Plastic Solar Cells: Understanding the Special Additive

ChEap SolaR ElECTRiCiTy While you are reading this article, your computer is using electricity. Where does this electricity come from? In 2013, around 67% of the electricity used in the U.S. was generated by burning coal or natural gas [1]. What if the supply of coal and natural gas runs out? And what about the pollution and climate change caused by burning gas and coal? There is a much friendlier source of energy: the sun! Best of all, it is free! The sun always shines and provides energy to the earth in the form of light, even on cloudy days. Solar panels convert this light into electricity, but solar panels are still pretty expensive. If solar panels were less expensive, we could use the sun to its full potential and have very cheap electricity! Solar cells use freely available sunlight to make electricity. At the present time, solar electricity does not come cheap, because solar panels are rather expensive. Now imagine that we could reduce costs by printing solar panels like we print newspapers! We can do just that with plastic solar cells. In this article, we explain the basic working principles of these novel plastic solar cells and then show how a stunning threefold increase in solar energy efficiency can be achieved by including a special additive to the printing ink. The function of such a special additive seems almost magical, but as scientists we know that true magic is really rare and we simply had to find out why and how it works. That was the subject of our recent investigations and in this article we describe how we divulged the secret of the special additive.