The cost of electricity is skyrocketing and you might consider installing solar panels on your roof to combat these rising prices. However, it’s easy for new homeowners to make mistakes with their new solar panels. Is your roof big enough (and secure enough) to support all the panels you need? A recent innovation could eliminate the need to install solar panels in this way: solar windows.
In May this year, researchers at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) revealed that they had invented a new form of solar cell that is 10,000 times thinner than a strand of hair. Thanks to its finesse, this new generation of solar panels, made from a material with a crystalline structure called perovskite, manages to be transparent and convert solar energy into electricity. Certainly, previous rival perovskite solar cells are more efficient, as are many commercially available residential solar cells, but what NTU’s solar panels lack in power generated per cell, they make up for in sheer utility.
According to the research paper published in ACS Energy Letters, the new perovskite panels are so transparent that you can install them above windows without significantly impairing visibility. Granted, these solar panels reduce transparency from around 70% or 80% to around 41%, which seems like a lot, but comparatively, sunglasses tend to reduce transparency between 8% and 18%. These new solar panels are also ready to be integrated into cars and portable devices. Imagine charging your electric vehicle with solar panels while you drive it. The transparent panels probably won’t provide enough power to run the car indefinitely, but it could reasonably reduce your electricity bill.
Electricity delivered rain or shine
The more engineers work with solar panels, the more we learn about them. For example, researchers recently learned that it’s possible to install solar panels near power cables with little interference, freeing up a ton of space we didn’t know existed. As for perovskite, the efficiency goes well beyond simply converting more solar energy into electricity.
Unlike traditional solar panels made from silicon, NTU Singapore’s perovskite panels (and all perovskite solar cells in general) can derive their energy from indirect or even diffuse sunlight. This capability is a huge advantage in metropolises like Singapore, where direct sunlight is preferred. Additionally, study leader Annalisa Bruno says NTU Singapore’s perovskite cells can essentially ignore certain wavelengths of light, absorbing those desired by engineers and leaving the rest intact for presentation purposes. Oh, and the panels should be easy to make, although they require a specific thermal evaporation process (materials are heated in a vacuum chamber until they evaporate and form a thin film) to control transparency.
While the new perovskite solar panels are in the early stages of development, the scientists involved are confident that if installed atop the windows of glass-fronted office towers, the solar panels could generate hundreds of megawatt hours of electricity each year. Bruno has already filed a patent for perovskite solar panels, and if other companies can validate the special process used to create the solar film, we could see self-sufficient buildings in the near future.
