People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, but maybe they should install some new transparent solar cells and capitalize on all those windows!
Scientists at UCLA announced the invention of a new solar cell, so thin and transparent that it can both turn solar energy into electricity and allow visible light to pass through it. According to study leader, UCLA Professor, and director of the Nano Renewable Energy Center at California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI), Yang Yang, “If you take a piece of glass and compare it to our solar cell, it is difficult to tell the difference.”
How is this possible? The UCLA team used a transparent plastic that absorbs infrared light, as well as a transparent metal to carry the charge out of the cell. The end result is a solar panel that is 70% transparent, but also only converts about 4% of the sun’s energy into usable electricity. Yang says his team is pushing that yield higher and that they have already done tests showing a yield of 11 percent.
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Yang expects to get a product to market in five years – a product that can be sprayed as a liquid onto surfaces easily, efficiently, and hopefully cheaply. Yang estimates that installation for an average home window may eventually cost only $10-$15. Those surfaces might range from windows in high rise buildings to consumer electronics.
Right now, the product is not suitable for an iPad screen because it could interfere with its touch-sensitive qualities, but in five to ten years, we might just be able to charge our electronics by leaving them outside.
Photo credit: UCLA