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Not Transparent Aluminum, But Conductive Plastic
michaelmalak writes "Scientists at the US Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory have fabricated transparent, thin films capable of absorbing light and generating electric charge over a relatively large area. The material, described in the journal Chemistry of Materials (subscription required), could be used to develop transparent solar panels or even windows that absorb solar energy to generate electricity. The material consists of a semiconducting polymer doped with carbon-rich fullerenes."
I assume they'd act like tinted windows since they'd be absorbing some of the light.
car windows which gradually charge the battery perhaps?
Now when we run out of indium-tin oxide(or the chinese just stop selling it to us), we can still make LCDs, OLEDs, and EL wire.
your efficiency per square foot may be crap, but your square footage can be huge. That's assuming, of course, this stuff ends up being cheap. The manufacturing process should be ultra cheap, but I don't know about producing the solution. It should be a lot cheaper than traditional panels, but will it be cheap enough to make it worth it? That's the question.
That's exactly right. The promise of organic photo-voltaics is that they will be so much cheaper to produce that the lower efficiency won't matter. But one of the harsh realities is that a photo-voltaic setup has certain fixed base costs (think of how much it costs to physically install each 1 m^2 panel, and tie it into a house's electricity system). Thus, according to industry partners, there is actually an efficiently level below which a solar material is not worth using even if it were completely free to produce. So, for organic solar cells to become commercially viable, they need to improve efficiency, even while reducing costs. Of course we're now reaching levels where it is indeed viable to use organic photo-voltaics, see for example Konarka's flexible solar panel that is built into a bag, so that it charges your cellphone; but there is a threshold of efficiency necessary to offset fixed installation costs.
That may be true, but I know for a fact that a lot of entrenched industry on the old money energy side hates the idea of solar and has gone way out of their way to make it not happen, because it threatens their business model. Solar can break the perpetual check to them, because eventually it can be paid off. You can NEVER pay off your local utility monopoly, and that's the way they like it. And speaking of hybrids, read up on large NiMH batteries and chevron, an oil company and how they bought up the patents, etc and then sat on it, refused to license it, making manufacturers start from scratch an building large ones, helping delay electric vehicles. Toyota had to develop their own, when it already existed!
Any way, back to solar. I've been into it for decades now, and back in the old days we had to do "guerrilla solar" (and also wind chargers, which are sorta hard to hide) because damn if you could get a "permit" to install it. Local electric company guys would get to the building inspectors (read:bribes) and no matter what, they wouldn't "permit" it, so we had to do it stealthily. This was on purpose, conspiracy, market manipulation stuff. You can google "guerrilla solar" for some stories about how much of a rip it was. Home Power mag has a lot of it in their old back issues.
I have NO doubt it still goes on with amazing solar breakthroughs, the patents get bought, then poofed away, stuff like that.