Sunny Side Up, Again

One day I will check my archives but I suspect that I have been writing about the imminent arrival of low cost, flexible photovoltaic solar cells for at least the past 20 years. The idea seems simple enough. Instead of making solar cells out of expensive and fragile silicon and glass and in the process using more energy than they’ll ever generate in their useful lives develop a chemical cocktail that turns light into electricity and coat or print it onto other materials.

Well, here’s another one, and I’m no longer holding my breath, but as usual it all sounds very promising. Konarka, the company behind the technology has come up with a flexible ‘Power Plastic’ film using inkjet printing techniques. Eventually it may become so cheap that solar cells could be embedded into hundred of different products and even incorporated into fabrics. At the moment they’re concentrating on developing cells for handheld gadgets and military applications but they’re hoping to scale up production soon. The new cells are typically only 5 percent efficient, compared with the 16 – 20 percent of silicon cells, but as they say, they’re working on it.