Flexible solar panels offer a great alternative to traditional rigid solar panels. Solar power seems to be the pinnacle of human energy technology. It harnesses energy straight from the indirect source of all energy on the planet; the sun. Solar technology has been reasonably slow to catch up to the expectations and demands of a market growing increasingly fed up with fossil fuel energy production, as solar electricity has a number of drawbacks that are preventing its wide adoption.

Flexible solar panels offer could start to change that. Part of the reason for this is cost, part is efficiency, and part is real estate. Manufacturing costs are still one of the largest hindrances to the development of solar cell technology, mostly in purchasing and assembling specialized materials. When assembled, these materials run into what seems to be a fundamental limit in their efficiency. As a result of this limit on efficiency, to get a reasonable amount of electricity out of solar panels, you need to have a lot of them, and they all need to be exposed to the sun. Because of innovations in construction, the creation of flexible solar panels sheds new light on this situation.

How do flexible solar panels work?

Solar panels are built using semiconductors and function on the principle of the photovoltaic effect. Semiconductors are materials like silicon that have been modified with other ingredients that give it the property of conducting electricity (by way of allowing electrons to flow through it). Simply put, the photovoltaic effect occurs when you shine light on a semiconductors arranged a certain way. The light displaces electrons in the semiconductor, which flow in one direction across the arrangement of semiconductors and create a voltage. If you do this with a large area of semiconducting surfaces, the voltage is significant enough to be useful.

The problem is that in the past, the semiconductors (almost universally silicon) tend to be very rigid, meaning that engineers have not been able to manipulate them beyond changing the size of the rigid panels they use. Recent developments have created flexible solar panels by changing the semiconductor to varieties other than silicon. In particular, they have chosen varieties of semiconductor that can be layered as thin films, or layers less than a micrometer thick. Because these semiconductors are so thin, they are very flexible. Using flexible electronic connections and plastics instead of glass to protect the cells, scientists have created a thin, durable, flexible, and efficient means of harnessing solar energy.

Are flexible solar panels expensive?

They use less material to create, so widespread adoption of flexible solar panel manufacturing technology is likely to bring a significant reduction in production costs compared to older silicon panels. More importantly, flexible solar panels mean that we can now collect solar energy in places we would never before have anticipated: clothing, curtains, exteriors of vehicles, and many others. Incorporating solar panels conveniently into our daily lives could eliminate the problem of solar panels occupying a lot of real estate. Though widespread adoption is still far off, this is a major step in the right direction.