Colored solar panels work without direct sunlight, double as PAR Can filters
By Darren Murph 
posted September 21st 2009 3:36AM
posted September 21st 2009 3:36AM
With eco-friendliness on everyone's mind, it's no shock to see more and more progress being made in the realm of solar. Shortly after hearing that boffins across the way were swapping carbon nanotubes for silicon, a Tel Aviv-based startup is now hoping to push its colored panels into the mainstream thanks to their ability to work sans direct sunlight. Granted, the tinted cells have only shown a 12 percent efficiency rate in testing, but they can reportedly be produced for around half of what a conventional panel costs. In essence, the cost savings comes from the dearth of silicon within, as GreenSun Energy has discovered that power can be generated by simply diffusing available sunlight over the whole panel and allowing nanoparticles to handle the rest. We'll invite you to visit the links below for the science behind it, but we're just interested in helping Ma Earth while replacing every windows in our apartment with a stained glass alternative.[Via Inhabitat]
12 percent efficiency for solar cells is actually not bad. The best commercially available cells only get about 18 percent, and they're incredibly expensive.
Wiki says the University of Delaware got cells at up to 42.8% efficiency (there are citations backing this up). Granted, I don't know how much those cost though.
@bootareen
Oh, I know. I'm a LEED-certified architect. I know that there are cells that do much better than that in lab conditions.
You just can't buy them.
things of love about engadget, if you heard a rumor about some experiment being done, odds are someone on that team reads this site.
I think Good high end available mono-crystalline cells are > 20% efficient, but you loose a few percent when you string together multiple cells into an array that puts out usable current and voltage. I think the good modules or arrays are in the 16-17% range.
One interesting company right now is Nanosolar.com. They are actually making an industrial available cell based upon an aluminium package, rather than solar and are basically printed. I think their cells are around 16% efficient and around around 1/3 the cost of a traditional panel.
Sounds good. I would like to put solar panels on my roof (not because of ma earth, but because they make sense), but they would end up facing the street. These sound like you could put them on the north side and they would still work.
ooooo this was on the news a few weeks back
Trust me, this kind of stuff takes decades to trickle into consumer's hands, no need to rush the news about it at all.
Correction, never trust strange idlers on the internet, even when they are right.:)
If you could have red and blue ones too, you could have a Velux window made of tiles of the different colours, while still getting white(ish) light through.
(admittedly it would look like you were living in a church... maybe this is the next step for stained glass windows?)
They are probably that color because of the chemicals used, and that means you can't change the color without loosing the ability to make electricity.
Sorta look like the stunt glass made of sugar candy, can I eat one plz?
lol lighting jokes
A wave and a particle walk into a bar..
I wonder the life span of this new Colored Solar Panel?
I have read the old expensive ones seem to last about 20 years and drop to about 2% (or less) efficiency. Making the cost recovery time frame that much more important.
Stained glass is coming back
It looks like they use fiber optic technology to make them work.
Honestly guys. Did you not use luminescent acrylic at school. We had tons of this stiff at ours. Granted we didn't think about putting solar cells on the edges of them. What they are using is probably the same thing but of higher quality.
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