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00:00There's really only one renewable energy source that could power the whole world right now today. And that's all our energy there's more than enough solar energy hitting the earth to power the earth many times over we're all familiar with the story of solar technology limitless potential. Somewhat disappointing results. One of the big hurdles is where to put it in the places where we most need power. There isn't a lot of space for big heavy opaque panels of course if you could make solar cells thin light and transparent you could put them almost anywhere . So this is actually a solar panel that you're probably familiar with. It's been around for decades. And what this does is it absorbs the light that hits the surface of the CAC converts light into electricity. So here's an example of a transparent version. So this is a transparent solar cell. You may Yeah . OK we're commercializing what we call a transparent solar cell . It's really just an invisible film that you can put on any surface. You can go on a mobile device display can go on a building window and it can generate energy on those surfaces . Our vision was really that we want to integrate solar technology into the products and surfaces we interact with every day. The idea of transparency kind of has risen to the top is something that seems had a lot of value for a wide range of applications in the past. People tried to make solar cells transparent by shrinking down the size of the components but that only gets you so far ubiquitous figured out that the key to a truly transparent solar cell isn't the size of the parts you use but the kind of light you're trying to absorb. We've designed photo active materials that let visible light pass through but can selectively harvest the parts of the solar spectrum that we can't see with our Eye namely the ultraviolet. And then there are Fred parts of the solar spectrum. And so we can have a very transparent solar cell. You're not capturing the visible light . Presumably that is affecting the efficiency of the panel to some degree. Yeah. If you look at traditional solar cell it absorbs light in all parts of the spectrum of the light that hits the surface. Thirty three percent of that light is converted into electricity with a transparent cell. You cut off the visible part of the spectrum but you can still achieve up to twenty two percent with our pilot production facility. We expect to be able to reach around 10 percent power efficiency which is a drop but then I suppose there are advantages to having things that you can see through as opposed to things that you cannot. Absolutely. Now you have a lot more surface area that you can apply solar technologies to the first place ubiquitous wants to put solar cells on the displays of mobile devices which could mean the smartphone of the near future never runs out of batteries. But the real potential of a technology like this becomes clear when you start to think big like skyscraper big currently there's a huge amount of surface area on the vertical space of buildings that's unused for energy harvesting utilizing transparent solar cells to convert those windows into solar panels as a way to utilize that surface area for energy generation. So now you're not just constrained to these types of devices on the roof you can actually use the vertical area of the buildings as well. We see this as really being deployed everywhere generating power in the background without even knowing that it's there. This won't be the only solution that we need but we see it as being a very important technology to make a more sustainable society .

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Invisible Solar Cells That Could Power Skyscrapers

Silicon Valley startup Ubiquitous Energy is making the world’s first transparent solar cells, a technology that could greatly expand the reach of solar power. Their technology is an invisible film that can go on any surface and generate power, which could lead to cell phones and tablets that never run out of batteries — or skyscrapers that can use their massive banks of windows as solar panels. Bloomberg's Sam Grobart reports. (Video by: Alan Jeffries, Justin Beach) (Music by Andy Clausen) (Source: Bloomberg)