The Green Optimistic

Nicole Kuepper, a 23 year-old Australian scientist has invented a method of making cheap solar cells out of simple materials, that any DIY-er could find in his home.

Scientists from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Northwestern University invented a silicon solar cell. The interesting fact is that it’s flexible and it can be printed on a curved surface or a fabric. Although solar paint has been produced, there are a few situations where you’d rather use more solid solar cells (like porous surfaces, where paint cannot be applied well).

The workers say that the newly installed solar panels will save about 200 tons of CO2 in just 2 weeks (the equivalent of 70 tons of oil). It’s just nice. In fact, the Vatican is the only place I don’t think these expensive things will get stolen. The project is estimated to about $1.5 million.

Some recent partnership between UK university researchers and Corus Colours, also a UK-based firm, brought to the surface a promise of future commercialization of cheap dye-based solar panels.

What can you buy for $38,000? Two second-hand Priuses? No. A smaller airplane? Neither. I’ll tell you what you can have for that money: a solar powered desalination device.

This is great news. William Yuan, a 12 year-old from Beaverton, Oregon, has made an innovation in the 3D solar cells production that could provide 500 times more light absorption than commercially-available solar cells and nine times more than cutting-edge 3D solar cells. It may sound weird, but, at his age, he studied nanotechnology.

If you remember, not a long time ago we had an article talking about NASA’s plans to send a satellite to space which could capture pure Sun energy and resend it to Earth in the form of microwaves.

This is about how to build a solar furnace out of a satellite antenna dish and mirror broken in many pieces. As you may know, satellite dishes have a focal point (that is a point in which the electromagnetic energy focuses at its maximum power).