Plastic power

What if you had solar cells on your bikini, so you could charge your mobile phone at the beach? Or on your car, for the CD player. Or on your tent, to charge your night light. Or... in the Science LinX exhibition. Are solar cells the answer to our energy addiction?

The fossil fuels we presently use produce far too much CO₂. And, what’s more, they have almost run out. There are renewable sources of energy, however, such as wind turbines and solar panels.

But the cleanest, safest and quietest way of producing electricity is by generating it directly using sunlight. And there is more than enough of that: in one and a half hours, as much energy shines on the earth as was needed to meet the total world energy demand in 2007. And the sun is expected to keep shining for another 4.5 billion years. So what’s the problem?

Until recently, the problem with electric (photovoltaic; PV) solar panels was that they were so expensive that they were hardly used. This trend is changing, however. While in the previous 20 years the surface area covered with solar panels increased by an average of 25% per year, in the past few years this has increased to 40% per year. The panels are becoming cheaper thanks to new technologies and economies of scale. In Italy it has already become profitable to produce your own electricity with solar panels. By 2015 more countries, including the US, are expected to follow.

At FWN they have been developing ‘plastic’ solar cells since 1996. These are cells in which two organic materials (carbon-based materials) cooperate to produce electricity. To date these solar cells have been markedly less effective than the standard, silicon-based cells. But the research is making steady progress, and experts anticipate that the first commercial products with plastic solar cells will appear on the market in a few years.

For the time being, however, don’t expect to see organic solar cells on rooftops, let alone in the Sahara. They are still much too fragile. However, teams of researchers and a growing number of companies are hard at work to increase the lifetime of these cells.

‘Imagine if we could use the carbon in CO₂ for the production of organic solar cells,’ exclaims excited researcher Kees Hummelen, who studies the chemistry of molecular materials. ‘That would be the ultimate solution for climate change!’ He thinks plastic solar cells have a bright future.

The advantage of plastic solar cells is that they could, in principle, be produced on a gigantic scale using cheap and sustainable production techniques. To satisfy our hunger for energy, from 2030 we will need to start installing some 10,000 km² of solar panels every year. Then it will really be worth our while to integrate solar cells in clothing, portable electronics, vehicles and endless other applications.

You can experiment with silicon and plastic solar cells yourself in Science LinX.

Links

• Energy portal
• A bright future for plastic solar panels
• Sustainability for secondary school
• Fair Nature
• (Bio)organic Materials and Devices group

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to: Prof. Kees Hummelen, Stratingh Institute for Chemistry and Adams Appel. Please contact Science LinX if you should have been included in the acknowledgements.

Authors

Prof. Kees Hummelen and Renske de Jonge