Centauri's Thoughts

We have been taking advantage of the sun-harvesting planet for eons. Either in living form as food, or as trees and shrubs we cut down and use for fire. Farther down the chain is hydrocarbons as gas and oil.

Our efforts at harvesting sunlight so far could be improved, and there are a few techniques which are being looked at or experimented with.

One sure method is concentrating the solar energy onto a smaller cell. Of course this has (thermal) limits, but it generally a good idea.

One of the biggest problems with solar cells is the light bandwidth in which they convert light to power. Of all the whole color spectrum of light, PV cells are very narrowband in what they can convert. The obvious solution should be to convert much of the incoming light (via prismatic lens or something similar, so that as much light power can be extracted.

This technique could be used for all PV cells whether on Earth or in space.