New Energy Technologies (Burtonsville, MD) has announced it will soon unveil a working prototype of the world’s first glass window capable of generating electricity.
The ability to produce electricity from see-through glass is made possible by using the world’s smallest working organic solar cells, developed by Dr. Xiaomei Jiang at the University of South Florida (which has licensed the technology, called SolarWindow, to a subsidiary of New Energy Technologies). These solar cells can generate electricity from both natural and artificial light sources.
Scientists successfully developed and integrated transparent compounds that are sprayed onto glass surfaces at room temperature, eliminating the expensive high-temperature or high-vacuum production methods in use today by solar product manufacturers. Previously, attempts to place solar cells on glass relied on the use of a metal contact, which blocked visibility and limited transparency. Eliminating metal, the company reports, proved “especially challenging” since the metal component acts as the negative polar contact.
New Energy Technologies claims these solar cells outperform today’s commercial solar and thin-film technologies by as much as 10-fold.