Flexible sheet-like solar PV cells research by NREL and Stanford University

Due to advance in flexible electronic material including the semiconductor material itself, there is now an effort to produce peel and stick kind of solar PV sheets. The flexibility offers multiple advantages compared to rigid Solar PV. Stanford University and the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) are partnering to develop such peel and stick solar PV. Read the full release from NREL. It may be possible soon to charge cell phones, change the tint on windows, or power small toys with peel-and-stick versions of solar cells, thanks to a partnership between Stanford University and the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). A scientific paper, "Peel and Stick: Fabricating Thin Film Solar Cells on Universal Substrates," appears in the online version of Scientific Reports, a subsidiary of the British scientific journal Nature. Peel-and-stick, or water-assisted transfer printing (WTP), technologies were developed by the Stanford group and have been used before for nanowire based electronics, but the Stanford-NREL partnership has conducted the first successful demonstration using actual thin film solar cells, NREL principal scientist Qi Wang said. The university and NREL showed that thin-film solar cells less than one-micron thick can be removed from a silicon substrate used for fabrication by dipping t...