Solar Cells from Plastic?
By: Lance Winslow
Solar energy is abundant indeed, as our Sun is the best nuclear generator ever known to mankind. It provides heat and light in literally perpetual motion. With such and energy source it makes sense to collect all you can. Some call solar energy alternative energy, but actually all the other energy mankind produces is actually an alternative to the sun, as it is the Planets main energy source and has been for 5.5 Billion years. Indeed, anything mankind decides to produce is absolutely a secondary thought. We were not even around while the Sun was nurturing our ancestral cell life. Think about it.
Well it turns out some kick-butt UCLA researchers have developed a polymer plastic solar cell which will be much cheaper to produce than growing the current crystals for solar cells, additionally they will be non-corrosive and of course made of plastic it will not rust. These solar cells can be produced for 10-20% the costs of regular solar cells.
These little plastic solar cells are made of plastic sandwiched conductive electrodes and should be fairly easy to mass-produce for all sort of uses. The total cost per watt available will be about one-third the cost of their silicon solar cell technology cousins. This could prove the answer to the problems associated with the Return on Investment of Solar Cells as opposed to grid-generated electricity. This is good news, don’t you think?
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