Buildings Could Capture Solar Energy Without Panels

With the release of the UN’s climate change report, the time to find the perfect technologies to decrease our carbon emissions is right now. One of these technologies will allow new buildings to harness energy from the sun without the use of any solar panels at all, allowing for a whole new way of looking at solar power where it’s built into every single new home. However, this new research doesn’t come without issues and it does need more research to be done to perfect it.

Coating photovoltaic material onto buildings.

Currently, photovoltaic panels are how solar energy is harnessed. However, that same photovoltaic material could also be used in its organic form to coat buildings and allow the building itself to harness the energy, without the need for expensive panels. Researchers at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia have found that they can take organic solar cells and mass produce them into inexpensive printable inks that can be applied to things like windows on buildings, which will allow them to convert energy in the exact same way solar panels current do, without the need for the panels.

Research still needs to be done on this new technology.

Unfortunately, as amazing as this new technology is and despite how much it could completely transform the solar world, research still needs to be done. This is because this organic form of these solar cells are not nearly as efficient as their silicon-based counterparts that are currently used in solar panels. Organic molecules need to be found that would be able to perform as effectively as silicon-based solar cells.

Currently, Derya Baran, an author of the study of these organic cells at the KAUST Solar Center, is researching different types of molecules with her team. These different types of molecules are called “non-fullerene acceptors,” which would allow the organic solar cells to keep the positive and negative charges apart, which is the thing keeping this type of solar energy from becoming our new main solar source.

“I believe these acceptors will shape the future of organic photovoltaics,” says Baran. “We have a spin-out company from KAUST Solar Center and through this company we want to make photovoltaic windows for electricity generation.”

EHIDTBR Molecule.

Currently, Baran and her team are heavily researching the “EHIDTBR” molecule, which is able to strongly absorb visible light, is easy to produce, and would be able to last for a long time. If this is the molecule they’ve been looking for, it could be the key to bringing this amazing new technology into the mainstream. This would completely change the world of solar energy.

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