by Rebecca Walker — May 27, 2009—A tinted see-through coating has been developed that can generate electricity on glass windows from natural and artificial light via ultrasmall organic solar cells.
New Energy Technologies Inc. has introduced SolarWindow, which uses an organic solar array made transparent through the use of conductive polymers that have the same electrical properties as silicon, yet boast a considerably better capacity to optically absorb photons from light and generate electricity, the company said.
Silicon wafers are costly and brittle, two things that limit their commercial usability in solar cells. Other new-generation, lower-cost, flexible thin-film solar materials such as amorphous silicon, copper indium gallium selenide and cadmium telluride often require high-vacuum and high-temperature production techniques, and they are many times thicker than their cells, New Energy said. Those traits limit the application of such thin films mainly to stainless steel, an expensive substrate material with limited prospects of delivering transparency.
Patel said the cells mark an important advance over early research and development of SolarWindow technology and address a number of commercial and technical limitations posed by conventional materials such as thin films, polycrystalline solar cells and silicon.
While the majority of today’s solar cells can be installed only where direct sunlight is available, New Energy said its cells can generate electricity from the visible light spectrum found in sunlight or anywhere artificial systems emit visible light, such as fluorescent office lighting.
For more information, see the company’s Web site.
