Self-Repairing Solar Cells May Improve Solar Use

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The worst thing about solar power–and indeed, there’s a list–is that the things designed to gather solar power, photovoltaic cells, are easily damaged by the sun itself. Basically, the mere act of collecting sunlight damages the sunlight collector. And considering how much it costs to put in a solar array–thousands of bucks depending on your usage–it definitely bodes well to see folks like MIT working on self-repairing solar cells.

They were looking at the way plants repair themselves while gathering solar energy via photosynthesis–a plant might replace proteins every 45 minutes or so–and thus, using a combination of carbon nanotubes and phospholipid discs (phospholipids are a synthetic molecular mix that allows light to be converted to electrons faster) built a solar cell that gathers light, converts it to electricity, and repairs its own damage from doing same.

When this is put into practice it may well double solar cell efficiency over current levels and go on from there, but don’t look for these any time soon, sadly. They’ve only just hit the prototype stage.