In the Future Your House Will be a Solar Panel

The house of the future should be covered in thin filmy solar power, and it might not even have to look like a giant silicon circuit board. Instead, it may resemble the house you live in now, but with a solar photovoltaic thermal energy system on the roof and thin power-generating film on the windows. Two promising new bits of technology will be responsible, if they pan out.

A researcher in Michigan thinks he has come up with a rooftop solar system that both generates power and efficiently heats water. Typically, that has required two separate systems: rooftop panels and solar thermal collectors that heat water.

Due to limited rooftop real estate, there’s always been a bit of an either/or question surrounding the two; solar water heaters are cheaper and efficient, but they can’t power your stuffs. There’s a reason that solar water heaters are rampant in China, but rooftop PV ain’t.

But along comes Joshua Pearce, an associate professor of materials science and engineering at Michigan Technological University with a system that combines both applications:

You don't have to cool down thin-film silicon to make it work. In fact, Pearce's group discovered that by heating it to solar-thermal operating temperatures, near the boiling point of water, they could make thicker cells that largely overcame the Staebler-Wronski effect [which reduces efficiency of thin film solar when its exposed to sunlight]. When they applied the thin-film silicon directly to a solar thermal energy tcollector, they also found that by spike annealing (baking the cell once a day), they boosted the solar cell's electrical efficiency by over 10 percent. The symbiotic process solves that real estate problem, making both the thermal and electrical side of the PVT more efficient. "People could have thermal and electrical energy in a neat little package," Pearce said.

By sticking thin film panels on the traditional solar water heating system, you can double your solar mileage. Also, the thin-film requires less silicon, so when we’re mass manufacturing that stuff to cover the houses of the future with it, we won’t run out as fast.

People have been fooling around with solar power-making windows for a while now. They’ve typically been inefficient and funny looking, but perhaps not for long. New research into window power has yielded another neat little breakthrough. ScienceDaily reports that William Wiegman has “calculated how much electricity can be generated using so-called luminescent solar concentrators. These are windows which have been fitted with a thin film of material that absorbs sunlight and directs it to narrow solar cells at the perimeter of the window.”

Now, if you want your power generated by transparent, normal-looking windows, you’ll need 4 square meters of film to run your computer—the invisible film is only 2% efficient. But opt for a grey or red tint, efficiency jumps to 9%, and, as a bonus, your house exudes a futuristic solar power-generating aesthetic. And you can power much more of your stuffs with solar.

All this stuff will be expensive for the foreseeable future, which is here, but not evenly distributed. Gibson’s aphorism has haunted solar since its inception, which is why we need policies that help more people cover their homes in solar power. Solar Mosaic, a Berkeley-based company, is built on one smart idea: a Kickstarter-ish model that helps regular folks invest in local solar power installations and earn returns from the plant's revenue when it's up and running (rap video here). Germany’s feed-in-tariff has been extremely effective, and should be emulated. Above all, the houses of the future must be smartly and efficiently designed and built to reduce the need for things like air conditioning and heating in the first place. But they very well may also be covered in thin solar film.

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