Solar panels thinner than a strand of hair will soon be everywhere

How small exactly? What if we said smaller than the width of a human hair?

Korean scientists have created solar cells that are just 1 micrometer thick, hundreds of times thinner than most solar panels and only half as thin as other solar films.

These cells are made of Gallium Arsenide as a semiconductor, “cold welded” directly onto a metal substrate without the use of any adhesive. More remarkably, they can produce nearly the same amount of power as thicker solar cells, while being able to be rolled up into a cylindrical tube with a radius of just 1.4mm.

At this thinness, these solar panels can be integrated into all sorts of wearable accessories, such as clothes, mirrors, hats, or backpacks to provide a constant source of power for our electronic devices. In fact, these panels can be integrated into almost anything.

But this isn’t the thinnest solar cell ever made. In February 2016, researchers at MIT created solar cells so small and light that they could be placed on a soap bubble without popping it.

The key to doing this, says one researcher on the team, is to make the solar cell, its support material, and a protective coating from the environment all in one process. The support material is created during cell manufacturing and never needs to be handled, cleaned, or removed from the vacuum during assembly, minimizing the possibility of contamination by dust or other materials that could degrade the cell’s performance.

The production process of this ultra-thin solar cell is done in a vacuum chamber at room temperature, without any solvents or high temperatures that are required to create traditional solar panels.

The researchers say the assembly process could be applied to a wide range of materials, including quantum dots or perovskites — solar cells that are small and transparent enough to be embedded in windows or building materials.

Of course, these are just scientific discoveries, and the path from scientific discoveries to commercial products is very long, with many difficulties and challenges.

But the trend toward solar innovation is clear. Cells are getting smaller and more flexible, using new assembly techniques that require less resources. But they are still very expensive, very expensive, and not going to come down anytime soon. Eventually, these new methods will come to market and be scaled up. And as they scale up, costs will come down.

Photovoltaics is a technology unlike any other. It could change the way we look at energy, from something that needs to be generated at a specific location to something we can harvest anytime, anywhere. Cheap, compact, and flexible solar cells can be integrated into building materials, roads, bridges, parking lots, vehicles, clothes, and even our skin.

These tiny cells won’t produce a huge amount of energy individually, but they will be ubiquitous. And as sunlight diffuses into infrastructure, the ways in which energy is stored and managed will change.

There will come a time when the entire environment of human civilization will become a giant energy harvesting and management machine. The energy system will no longer be something that relies on infrastructure, but rather will be part of and possibly scattered across many different infrastructures. Most or all of the energy that urban dwellers need will exist in a continuous and always-on grid."flow" around them.

It sounds like science fiction. But surely children born today will grow up to see it happen.