Quite a few media organisations around the world picked up this story in the New Scientist on the latest progress being made in LSCs - basically a newish way of trapping light photons and chanelling them using a waveguide to displace electrons on the cell and hence create direct current electricity. Some researchers at MIT however have come up with a couple of improvements;

i) Getting rid of the plastic substrate and replacing it with a sprayed onto glass mixture of dyes combined with a substance called tris(8-hydroxyquinoline) aluminium which is used as the waveguide. This typically captures high energy light like UV and leads to higher efficiency as less light escapes.

ii) Adding a second sandwich of dye and glass over the first - this traps longer wavelengths that have passed unperturbed through the top level and any lower-energy light that has been re-emitted within the top layer and somehow escaped.

The Economist, uncharacteristically, gets pretty excited and says;

The upshot is a device that, even as a prototype, converts ten times more of the incident light into electricity than a conventional solar cell.

Meanwhile, the BBC, gets even more carried away, confusing light with (highly marginal) incidental light and says

A new way of capturing the energy from the Sun could increase the power generated by solar panels tenfold

So it falls to the New Scientist to fill in two crucial missing bits;

Based on experiments, the team calculates that the power conversion of the prototype would be about 6.8% efficient, about the same as commerical cells made from amorphous silicon. But Baldo believes that with various improvements, the technique could eventually reach an efficiency of more than 20%.

So in other words, they've moved from highly inefficient to very inefficient. The 20% figure we can write off because that's a bit like saying, theoretically, it will be possible to capture 57% of the sun's energy for solar power, one day. Some of us though, live in the present and have an eye on the near future and should resist grand futuristic visions.

The second point, the killer fact iny book is this;

Although the new dyes are not as fragile as the ones used in the 1970s, they still have a lifetime of only about three months

So to get a return on this application, the value of the power it generates has to exceed its financial input in less than 3 months. I'd be staggered if this ever happens, anywhere, in the 21st Century !

It just goes to show, reading one source of information on one event will never give you the full picture. We can all so easily see what we want to see rather than how it really is. Optimism can work against you as well as for you. So don't hold your breath - this particular solar news story is interesting, but not a breakthrough.