[r9etb]

Cool. But how big is the lens? Doesn't matter if the photovoltaic is 1 cm^2 if the lens is 1 m^2. Yeah, I am puzzled by this also.

You're still collecting about the same amount of sunlight, either way.

The advantage of using a concentrator is that lenses are a lot cheaper to build, maintain, and replace than the photovoltaics. You can save a lot of money by reducing the number of expensive components you have to buy.

[wbill]

Yeah, that's a good point on the lens being a cheaper component. I just skimmed the article - my thought was "who cares if the PV is a little tiny thing, if you need a massive lens to make it work?"

The maximum amount of energy from sunlight that you can get per area is more-or-less a constant...I'm guessing that all the lens does is take a big area and condense it down to a small one. Hopefully, no one is planning to turn up (or down lol!) the sun to satisfy some power requirement.

I wonder if this PV is more efficient, or can use superconductors to minimize the transmission losses?