Why don't solar cells produce visible light when supplied with electricity?
It's not that they don't, its just very inefficient in reverse bias. Non-visible and very weak, Heat buildup, fragile silicon crystal structure. Typical Solar PV cells are made using silicon crystals just like IC silicon wafers. It's the same reason that LEDs arn't made with silicon.
&quot;Digikey: Will Silicon Substrates Push LED Lighting Into the Mainstream?&quot;

The reason why LEDs are expensive is partly because the manufacturing process used to fabricate the wafers from which the individual chips are cut is difficult and employs exotic materials such as gallium nitride (GaN) deposited on sapphire or silicon-carbide (SiC) substrates.
But recently, some manufacturers have proposed using silicon, the material routinely used to fabricate billions of integrated circuits (ICs) every year, as an LED substrate. Apart from potentially reducing the cost of LEDs, the use of mature complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) IC technology would allow fabrication in conventional wafer fabs that have spare capacity.
However, the idea is not new. Silicon has been tried before, but large mismatches between its crystal structure and coefficient of thermal expansion, and those of the GaN used for the LED proper created faults that lowered the end product’s efficacy and dramatically shortened its life. Now new developments promise to overcome these drawbacks.