Artificial intelligence is developing more effective, durable organic solar cells — which are thin and flexible, and thus can produce energy in radically more places:
For decades, progress on organic solar cells has been stymied by how quickly light can break them down. Now AI has discovered organic light-harvesting molecules with a five-fold improvement in stability over their predecessors. Moreover, the new system can explain what makes these novel compounds more stable, to help scientists design better molecules in the future.
Solar cells made from organic materials offer several advantages over the conventional silicon ones that are now common on roofs and fields. For example, while silicon panels are heavy and rigid, organic solar cells are thin and flexible.
Since the 1980s, commercialization of high-performance organic solar cell materials has been hindered by a major problem—they degrade when exposed to light. Overcoming this hurdle has been challenging because of big gaps in scientists’ understanding of how to design photo-stable molecules, says Nick Jackson, an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
In the new study, the researchers used an artificial intelligence that provided suggestions about what molecules to create. An automated system then synthesized those compounds and probed their properties in experiments. The AI then analyzed the resulting data to improve its suggestions.
All in all, this new, iterative system generated light-harvesting molecules, the best of which were more than five times more stable on average than the compounds the researchers started with. It logged this accomplishment this after generating only 30 new candidate molecules over five rounds of synthesis, experimentation and optimization, or 1.5 percent of the 2,200 potential compounds it could have produced.
In other news, solar panels could “ink-jetted” onto your cellphone or other possessions to supply energy to you: “A coating 100 times thinner than a human hair could be ‘ink-jetted’ onto your backpack, cell phone or car roof to harness the sun’s energy, new research shows, in a development that could reduce the world’s need for solar farms that take up huge swaths of land. Scientists from Oxford University’s physics department have developed a micro-thin, light-absorbing material flexible enough to apply to the surface of almost any building or object — with the potential to generate up to nearly twice the amount of energy of current solar panels,” reports CNN.
Existing “ground-based solar farms take up a lot of land,” notes CNN. “Solar panels have contributed to deforestation” in Massachusetts, reports The College Fix, citing “a study from Harvard University”:
“Since 2010, over 5,000 acres of natural and working lands have been destroyed for solar development in Massachusetts, resulting in the emission of over half a million metric tons of CO₂— more than the annual emissions of 100,000 passenger cars,” Mass Audobon stated in a summary of its study with Harvard Forest.
“Under current siting practices, thousands of acres of forests, farms, and other carbon-rich landscapes are being converted to host large-scale solar,” the report stated.
The removal of trees undercuts the state’s requirement to reduce emissions by 2050. This is because trees are an effective carbon removal tool. “By 2030, climate-polluting emissions in Massachusetts must be reduced by 50 percent relative to 1990 levels, and by 75 percent by 2040, on the way to net-zero emissions by 2050,” the study stated.
“Because it is not feasible to eliminate fossil fuel use across the entire economy by 2050, reaching our net-zero goal will also require removing carbon from the atmosphere, to counteract our remaining [greenhouse gas] emissions,” the study stated.
It makes little sense to subsidize solar panels in Massachusetts, which is often cloudy or overcast, with thin blue or snowy gray puritan skies. But that is what the state is doing.