The sun keeps pounding out energy and meanwhile, I'm paying a monthly energy bill like a sucker. Fortunately, researchers at UCLA have developed a transparent solar panel that could be used as a home window.
"Probably not sufficient to power the whole house, but the idea is to turn all the windows in the house or buildings so they become solar panels to generate electricity," says Prof. Yang Yang at UCLA. He says other solar panels are too dark. It would be like your house wearing sunglasses. The breakthrough here is that you can see right through these new panels.
"Our plastic is actually a transparent because it only picks up the light in the infrared part," says Yang. That's the part our eyes can't detect.
Paul Weiss of the California NanoSystems Institute worked on the project and says that in order to harness solar power while staying transparent, the panels, our future windows, use invisible silver. Weiss says, "What really Yang's group came up with and we helped a little bit was a way to make silver into a very tiny wires that remain sufficiently clear that you can see through them, but sufficiently conducting that we can still pull the electrons out."
The panels are not at your hardware store yet but they're expected to be inexpensive when they arrive.
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Tonight, I'm reading a book before bed instead of going online. I don't want to get depressed. See, I know about the hamsters.
Tracy Bedrosian is part of a research team at Ohio State.
Source:http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/new-transparent-solar-panels-could-be-used-windows
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