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SolarWindow Tech – at the verge of a breakthrough?

October 12, 2015

Via: ITCurated

What does solar energy have to do with mobility? The long-awaited alternative energy availability comes with a twist, when an initiative envisions the entire glass surface of the office buildings converted into a huge energy factory. Considering all the tech equipment hosted by such buildings and its energy needs, the image of a future office building where the technology is powered up by the outside glass surfaces is suddenly a progressive, modern hypothesis.

Maybe that is precisely why a certain technology has caught the attention of several important online publications – SolarWindow tech claims it is close to making that future possible. There are of course other startups or pilot programs tackling the same idea, but we will try analyzing this particular venture for now.

The company New Energy Technologies based in Columbia, Maryland re-branded itself SolarWindow Technologies in March 2015. Its technology created a bit of a buzz online – “first-of-their-kind electricity-generating see-through windows and products”, to quote the company’s presentation.
One of their products is SolarWindow–Commercial – a type of flat-glass panel destined for under-construction commercial towers with the scope of turning the vast glass surfaces into energy generators.
Their research is ongoing and the investor’s page offers the necessary details about this venture.

On 20 August 2015 an event took place, aiming to answer the “when” question: when would these energy-generating systems enter the market? Apparently we are talking of the next four years’ wait for beginning the implementation (commercial availability in 2017) – this is the declared expectancy.
An article dating 24 August mentions an important detail: the new solar cells developed have the capacity to produce 50 times the common panels’ energy.

How SolarWindow technology works

According to the available insights, the new SolarWindow panels have a photovoltaic coating of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, mixed with some other undisclosed ingredients. The finite product is transparent, while it keeps its light-absorbing properties (the energy-extracting conductors are also clear and therefore don’t darken the panels). This coating goes to the interior of plastic panels too, keeping its transparency and efficiency.
A synopsis of the 20 August webcast, (although limited by the NDA conditions announced previous to the event), mentions that a thin film organic coating would go between the two layers of glass from the double-pane windows – thus ensuring anti-degradation protection. The clear conductors harvest and transport the energy to the quick-connect interface from the panes’ edges. Therefore, the technology is composed of OPV (organic photovoltaic) material, less efficient than semiconductor PV and requiring a specific amount of lighting in order to start processing – but the inside artificial light is also used in generating energy (an interesting detail).
Manufacturing this new kind of solar panels is easy to integrate in the already-existing glass industry processes.

Another take on the fully transparent solar cell technology belongs to the Michigan State University researchers.They are employing a fully transparent solar concentrator – and indeed the photos accompanying the article show a piece of coated glass that does not modify in any way the landscape color. (In the SolarWindow photos we could notice a color difference).
This chemical engineering exploit is named Ubiquitous Energy – and it went on being an MIT startup first reported in 2013, co-founded by Richard Lunt (assistant professor at Michigan Uni). The core tech innovation is the transparent luminescent solar concentrator (TLSC) – organic salts absorbing ultraviolet and infrared light, and converting it into another infrared wavelength (guided towards the panel edge’s converters).

SolarWindow – believable or not?

A more critical analysis of the SolarWindow Company and its technology is available here. The arguments building doubt in regard with the technology come from analyzing the press releases available so far, the estimated time frame, as well as the data linked to the company’s status itself. The big future of this technology is seen as conditional, and the available information rather addressed to the industry than to the investors.

It is a fact that New Energy Technologies (now SolarWindow) also made impressive statements prior to 2014 (at a time when a Sponsored Research Agreement at the University of South Florida appeared in the venture’s description). Maybe any good thing takes a long time to implement. Alternatively, maybe the technology did not deliver the expected results in the initially estimated time.
It is however true that the media feedback on the SolarWindow technology is currently insufficient. The big voices have spoken on this subject – and the lack of such professional analyses may raise a few question marks.

Producing clean and efficient energy-generating systems is a dream waiting to come true for so long. There is a thirst for such technologies – and a need for them to deliver on their promises. This existing gap increases the risk of both failure and scams. And the only ones that can secure investors, industry and public opinion are the neutral researchers in the field, whose experience and knowledge allows distinguishing a fake solution from a real one.
Then again, many scholars from the past did not see current technologies as being feasible. Hoping that today’s scientists have learned from the mistakes of the past – we are waiting for their say in such crucial technological matters.

Solar Technology Future

For further information on this subject, one might consult the detailed material provided by MIT – the result of their study on solar energy from their series of initiatives “Future of”.
Another material, which on the other side advises a more precautionary, less enthusiastic attitude towards this type of alternative energy, brings into discussion the economic perspective– the validity of solar power, when all costs are taken into consideration. The situation considers the technological means available in 2012 – but, as we’ve seen in our article, the steps in developing photovoltaic technology have not been huge. Without public subsidies, and without disposing of revolutionary means to reduce the producing costs – solar energy is just not competitive yet.
An updated global statistic incorporated in an opinion featured on Fortune paints a more optimistic image: by 2014, 40 GW of global solar photovoltaics (PV) could in theory power almost 6 million American homes. Bloomberg estimates 600GW of solar PV by 2020, and 1,900GW by 2030. An interesting piece of information here would also be the one about using solar energy to power up mobile phones, surpassing the lack of a modern energy grid in some areas on the globe.

With all the recent talk about global wireless Internet, it makes sense that an energy source it needed to power up the devices used in remote places or in areas that have no conventional energy grid. Thus, mobility everywhere also depends on flexible, less conventional energy sources. To sum up, both urban office buildings and isolated device users might benefit from such energy systems becoming reality.