A Sticker Boosts Up Solar Panels

This polymer film contains microstructures that bend incoming sunlight so that the panels can absorb it and produce more electricity, and it also can be applied to already installed solar panels.

This rather cheap technology is developed by a small startup called Genie Lens Technologies, from Englewood, Colorado, it could lower the costs per watt of solar power and most of all, it can be applied to any type of solar panel - crystalline silicon and newer thin-film solar panel technology - already installed or not.

Genie Lens CEO and co-founder Seth Weiss, says that this polymer film does three things: it prevents the reflexion of light off the surface of the panels, it traps it inside in the semiconductor materials so that it can be transformed into electricity and it redirects incoming light to that it travels along the surface of the semiconductor material and have higher chances of being absorbed.

The base of this new technology is the way the light is interacting with different surfaces within the solar panel and also finding the perfect bending angle so that the maximum amount of light can be captured and transformed.

This bending angle is very important because the light has to enter the solar panel at a right angle, not too large so that it does not reflect off it and be lost.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory made several tests that established that the film increases power output on average between 4 and 12.5 percent, with the best performances under cloudy conditions.

Even if adding the film, in the factory or on solar panels already installed, increases the overall costs 1-10 percent, the additional energy produced by the panels and the fact that it would take less panels for the same surface would justify the price.

Evidently, the entire benefit depends on how long this polymer film lasts and even if Weiss says that the films made by his company will last 20 years, this has not yet been verified, Technology Review reports.

If the film is scratched over time, if it attracts dust or becomes discolored after many years in the sun, this might actually decrease the power output and become problematic.