A continuous supply of renewable energy requires intermittent sources to be paired with storage. Thermal storage is an excellent match for solar energy, but concentrating solar power plants must use high optical concentrations and large plants to be cost competitive. Here, we propose an alternative, solid-state heat engine for solar-thermal conversion consisting of a solar absorber, a thermoradiative cell, and a photovoltaic cell. Heat from the solar absorber or thermal storage drives radiative recombination current in the thermoradiative cell, and its emitted light is used by the photovoltaic cell. Based on the principle of detailed balance, we calculate a limiting solar conversion efficiency of 85% for fully concentrated sunlight and 45% for one sun with an absorber and single-junction cells of equal areas. Solar thermoradiative-photovoltaic systems outperform similar solar thermophotovoltaic converters for low band gaps and practical absorber temperatures, and for a realistic device, this improvement can be up to 7.9% (absolute).

持续供应可再生能源需要将间歇性能源与存储配对。蓄热是太阳能的绝佳选择，但集中式太阳能发电厂必须使用高光聚集度和大型发电厂，以提高成本竞争力。在这里，我们提出了一种用于太阳能转换的固态固态热引擎，它由一个太阳能吸收器，一个热辐射电池和一个光伏电池组成。来自太阳能吸收器或蓄热器的热量驱动热辐射电池中的辐射复合电流，其发射的光被光伏电池使用。根据详细平衡的原理，我们计算出在完全聚集的阳光下，具有相等面积的吸收器和单结电池的极限太阳能转换效率为85％，对于一个太阳为45％。