Printable Solar Cells

nanosolar Printable Solar Cells
This looks pretty cool - solar power you can roll out like roofing material. Could really open up the market for locally generated solar power. From the company's website:
Nanosolar has developed the world's most cost-efficient solar electricity technology and is working to bring it to customers everywhere and capture a significant fraction of the world’s electricity generation.

Improving the cost of solar electricity means optimizing power-conversion performance (W/sqft), product cost ($/sqft), lifetime (years), as well as other system and installation costs ($) – and the optimum of this is generally not the maximum of any individual dimensions. (For instance, the highest efficiency does not necessarily result in the lowest cost.) In addition, addressing the market in volume requires scalable production and technology with robust high yield and low capital expenditures ($/MW).

Conventional solar electricity systems based on crystalline silicon wafers have succeeded in meeting the first several billion dollars of annual market need for solar electricity systems. But the industry is finding it increasingly difficult to further optimize products based on the inherently stiff amounts of material and energy required, as well as production fundamentally limited by processes based on moving batches of fragile wafers and/or glass plates through a factory.

In order to make solar electricity scale beyond the limitations found with crystalline silicon, substantial amounts of R&D have been invested over the past two decades into novel kinds of approaches based on much thinner and more easily processable solar cells. These thin-film cells are based on non-silicon semiconductors (inorganic semiconductors of the IIb/VIa and Ib/IIIa/VIa families as well as solution-coatable organic semiconductors) which can absorb the same amount of sunlight as crystalline silicon but in layers that are at least two orders of magnitude thinner. (ref.)

Designed to be easily installed on large low-slope rooftops or directly integrated with leading commercial roofing membrane products (such as single-ply thermoplastic membranes), customers can save on installation and achieve even lower total system cost.

With multiple SolarPly™ sheets readily interconnected, large areas of sunpower collection and electricity generation can be easily created. Nanosolar has developed reference designs and mounting mechanism for all of the most common types of building structures.(ref.)

The University of Toronto has developed a 'spray on' solar collection material that is capable of capturing energy in the infra red spectrum. “We made particles from semiconductor crystals which were exactly two, three or four nanometres in size. The nanoparticles were so small they remained dispersed in everyday solvents just like the particles in paint,” explains Sargent. Then, they tuned the tiny nanocrystals to catch light at very long wavelengths. The result – a sprayable infrared detector.

Existing technology has given us solution-processible, light-sensitive materials that have made large, low-cost solar cells, displays, and sensors possible, but these materials have so far only worked in the visible light spectrum, says Sargent.
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Professor Peter Peumans of Stanford University, who has reviewed the U of T team’s research, also acknowledges the groundbreaking nature of the work. “Our calculations show that, with further improvements in efficiency, combining infrared and visible photovoltaics could allow up to 30 per cent of the sun’s radiant energy to be harnessed, compared to six per cent in today’s best plastic solar cells.” (article)

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