This glass could turn skyscrapers into power generators

Solar panels are a popular method for capturing renewable energy, but they have some limitations. They need lots of space, special installation, and have some aesthetic drawbacks. But what if they look like this and every window around you doubled as a solar panel? We’ve developed a way of making solar cells transparent by only capturing the invisible light. This is the only technology that allows you to do that. Ubiquitous energy isn’t the 1st to develop solar glass. Others have found results by combining glass with solar cells that are thinner and smaller, But they can have drawbacks like lower power efficiency and less transparency. Ubiquitous took a different approach and developed a solar coating made from organic dyes designed to match the transparency of standard windows. Light absorbing dyes are found all around us. They’re in paints. They’re in pigments for clothing. What we’ve done is we’ve engineered those dyes to selectively absorb infrared light and also convert that light into electricity. And that’s key, because infrared light is invisible to the human eye. You can see that the visible light doesn’t do anything. It just passes right through the glass, while the invisible infrared light starts to generate electricity. The result, the team says, is solar glass that delivers the best combination of energy efficiency and transparency. We are beginning to do installations of our glass in real buildings. The installation here is one of the first installations of this glass. We’re controlling the voltage here, for example, to power the lighting in the room. For now, solar glass is still less efficient than traditional solar panels are, but its potential for wider use can make up for that. For example, the sales force tower in San Francisco has 70 times as much vertical surface to its rooftop, and that would mean over 20 times more energy production from transparent solar than opaque solar on the roof. The windows would generate enough electricity to offset over 1/4 of the building’s electricity consumption. And that matters in the US, where buildings consume 70% of the country’s electricity. But to offset all of that energy consumption will require more than solar windows. The company hopes their technology can complement conventional solar panels. Combining these renewable energy technologies can get buildings to net zero energy, meaning they produce as much energy as they consume. We really see the future of this technology as being applied everywhere. The sun’s energy is all around us, why not convert it into electricity?