If you grew up in the United States in the last three decades, then you might remember getting your first solar calculator, perhaps for use in a high school or college math class. Those tiny electrical devices were powered by solar cells, and today's solar cells continue to use the technology that worked in the past.

However there have been many breakthroughs in solar technology that have vastly increased solar cell efficiency, such that there are cities and towns in hots spots located throughout the world that utilize solar energy on a commercial or utility system scale.

Sunny and dry climes are best suited for producing solar energy the most efficiently, because of the abundance of sunlight. Cutting edge solar technology relies upon photovoltaic cells to make the change from the light of the sun into usable electricity. When the sunlight hits a photovoltaic cell, the light is captured by a semiconductor material, often crafted from silicon. The solar cell uses an electrical field to control the flow of free-moving electrons released from the sunlight into an electrical current, which can be tapped into by using metal contacts at the top and bottom of the photovoltaic cell.

Solar technology efficiency has been vastly increased through the use of a simple component that helps to light Broadway plays as well as your favorite movies seen on the big screen. Fresnel lenses have been used in certain large-scale solar systems, for example, to concentrate the power of the sun up to five hundred times more than ordinary sunlight hitting the solar array.

These powerful systems, known as concentrated photovoltaic solar cell power, can also have their efficiency improved even more with the use of components that can track the position of the sun in the sky, so that the solar array can adjust to capture as much sunlight as possible for the longest period of time every day it is in use.

Another interesting new technology that will have a wide variety of applications in the near future is thin film solar cells. Thin film solar cells use a semiconductor material much like the photovoltaic solar cells, but the semiconductor used in thin film solar cells is very slender, and can range from nanometers to micrometers, or the thickness of a piece of aluminum foil.

Thin film is efficient in that it is currently less expensive to produce than photovoltaic cells, but it produces less energy than the photovoltaic cells as well. However, these solar cells offer many advantages by providing a thin and lightweight solar cell that is not bothered by windy conditions found in hot climates. And technologies are being developed so that the sunlight that is captured is absorbed more effectively by the semiconductor material to increase its efficiency.