Pour-In-Place Solar Cells

ianchaos writes: "According to an article in New Scientist, solar cells that 'self assemble' from a liquid have been developed by scientists at the University of Cambridge. The breakthrough could make it cheap and easy to cover large areas, like roofs, with efficient, ultra-thin solar cell coatings. Now they just need to try coating clothes with the stuff to make the wearables more viable."

Comments

Re:Solar Cells

[Prof_Dagoski]

Anyone intersted in going solar should check out this product from Unisolar. It's about the cheapest I've seen yet. If I've done the math right you could roof a decent sized house with these for about $5000.

Solar Cells

[veinard]

To their defence, though the application technique sucks, it does have a lot of implications. An organic solar cell with 34% efficiency is really amazing actually. The solar cells used in the space program are expensive thin film gallium-arsenide that are about 24% efficient. The solar cells that we can go out and buy on the market are amorphous, poly-crystalline and single crystal Si cells that have efficiencies from 7%-16% or so. Even at low efficiencies of 16%, if you cover a roof with solar cells in Ca (Which is cheaper than you might imagine given all the government subsidized loans and rebates for this kind of thing), you can power all of an energy efficient house during the day, as well as sell back some energy (which the utilities are required to buy) while you are at work. So yeah, you still buy energy at night, but it ends up as no net energy cost after installation. My point is, if they really mean that 34% efficiency, this has the potential to seriously reduce the power problems in most of the united states, since it would make solar viable for places in the US that are exposed to fewer days of sunlight, AND make it more affordable for all.

rant complete

Re:Solar Cells

[Cy Guy]

Perhaps the %34 efficiency is for only a narrow band of the solar spectrum.

That seems to be it. According to the abstract "these films show photovoltaic response with external quantum efficiencies of >34% near 490 nm." 490 nm is right between blue and green in the visible spectrum.

Can't be 34% efficient

[btempleton]

They said that they needed to work to improve the efficiency to make it viable, and that is simply not something that would be true if it were 34%. There's very little improvement even possible at that level of efficiency.

However, cells that can be poured on and installed locally would be a huge boon if they can make that work.