Solar Stickers Look Like Nothing, Could Power Everything

Not just stickers, of course... But "solar stickers" that harness the sun's energy all the time, while being inexpensive, flat, light and invisible…

A group of nanoscientists in Silicon Valley has that dream.

Such an innovation could make power generation ubiquitous, providing power anywhere and everywhere a surface was exposed to the sun.

Ubiquitous Energy

Last year we wrote about a collaboration between MIT and Michigan State University to deliver on the promise of transparent solar panels.

Specifically, there is long standing controversy among energy efficiency and LEED/green building experts regarding the tradeoffs between designing green buildings with lots of windows (aka glazing) and the realities of designing for energy efficiency.

Many building scientists believe that glazing is an energy efficiency nightmare.

However, the solar stickers concept could alleviate a lot of that concern that windows make buildings pretty, but not necessarily energy efficient.

Now the same MIT researchers from our earlier article have formed a company, appropriately named Ubiquitous Energy, and have raised capital and moved to Silicon Valley to pursue the commercial production of solar cells that can be applied as a sticker to almost anything.

How Do Solar Stickers Work?

The genius of solar stickers is that they do not compromise on human needs for visible light, nor the needs of solar panels to capture ultraviolet and infrared energy.

Two thirds of the light needed to produce electricity are within the ultraviolet and infrared spectrum. The ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths are not visible to the human eye, but must be captured by the solar cell.

However, the human eye needs access to the wavelength of visible light that is in between ultraviolet and infrared.

Ubiquitous Energy has designed solar cells that allow visible light from the sun, which enables us to see, to pass through while simultaneously capturing the ultraviolet and infrared light and converting it to energy.

Eureka! Solar windows!

UE believes that applications abound in mobile, the Internet of Things and Smart Glass among other areas.

While the technology is only about 10% efficient, meaning it is about 50% less effective at converting sunlight to energy, when compared to silicon panels, which are the standard in the market, the company believes that their transparency will make them ubiquitous, allowing for greater surface area coverage.

Because the sun’s energy is constant and renewable, its energy provides electricity inexpensively, while helping reduce the impact on the Earth through reduced fossil fuel pollution.

Consumer Potential for Solar Stickers

The U.S. solar industry achieved another record year in 2014, growing 34% over 2013 to install nearly 7,000 megawatts (MW) of solar electric capacity.

The growth of the U.S. solar industry is comprised of two categories of solar energy: photovoltaic solar power, and concentrated solar power. The former is what you most people think of when they think of solar. The latter uses mirrors or lenses to focus solar thermal energy (sunlight) onto a single area where the heat is harnessed to do work, such as drive a turbine.

To date, the growth of solar has primarily been driven by utility grade solar, as well as commercial and residential.

However, because solar stickers could provide much broader consumer applications than photovoltaic and concentrated solar energy, they could represent a new class of low cost, non-toxic, flexible solar energy films that could be truly ubiquitous.

Solar stickers could also make the purchase and installation of solar energy simpler, spurring innovative new consumer applications across a range of industries.

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Video courtesy of National Geographic