application scope,” says study author Wen-Hua Zhang, from China’s Yunnan University and Southwest United Graduate School in Kunming.
The work by these researchers could prove seminal to the solar panel industry as a whole. In recent times these have solely been found atop roofs, on wide open spaces and on some mountain sides. Earlier this year, Dutch researchers unveiled the world’s first solar-powered ambulance in rural Kenya.
The Norwegians have come up with a solution where solar power is helping remote former radio stations, one that was only accessible by boat or helicopter previously. Then there is the Swiss experiment involving solar panels sitting between railway tracks to generate power that could possibly run the entire train soon.
What the Chinese have achieved with the underwater solar panel could solve several major hurdles and bring down global power consumption drastically. Imagine ocean sensors, cameras and communication equipment sitting underwater without needing to connect to power supplies on land? Not to mention datacentres near the coast like Google is building in Visakhapatnam that can get power from underwater continuously?
Of course, there’s still a long way to go as the tests only resulted in breaking Shockley-Queisser limit. It still is noteworthy, given that even the small amount of electricity produced has far surpassed the researchers’ expectations. Commercial development could still be a long way off but knowing the Chinese, it might still be too close for Elon Musk’s comfort.
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