This is blogspammed PR that gets it wrong. This is a research project that is nowhere near production with many "ifs". Vertical surfaces don't make a lot of sense for solar since they get limited exposure. They'd have to be incredibly cheap to make financial sense.<p>Research like this comes out every day. 90% of the time it's not possible to make it practical.
Office towers seem like a natural fit for this and have a huge surface area to collect solar energy from! Hope this makes it out of the lab and into commercial buildings in quick fashion.
My house has 4 walls and a roof to cover solar panels in before it makes sense to make my windows solar panels. Unless it is one of those skyscrapers where the entire exterior is glass.
Just from a physics point of view, I have a hard time believing this. Isn't a large portion of the energy coming from the sun photons in the visible wavelengths? If the solar panel is transparent, it's allowing those photos through and not collecting energy.<p>Or am I wrong, and most of the energy is in the non-visible range?
1. Utility solar will <i>always</i> be cheaper then distributed solar.<p>2. The biggest limiting factor on renewable adoption is cost.<p>3. We will never run out of space to put solar panels.<p>The last thing I need is a pile of extensive, over-complicated, version 1.0 technology and all of its electrical wiring, etc crammed into my windows.
This lacks data. We'd need to know the efficiency, life expectancy and energy production cost of the cells in order to know if this is really interesting.
If you need more energy to produce the cells than the amount they'll provide throughout their lifetime, it's not worth it.
Sure, it looks cool, but it's too soon to publicize.
Many negative comments. While this might not yield the desired results right now it’s still good that different approaches are being explored and evaluated.<p>Also, as for many things (think gorilla glass) the right application might not be the one for which this technology has been developed originally.