Few hours ago the the spokesman at the Research Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials at Wake Forest University in the UK announced that they had discovered groundbreaking improvement in making efficient and inexpensive solar panels out of special plastic materials.

The scientists achieved record efficiency for organic or flexible, plastic solar cells by creating "nano-filaments" within light absorbing plastic, similar to the veins in tree leaves. This allows for the use of thicker absorbing layers in the devices, which capture more of the sun‘s light.

Plastic solar cells are flexible, light weight and easy to work with and in the same time quite inexpensive compared to traditional Silicone based solar cells. One of the greatest advantage in this new technology is that they can be integrated into traditional building facades as they do not require any special structures to support additional weight...

A large funding for this research has been given by the United States Air Forces as they are extremely interested in this technology which later on can be used in different air crafts (due to the small weight compared to traditional solar cells).

We expect this technology should become available to the US market in few years, so there is still hope for those who don‘t want to spend more than few hundreds to save the planet.