They're solar panels as you've never seen them before: completely clear

[eridani]

http://www.upworthy.com/theyre-solar-panels-as-youve-never-seen-them-before-completely-clear

Here's a game-changer on the aesthetics front: What if it was possible to create clear solar panels?

Lucky for us, that's exactly what a couple different groups have been working on for the past few years.

Sunpartner Technologies has developed technology that can essentially turn the screen of your cell phone into an energy-collecting panel.

[Sherman A1]

1. Cool!

[patricia92243]

2. I particularly like the idea of solar paths/roads. n/t

[dreamnightwind]

3. Solar windows?

Imagine if every new window was also a solar panel... All those highrises with thousands of windows... I suppose the angle to the sun would not be optimal, still seems like you could get a lot of power that way especially if scaled over many windows.

[Roland99]

4. I'll take some! The back of my house gets that full FL afternoon sun

[Mojorabbit]

13. Same here! nt

[Nihil]

14. Loft windows, skylights or office atriums could benefit from this though ...

> I suppose the angle to the sun would not be optimal, still seems like you
> could get a lot of power that way especially if scaled over many windows.

There is a lot of suitably tilted glass around that would be a good start!

[rock]

5. How does a material that light passes through

pull off energy from that light. Does it only absorb and convert light energy outside the visible spectrum? Or does it only collect about (say) 30% of the light thus making the panel look dingy?

[mindwalker_i]

7. That's exactly what came to my mind

If they're completely clear, then they aren't absorbing any energy and their use as solar panels would be highly diminished. However, they may be absorbing ultraviolet or infrared. If that's the case, then they're just clear for real, American light.

[OKIsItJustMe]

11. Yes, people are working on IR and UV solar cells

For example:
http://mitei.mit.edu/news/transparent-solar-cells

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Transparent solar cells[/font]
[font size=4]Generating power from everyday surfaces[/font]

June 20, 2013
Nancy W. Stauffer, MIT Energy Initiative


Vladimir Bulović of electrical engineering and computer science (left), Miles Barr PhD ’12 (right), and Richard Lunt (below) are making transparent solar cells that could one day be deposited on everyday objects from mobile devices to windows, turning surfaces everywhere into low-cost energy-harvesting systems. This research was supported by the MIT Center for Excitonics, an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the US Department of Energy. Photo: Justin Knight

[font size=4]Overview[/font]
[font size=3]MIT researchers are making transparent solar cells that could turn everyday products such as windows and electronic devices into power generators—without altering how they look or function today. How? Their new solar cells absorb only infrared and ultraviolet light. Visible light passes through the cells unimpeded, so our eyes don’t know they’re there. Using simple room-temperature methods, the researchers have deposited coatings of their solar cells on various materials and have used them to run electronic displays using ambient light. They estimate that using coated windows in a skyscraper could provide more than a quarter of the building’s energy needs without changing its look. They’re now beginning to integrate their solar cells into consumer products, including mobile device displays.[hr]Inventing a new solar technology that can compete commercially with today’s solar cells is difficult, given existing deployment methods. But a transparent photovoltaic (PV) cell would change the rules of the game. It could be deposited on any surface without obscuring the look of the underlying material. “You can have zebra stripes or elephant footprints or whatever you want underneath because the cells that sit on top are invisible,” says Vladimir Bulović, professor of electrical engineering and director of MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories. “They could be on everything around you—including all your windows—and you wouldn’t know it.”

Other research groups have previously worked on making “see-through” solar cells, usually by taking conventional opaque PV materials and either making them so thin they are translucent or “segmenting” them—a process Bulović likens to mounting pieces of a solar panel on a window with gaps for seeing out. But those approaches involve an inherent tradeoff between transparency and efficiency. “When you start with opaque PV materials, you typically have to decrease the amount of active area to increase the transparency,” says Miles Barr PhD ’12, president and CTO of Ubiquitous Energy, Inc. “So with existing PV technologies, it’s difficult to optimize for efficiency and aesthetics at the same time.”

Three years ago, a team in MIT’s Organic and Nanostructured Electronics Laboratory began to tackle the problem using a different approach. Richard Lunt, then an MIT postdoc and now an assistant professor at Michigan State University, proposed making a solar cell that would absorb all the energy from the sun except the part that allows us to see. All light is made up of electromagnetic radiation spanning a spectrum of wavelengths, each containing energy that potentially can be harvested by a solar cell. But the human eye can detect only part of that spectrum—the so-called visible light. With the right materials and design, the light that we can detect would pass through the solar cell to our eyes; the rest would be absorbed by the solar cell—and we’d never miss it.

…[/font][/font]

A spin-off, Ubiquitous Energy is commericalizing the technology.

[LouisvilleDem]

9. Thinking the same thing

The panel in the picture looks a little cloudy to me...

[SoLeftIAmRight]

12. here is your answer

http://www.solarpoweristhefuture.com/what-light-wave-do-solar-panels-use.shtml

[TexasBushwhacker]

6. How about on the roof of your electric car?

Recharge the battery during the day while you're working. No plugging in necessary. Just park in the sun.

[caraher]

8. That only works if your commute is relatively short

There's roughly 1 kW of energy falling on a square meter of sunlit surface. Even if you expose 2 square meters of car surface to sunlight during an 8 hour workday, and your panels are 20% efficient (which is a high-end panel), that works out to about 3 kWh of electricity. Electric car battery capacities are typically 5-7 times that. So if your commute is significantly shorter than your vehicle's range this might work OK.

But this also assumes a pretty sunny day. You'll still need, for most drivers, some way to plug in. It seems to me that it makes more sense to cover parking areas with solar panels feeding charging stations than to put solar cells on a car as the chief means of recharging. That fixed installation will work for the entire 20-30 year lifetime of the solar cells, while in the car chances are the useful lifetime of the vehicle will be far less.

[TexasBushwhacker]

10. Yeah, I've always liked the idea of covered parking

with solar panels. We won't have huge numbers of electric cars or plug in hybrids anytime soon, so if the entire parking lot is covered with solar panels, they could easily provide electricity to a fraction of the parking spaces. More charging stations could be added as demand increased, or excess electricity could be sold back to the electric company to offset the energy costs of the building.

Of course, the parking spots would be at the front of the parking lot, so all the people driving gasmobiles would walk past them everyday. Then maybe more people will buy electric cars.