Invisible Solar Cells That Could Power Skyscrapers
There’s, really only one renewable energy source that can power the whole world right now today and that solar energy there’s more than enough solar energy hitting the earth to power the earth many times over.
We’re all familiar with the story of solar technology. Limitless potential, somewhat disappointing results. One of the big hurdles is where to put it in the places where we most need power. There isn’t a lot of space for big heavy opaque panels.
Of course, if you could make solar cells thin light and transparent, you could put them almost anywhere So this is actually a solar panel that you’re. Probably familiar with been around for decades and what this does is it absorbs the light that hits the surface and it converts that light into electricity.
So here’s, an example of a transparent version, so this is a transparent solar cell. There you may yeah, okay, we’re commercializing, what we call a transparent solar cell, it’s. Really, just an invisible film that you can put on any surface.
You can go on a mobile device display can go on a building window and it can generate energy on those surfaces. Our vision was really that we want to integrate solar technology into the products and surfaces we interact with every day.
The idea of transparency kind of has risen to the top is something that seems to add a lot of value for a wide range of applications. In the past, people tried to make solar cells transparent by shrinking down the size of the components, but that only gets you so far.
Ubiquitous figured out that the key to a truly transparent, solar cell isn’t the size of the parts you use. But the kind of light you’re trying to absorb we’ve designed photoactive materials that let visible light pass through, but can selectively harvest the parts of the solar spectrum that we can’t see with our eye, namely The ultraviolet and the near fred parts of the solar spectrum, and so we can have a very transparent solar cell, you’re, not capturing the visible light, presumably that is affecting the efficiency of the panel to some degree yeah.
If you look at a traditional solar cell, it absorbs light in all parts of the spectrum of the light that hits the surface. 33 %. Of that light is converted into electricity with a transparent cell. You cut out the visible part of the spectrum, but you can still achieve up to 22 %.
With our pilot production facility. We expect to be able to reach around 10 % power efficiency, which is a drop, but then I suppose there are advantages to having things that you can see through, as opposed to things that you cannot absolutely now.
You have a lot more surface area that you can apply solar technologies to the first place. Ubiquitous wants to put its solar cells is on the displays of mobile devices, which could mean the smartphone of the near future never runs out of batteries, but the real potential of a technology like this becomes clear when you start to think big, like skyscraper big , currently there’s, a huge amount of surface area on the vertical space of buildings, that’s; unused for energy harvesting, utilizing transparent solar cells to convert those windows into solar panels as a way to utilize that surface area for Energy generation, so now you’re, not just constrained to these types of devices on the roof.
You can actually use the vertical area of the buildings as well. We see this as really being deployed everywhere, generating power in the background. Without you, even knowing that it’s there, this won’t, be the only solution that we need, but we see it as being a very important technology to make a more sustainable society.
