Ultra-Thin Solar Cells 1000 Times More Powerful Than Conventional PV Per Pound

The general drive in the solar energy technology industry has been towards the development of higher solar cell efficiencies and lowered manufacturing costs, but are there other avenues of improvement worth exploring? Such as the development of ultra-thin, ultra-lightweight solar cells? That’s exactly what new research from MIT is suggesting — that the development of extremely thin, lightweight solar cells has the potential to completely revolutionize the industry.

Such extremely thin and lightweight solar cells have the potential to greatly surpass “any substance other than reactor-grade uranium” with regard to the energy produced per pound of material. According to the researchers, such solar cells could be created by utilizing stacked sheets of one-molecule-thick materials such as graphene or molybdenum disulfide.

The new approach “pushes towards the ultimate power conversion possible from a material” with regard to solar energy,” according to Jeffrey Grossman, the Carl Richard Soderberg Associate Professor of Power Engineering at MIT, and senior author of the new study.

The researchers say that even utilizing just a single bilayer of two-dimensional materials — such as graphene, molybdenum disulfide, molybdenum diselenide, etc — it’s possible to create solar cells with efficiencies of 1-2%. While that may not sound like much at first when compared to conventional solar cells, when you consider the resources, time, and materials that go into making conventional solar cells (as well as the space they take up and their weight) and compare that to a solar cell that is thousands of times lighter, uses considerably less material, and is lighter than tissue paper… the appeal of the technology becomes obvious. As of now, the two-layer solar cell design is about 1 nanometer thick — hundreds of thousands of times thinner than a conventional silicon solar cell.