Solar panels to dye for
Scientists show that cheap chemical dyes may lead to efficient conversion of the sun's energy
If you think solar is still too expensive, here’s how to get more bang for your solar-cell buck.
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Take a small solar cell, and slice it into thin slivers. Wrap the slivers around the edges of a slab of glass. Paint the glass with a high-tech, but cheap, dye — which you bought online — and voilà! You have a new solar panel. It can collect much more energy than the pricey cell you started with, and it costs only a little more.
If done right, making solar panels with a new generation of dyes complementing conventional photovoltaic cells would be cheaper and thus more competitive with other energy sources, Marc Baldo of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues report in the July 11 Science. Already in the team’s lab demonstration, “it gives a tenfold increase in total power per unit area of conventional photovoltaic,” Baldo says.