Solar Windows?

Imagine standing in front of a wall of windows, surveying

the view. You hear someone enter the room behind you.

You turn. “Welcome,” you say. “Here is the video I wanted

to show you.” At the press of a button, the view vanishes

and the windows transform into a high-definition TV screen.

No, your friend isn’t James Bond, and you aren’t the next

Q. Still, even as you watch the video, your window-TV is

doing as much to help avert global catastrophe as any

Bond-film gadget ever did. You see, it’s also a solar panel,

constantly harvesting renewable energy from the sun. The

problem of climate change is not a typical movie supervillain,

but it’s a trickier problem than Goldfinger posed. Worse,

humanity’s efforts to solve it with existing technologies aren’t

working fast enough.

The heroes swooping in to the rescue could be a new

technology called organic semiconductors, a new way to make

materials that conduct electricity only under certain conditions.

Most semiconductors in modern electronics are made of

crystalline, rock-forming elements like silicon. Organic semi-

conductors, by contrast, are made primarily of carbon-based

molecules. They take less energy to make than conventional

semiconductors. A conventional photovoltaic cell, for instance,

can take years to produce as much energy as was required to

build it; an organic photovoltaic cell takes just months.

However, perhaps the most exciting thing about organic semi-

conductors is that it’s possible to design molecules that are

flexible, lightweight, colored or completely transparent. In the

lab I work in, we design and test new small molecules that

have specific, targeted properties – like making a simple

transparent pane into a window, screen and solar panel.