Page 12 - North American Clean Energy March April 2016

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solar energy
Transforming the Solar Industry
Breakthrough technology converts solar rays into liquid energy for skyscrapers and tall towers by John A. Conklin
For the average person, the typical image of solar
power is large, opaque, expensive panels mounted on
a rooftop, or rows of tilted panels on a solar farm, but a new generation of transparent, liquid solar coatings may soon be powering cities by coating the glass windows of tall buildings and skyscrapers.
Looking back at the early 2000s, the price of a solar panel hovered around $4.00 per watt and solar skeptics strongly believed the price could never drop below $1.00 per watt due to prohibitive material costs. ey also believed the land area required was too vast for solar to become a large-scale power source. At best, solar power was for the remotest of places, and the most a uent enviro-zealots.
Fast forward to 2016, the cost of photovoltaic solar panels has dropped dramatically with the most recent record-breaking panel priced at $0.55 per watt. Last year was notable as solar was added to another U.S. home or business every three minutes. No doubt this is an exciting time for solar and many believe it is the power source of the future, but solar power still accounts for less than 1 percent of the country’s energy consumption.
How can this trend scale to the degree necessary to beat climate change?
In MIT’s 2015 report ‘ e Future of Solar Energy’ researchers declare ‘solar electricity generation is one of very few low-carbon energy technologies with the potential to grow to very large scale’, and advocates the development of new technologies that maximize the opportunities the sun’s energy provides.
Although a silicon solar panel bought today will perform light years ahead of one bought 20 years ago, it is still heavy, rigid, and generally limited to rooftops and solar farms. According to the latest predictions, about 192,000 square miles of solar panels are needed to provide renewable power for the entire Earth. is requirement is roughly equivalent to the land mass of Spain.
Researchers argue that to truly take advantage of the sun's power, it is necessary to expand the amount of real estate which can be out tted with solar, engineering ways to blend solar panels into our everyday lives.
Every day, sunlight streams through billions of windows— more than two million acres of “skyscraper” glass worldwide Consider there are an estimated ve million skyscrapers, tall towers, and commercial buildings in the U.S. alone; there is a huge amount of surface area on the vertical space of buildings available for energy generation. By applying transparent liquid, organic, photovoltaic coatings to the glass, window panes become electricity-generating. ese coatings can be made of earth abundant carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, organic polymers and other materials which, in liquid form, are ideal for low-cost high-output manufacturing. ey can be applied to glass and exible plastic surfaces at ambient temperature and pressure, and produced in aesthetically appealing colored tints popular to architects, building owners, and developers for skyscraper glass.
Unlike conventional solar photovoltaic (PV) systems, this type of technology can be applied to all sides of tall towers, generating electricity using natural and arti cial light as well as shaded, di used, and re ected light conditions. While conventional rooftop solar systems are limited to a handful of square feet due to congestion from heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, a modeled installation of these types
of “solar” coatings could generate up to 50-times the energy and deliver 15-times
the environmental bene ts when compared to conventional roof-mounted PV. By some estimates, the payback period of this technology is as little as one year, while conventional solar systems have a payback of 5-11 years for the equivalent amount of power, and require an additional 10-12 acres of valuable urban land.
12 MARCH/APRIL 2016
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