Improvements made to flexible solar panels

clipped from www.worldofrenewables.com A new breed of flexible solar power cells that are cheap and easy to make are one step closer to reality, researchers have said Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the US have recently conducted work to deepen their understanding of the complex organic films at the heart of the new solar technology. Organic photovoltaics, which rely on organic molecules to capture sunlight and convert it into electricity, in principle have significant advantages over traditional rigid silicon cells. Organic photovoltaics start out as a kind of ink that can be applied to flexible surfaces to create solar cell modules that can be spread over large areas as easily as unrolling a carpet.This makes them easier to adapt to a wide variety of power applications, and considerably cheaper to make than traditional cells. Currently even the best organic photovoltaics convert less than six per cent of light into electricity, and last only a few thousand hours.