Sunlight is everywhere, but so far our efforts to
harvest its energy have been restricted to solar farms and rooftop panels. A
new wave of analysis projects at different best solar companies
applied to display screens, cars, and windows, which could supply around 40% of
the energy demand in the United States.
In the last five to six years, transparent and
semi-transparent light usage materials have started to emerge, according to
Michigan State University researchers and authors of a review that was
presented recently in Nature. The authors estimate there is somewhere in the
region 5 to 7 billion square meters of glass surface in the US, and coating
this with transparent solar cells with similar efficiencies to today’s solar
panels could generate an additional 100GW of power, which approaches the
nationwide potential of rooftop solar installations.
Richard Lunt, an associate professor at Michigan State
University, and one of the authors of the research on transparent solar
technology stated in a press release that they had been working for around five
years on the highly transparent solar cells. He further added that the
technology offered a positive route to economical, widespread solar adoption on
surfaces both small and large. The review highlights three main tactics that support
solar cells transparency and suggest an approach called solar concentrations.
There is also a related approach that coats glass in
materials that redirect light from the surface of the glass to the edges, where
it can be collected by conventional photovoltaic cells, called solar concentrators.
The authors point to the benefit of the ubiquitous technology
whilst integrating standard silicon-based solar cells in transparent materials.
They also point out that the efficiencies could be as high as 14% when thin
films of opaque light-absorbing semiconductors
cover the entire area. However, the authors advise about observing the effect
of colored light on human’s circadian rhythm.
The authors chalk out number of challenges, including
scaling, high demand for indium-based electrodes, glass surfaces being
non-optimally positioned for sunlight collection, and the technologies depending
on organic materials that had the possibility of limiting lifetimes.
Despite numerous challenges, there is still an
enormous probability of turning every glass surface in the world into a solar
panel. It would definitely be a bright future where all the gadgets could be
self-charged using sunlight.
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