Mass-produced, printable solar cells enter market and could change everything

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27 pointsalexgrcs6 comments

Clicked through two links to get to the original article and there is still no mention of how efficient these cells actually are. Printed cells have been around for a while, but efficiency has been so low that you you would need something like a square meter in direct sun to charge your phone.

9 or 10 percent it looks like. http://arena.gov.au/files/2014/11/Printing-solar-cells-publi...

Thank you for the link. For other people interested in a comparison, there is a very nice graph on wikipedia which compares the solar cell efficiency of many different technologies and how they improved over recent years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell_efficiency

Thanks. That's not too terrible - about half the efficiency of residential rooftop panel at a significant price reduction.

I would like to see an embodied energy comparison - if it's significantly lower it might be a much better short-term solution, especially if the technology keeps improving, because then it's not as bad to replace it every few years

And what do they use it for? Driving advertising displays. Now those posters the kids put up on lampposts can really annoy the heck out of you.

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