- We totally take it for granted,
but glass is a remarkably cool substance.
I mean, think of it.
It's like a rock that you can see through,
letting the sun shine right in.
Now a new kind of glass is
taking advantage of that sun
and using it to charge
our way into the future.
Here's Albert Lawrence to explain.
(upbeat music)
- [Albert] One hour of sunlight
that hits the Earth's surface
contains enough energy to power
our planet for a full year.
Which is mind boggling.
Obviously, we need to improve our ability
to harness the sun's vital rays
to meet the increasing
global energy demand.
- Forty percent of the world's energy,
about a third of global
greenhouse emissions,
can be attributed to buildings.
- The challenge is,
most buildings don't have enough
roof space to accommodate
the number of solar panels
needed to generate self-sustaining energy.
But one possible solution
is already installed on a building.
- The next solar window
is a window that generates electricity.
So we take the sun's light,
and we convert the
infrared to electricity.
All the solar cells
currently on the market
are based off what's called
an inorganic semiconductor,
which means they can't be transparent
and there's not a way to
use them to make a window
that looks like a normal window.
- I made the drive
up the California coast
to Santa Barbara to meet Corey Hoven
and a team of scientists at
Next Energy Technologies
who are turning standard building windows
into energy-efficient solar glass.
(upbeat music)
- So, in these labs are where
we make our semiconductors.
And then we put them into an ink,
and then from that ink, we can
coat them right onto the glass,
and so a lot of the work we do
is designing those semiconductors
to kind of do everything we want.
So the sun comes and hits the window
and hits our organic semiconductors
and is converted from photons of light
into electronic carriers,
and this is uniform
across the whole window,
so that allows us to generate
a lot of electricity.
All solar panels on the
market are encapsulated.
So that means you have to
protect the solar panel
from oxygen and moisture.
So typically they would
take two pieces of glass
and put the solar panels in between them.
Well, that's almost exactly
the same thing as a window.
(upbeat music)
- To see how Next Energy
prints the infrared
capturing ink onto glass,
we had to suit up before
going inside their clean room.
- So what you're about
to see is us making,
actually, one of our
transparent solar windows.
- Ooh.
- So what we're doing here
is taking the ink,
our solar ink,
and putting them through,
it's called a slot die,
to make our films on glass.
And then we do that for a
number of different layers,
and that's how our transparent
solar panels are made.
- Wow.
- That simple.
- Just layer by layer.
- Most of these layers
are less then a hundred nanometers thick,
which means a piece of hair
is a thousand times thicker.
- Wow.
Corey grabbed a finished window pane,
and we took it outside.
Since this is already gathering energy,
can I plug this on in
and see what the output is like?
Oh, wow.
Just right away.
Jeez.
- Even in an off weather,
you can see it's still generating energy.
- Sure
- Even at high angles from the sun,
we're still generating energy.
- Well, Corey, this is
definitely shattering
everything that we've come
to expect from windows.
(upbeat music)
