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Although there are many individual ways in which solar cells can be used, there are still only 4 basic applications to use them. Essentially, any way a solar cell can be used will fall into a category that I shall briefly describe below.Utility Grid Connections – This is when solar cells supplement energy needs for the house or commercial business, being hooked into the regular electrical grid and supplying power directly through the lines. If more electricity is generated by solar than is needed, many electrical companies will give credit and/or refunds for the extra power sent back into the lines.A Grid Interactive System – When solar cells are used to maintain and charge up battery back-up systems for household or commercial usage. Any person or business would use a system like this to insure continued power if main grid electricity was shut down for any reason. Computer banks might benefit greatly from this technology.Remote Solar Cell Usage – Solar cells and panels used as an electricity supply in places where electrical service has not been developed yet. Wilderness cabins, undeveloped landscape and 3rd world countries would all benefit with using solar power in these remote areas.Product Applications for Consumers – Basically the use of solar cells to replace battery applications in a wealth of products. Things like calculators, cap fans, and any low voltage toy can be made to run off of solar cells saving on battery use and consequently, landfill issues for discarded batteries.With the newer higher efficiency solar cells and panels on the market today, these applications have become more common and useful than ever before.

Tracking advances in solar cell technology, I’ve stumbled across another landmark efficiency gain.  This one, obtained by switching from conventional screen printing to a non-contact aerosol jet printer, has upped efficiencies by 2 percent on thin-film solar cells.Thin-film solar cells (TFSC) are defined as solar cells made by depositing one or more thin layers (nanometers to micrometers) of photovoltaic material on a substrate. These thin-film cells are classed as: amorphous silicon, cadmium telluride, copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS), polysilicon, dye-sensitized solar cells, or organic (plastic, or polymer) solar cells – the latter three still in development stages.Printing is a deposition method, and the use of aerosol jet printing could raise the copper indium gallium selenide efficiency – already reported at 9.5 percent (with reports from NREL in excess of 19 percent) – to a value competitive with silicone-based solar at about half the cost to manufacture.The advance, coming from the Fraunhofer Institute’s Solar Energy Systems in Germany, reports that using an Optomec printer enabled thinner strata deposition of metallic, semiconducting and insulating inks via nanoscale pigments developed by Applied Nanotech Inc. enabled efficiences in excess of 20 percent, as compared to previous figures of 16 to 18 percent.Fraunhofer also used the printer to fabricate front-side metallization lines on otherwise conventional solar cells, which enabled it to shrink the metallization area and boost efficiency by reducing shading losses.Screen-printed solar cells can be manufactured faster than ink-jet printing methods, and the Optomec’s 40-nozzle head can print a solar cell in under 3 seconds. What this means to you, the consumer, is a future of truly affordable solar. What it means to the environment is of inestimable value.Of course, waiting to save a few bucks doesn’t make a lot of sense in terms of the environment. News coming out of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Poznan, Poland (December 5 to 12) indicates that climate change is not only upon us, but likely to reach that critical “tipping point” in as little as a decade.

How Solar Cells Save the Environment

Sure, we all know that solar panels are green and clean, but how really green are they? Wouldn’t it be nice to actually see some facts and figures for a change instead of hearing phrases like solar cells save oil or solar cells reduce air pollutants? Anyone can say that about anything green, but here we will now look at some honest to goodness hard facts to ponder.

First things first, a 2.5kw solar panel array, which is very common, will supply about 380 kilowatts per month calculated with 5 sun hours per day.  The average house, meanwhile, burns about 700 kilowatts of electricity per month.  In raw terms, those electrical savings will amount to over 300 barrels of oil saved per year, or the equivalent mileage of 270,000 driven miles.

solar panel

Want more details? Having that system saves 2 tons of coal burning which generates the same amount of electricity. Needless to say, that cuts down on the equivalent amount of acid rain emissions, and literally reduces all greenhouse gases by over one quarter of a million pounds! Over 25 years, in a botanical and environmental sense, this is like planting 5000 trees, doing all that good from the roof of your house!

Now,  couple those figures with the rising cost of electricity, and you are doing just as much good for your pocketbook as you are for the safe environment.Those are just the facts. But maybe best of all, knowing about all of this and then going solar gives you something much better then just facts, it gives you some piece of mind.

Currently, most solar technologies are delivered via silicon crystals, whose highly refined nature and relative scarcity make them expensive components in the solar process. This makes the end-product equally expensive, and cost is one of the factors limiting the use of solar panels to generate energy.

Plastic, or polymer, solar cells are relative newcomers to solar technology, but their potential advantages – lower cost, lighter weight and greater flexibility – promise to sweep the solar industry, once sourcing and manufacturing are refined.Polymers are plastic-type substances, usually made from petroleum. Organic plastics, typically represented by such products as amber and shellac (or tree sap), may soon be available from cellulose, or food products like corn, making organic polymer solar technology not only inexpensive but environmentally friendly; i.e., disposable.

Konarka Technologies, Inc., recently announced that their flagship product, Power Plastic®, was rated at 6 percent efficiency. This may not seem like much, but solar panels currently in use rarely boast more than 12- to 14-percent efficiency, and polymer cell technology is still in its infancy. For Konarka to achieve 6 percent with its flexible organic based photovoltaic (PV) solar is truly an important milestone, as co-developer Dr. Alan Heeger of the University of California (Santa Barbara) notes.”This progress gives us confidence that we are on a technology pathway toward the vision of high efficiency, low cost ‘plastic’ solar cells.”

Heeger of Konarka

Heeger, one of the co-founders of Konarka, received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2000. He and his colleagues at UCSB are currently focused on issues related to the fundamental electronic structure of polymer solar cells, and hopes in the near future to bump that efficiency rating to a full 10 percent, which would make it highly competitive with silicon-based solar.

Another discovery, from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, promises to improve polymer solar material by substituting a silicon atom (or a crystalline) for a carbon atom in the backbone of the polymer. Eventually, says UCLA researcher and co-author Hsiang-Yu Chen, solar cells may be as thin as paper, attachable to any surface, and colored to match different applications.Imagine hanging a solar panel alongside your deck or patio that looks like a Van Gogh!

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