That’s an interesting twist, because normally one would think that visible sunlight does all the heavy lifting in a solar cell. The visible light passes through and the rest is put to work generating electricity. Got all that? Good! Lunt’s contribution to the field of transparent solar cells is a window that looks exactly like conventional glass, but it sorts out visible light from the invisible light at both ends of the spectrum, meaning ultraviolet and infrared light. The company behind the project is Ubiquitous Energy, which was co-founded by MSU Professor Richard Lunt, who holds the Johansen Crosby Endowed Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the school’s College of Engineering. See-Through Windows That Generate Electricity If all goes according to plan, which presumably it has, the idea is to harvest enough sunlight to light up the atrium. The new MSU solar array consists of a 100-square-foot installation of transparent panels above the main entrance to the building. Still, it appears more ambitious than other transparency projects to surface this year. To be clear, the MSU project is more of a toe-dipping than a plunge. The latest buzz over transparent solar cells was sparked last August, when Michigan State University announced a makeover of its Biomedical and Physical Sciences Building with fully transparent solar windows. MSU Plunges Into Transparent Solar Cell Territory That problem has begun to fade out of the picture, but researchers are still fiddling around with graphene and other high-tech tweaks to tackle the real meat of the matter, which is how to formulate a truly transparent solar window that works effectively enough to justify the cost. One early obstacle between fully transparent solar cells and the commercial market is scaling up from laboratory specimens to a marketable size. Instead of a stiff, bulky solar panel that nobody can see through, the thin film platform involves fabricating flexible solar cells in the form of a solution that can be literally painted onto various surfaces, allowing sunlight to trickle through. Thin film solar technology is just what it sounds like. See-through solar cells have been bouncing around the CleanTechnica radar since at least 2010, when the possibility of creating a transparent solar window was beginning to emerge alongside thin film solar technology. The obstacles are many but it looks like a real breakthrough is finally at hand, so to speak. Just look at any glass building and you can practically feel the blooming of the possibilities. The prize is acres upon acres of new sites for solar panels on buildings, without losing the energy-saving advantages of daylighting. Researchers have been hammering away at the challenge of harnessing sunlight to generate electricity from see-through windows for years. The idea of transparent solar windows almost sounds too good to be true, and it is, but not entirely.
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