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If you haven’t heard of them before, chances are, you’ll be hearing more of the name “Konarka Technologies“. After all, developing a technology as advanced as flexible, colored solar cells is a pretty fantastic bit of work. This technology gets all of it’s benefits by being integrated with plastic instead of the usual silicon base. Because it is ‘organically based’, it has a few extra benefits: it’s bendable, lighter, and has more “consumer-friendly” uses than regular photovoltaic cells. These consumer friendly uses translate into a product that has an appeal to a wide market of consumers, and, as such, means this product should be widely accepted.
For example, the prototypical cells already in the testing pipe could be combined with things like a roll-up solar charger or even so far as being stuck on windows or umbrellas. Even more so, the ability to create custom colors makes this even more attractive for commercial and consumer usage.
Konarka, who can craft patterns and colors of any type with this solar film, already makes flexible, camouflaged, solar buildings for the military, so you know it is of high quality. However, it’s looking to branch out into the commercial sector after having recently received nearly $100 million dollars in private funding. While the technology is still in it’s infancy (the efficiency of these solar cells are, right now, down around 5%; silicon cells are near 40%), the ultimate goal is to bring the power-generating capacity of these plastic cells up to that of silicon. This is offset, though, by these cells’ ability to use nearly any spectrum of light to generate power; however, I hope I don’t have to say that putting one of these under a lamp and expecting to get more power back isn’t exactly the best thing to do. Those pesky laws of Thermodynamics and whatnot could get in the way of that.
Interestingly enough, Konarka is taking a unique approach with regards to their competition. They’re (unfortunately) not going to try to make the solar plastic extremely high efficiency and extremely low cost, but what’s really unique is the market saturation we could see with this product. The fabrication of these organic cells isn’t unlike the printing process used to fashion newspapers; it’s environmentally friendly, extremely simple to get going, and can be created where the infrastructure to build conventional solar cells simply doesn’t exist. Similarly, instead of creating new products around their design, they’re focusing on partnerships to augment existing products. I mentioned earlier that these could be placed on windows; well, along with Air Products, a window manufacturer, Konarka was selected to design transparent solar modules that could be designed and built into windows.
The really great news? It’s close. 2008 close. Well, here’s to cranking up the efficiency, at least a little bit, by then.
See some of Konarka’s other applications.
Pictures courtesy of: Konarka;
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