August 3, 2011. Bill Szydlowski
credit: aloshbennettWill it free us from our need for foreign fuels?
Will it lower our taxes?
Will it eliminate utility bills?
Will it cause global peace?
Will it prevent global warming?
I can’t say that it will give instant relief in any of the aforementioned crisis but, when properly used, it can certainly help with each and every one of them. Solar energy can be harvested in many different ways, none of which are extremely cost effective as of yet, but every avenue is being researched and there are some creative and promising technologies that we can hope to see on the market in an affordable and practical setting within the next several years.
One of my favorites amongst those is the idea of solar windows. At this point they’re inefficient and astronomically expensive at $1900 a square meter, but there’s great hope for them as the research continues. A normal solar panel is able to convert 20% of the sun that it receives into usable energy, so if you could convert an entire sky scraper’s windows into solar panels you could do a great deal to reduce the power consumption of a city, which would, in turn, reduce the need for power plants to use massive amounts of fuels and would be an efficient use of land, as devoting large lots of land to power production drives property prices up.
MIT has been doing research into a dye system that, while only currently at 1% efficiency, they are hoping to soon reach a 10% efficiency with. This isn’t the most hopeful, in my opinion, as it would mean ridiculously expensive renovations to entire buildings, but Ensol, out in Norway, has produced a polymer spray that only slightly dims glass, while converting it into an 8-10% efficient power source. They’re hoping to have the spray boosted to a 20% efficiency by 2016, which would mean that existing glass panels could become as efficient as expensive solar panels by simply coating them with a spray.
There’s also already a product called “power plastic” that Konarka, based out of Lowell, MA has in a research stage, but that has been produced in mass for interested clients, that is translucent enough to allow a great deal of light through and has been used as solar windows for skylights and ceilings that produces 6% efficiency.
It’s not a lot, but combined with other renewable energy ideas, I think solar windows can make a big difference.
Updated August 3, 2011. Published May 9, 2011. Bill Szydlowski
