The Power of Design: Product Innovation in Sustainable Energy Technologies

3.3 Photovoltaics and Product Integration

Angèle Reinders¹ and Wilfried van Sark²

¹Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Design for Sustainability, Landbergstraat 15, The Netherlands

²Utrecht University, Faculty of Science, Science, Technology and Society (STS), Budapestlaan 6, The Netherlands

3.3.1 Introduction

It was more than a century since the discovery of the photovoltaic (PV) effect – the conversion of photons to electricity – by Becquerel in 1839 (Becquerel, 1839) before solar cells were developed. In the 1950s, PV solar cells were developed at Bell Telephone Laboratories in the United States with the purpose to apply them in products that lacked permanent electricity supply from the mains (Chapin, Fuller, and Pearson, 1954). The solar cells were called silicon solar energy converters, commonly known as the Bell Solar Battery (Prince, 1955). Furnas (1957) reports,

“The Bell Telephone Laboratories have recently applied their findings in the transistor art to making a photovoltaic cell for power purposes...and exposed to the sun, a potential of a few volts is obtained and the electrical energy so produced can be used directly or stored up in a conventional storage battery....The Bell System is now experimenting with these devices for supplying current for telephone repeaters in a test circuit in Georgia. As to cost, one radio company has produced a power pack using this type of photoelectric cell for one of its small transistorized radios.” ...