The Photovoltaic Effect

Discovered in 1839 by French physicist Alexandre-Edmund Becquerel, the photovoltaic effect describes the way in which PV cells create electricity from the energy residing in photons of sunlight. When sunlight hits a PV cell, the cell absorbs some of the photons and the photons’ energy is transferred to an electron in the semiconductor material. With the energy from the photon, the electron can escape its usual position in the semiconductor atom to become part of the current in an electrical circuit.