New Energy Unveils Its Largest and Highest-Performance See-Through SolarWindow Capable of Generating Electricity on Glass

New Energy Technologies Inc., developer of see-through SolarWindow coatings, capable of generating electricity on glass and flexible plastics, made public never-before-seen images of the company’s largest area, high-performance SolarWindow arrays. These SolarWindow arrays measure more than 232 cm² – a significant achievement for size, improving upon New Energy’s previous achievements at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), and produced with highly-uniform, colored tints preferred by commercial window manufacturers for installation on skyscrapers, worldwide.

“Among the most important criteria for developing SolarWindow™ applications for today’s skyscrapers is providing a set of neutral colors that remain see-through and are uniform in fabrication. Today, we’ve revealed a record-breaking, largest-area see-through, organic photovoltaic (OPV) SolarWindow array that addresses tall-tower and commercial building glass requirements, they also bear the promise of facile scale-up capabilities and unparalleled manufacturability,” explained John A. Conklin, president and CEO of New Energy Technologies, Inc.
This SolarWindow array is more than 35% larger than the Company’s previously-fabricated, 170 cm² working module achievement. That prior module was already 14 times larger than the then-previous largest-area OPV module ever fabricated at the NREL.

The company’s latest high-performance, large-area SolarWindow has been fabricated through the efforts of New Energy’s principal scientist, Dr. Scott Hammond, in collaboration with NREL researchers, particularly Dr. Maikel van Hest, Dr. Dana C. Olson and Dr. Scott Mauger.

NREL is among the world’s most respected and advanced solar-photovoltaic research institutions, and over its 37-year history has been credited for ground-floor support of many of the commercial technologies employed by today’s renewable energy industries. NREL and New Energy have been working through a cooperative research and development agreement to advance the company’s SolarWindow technology for generating electricity on glass windows.

“We continue to meet and exceed our device design, architecture, uniformity, color, and transparency development goals,” said Conklin. “Accomplishing these goals allows us to now advance towards larger area, commercial scale windows while maintaining uniform, neutral colors and scalable power.”

Architecturally neutral colors and scalable power are important to achieving the company’s near-term commercial objective, its development of electricity-generating windows for skyscrapers. Engineers envision replacing today’s passive glass windows with New Energy’s electricity-generating SolarWindow systems on all four sides of tall towers – such installations could contribute to the goal of self-powered skyscrapers.

Unlike traditional building-applied photovoltaic (PV) systems, restricted to use in direct sunlight on very limited skyscraper rooftop space, SolarWindow is designed to operate in sunlight and shaded conditions on the many thousands of square feet of glass surfaces common to today’s high-rise towers – a game-changing advantage.

“The unique properties of OPV allow for low-cost, high-volume manufacturing and provide many advantages over conventional, inorganic PV technologies for window applications,” explained Dr. Hammond. “The unparalleled aesthetics of our SolarWindow prototypes are the result of numerous novel techniques and processes we’ve developed, which have allowed our joint New Energy-NREL team to successfully overcome technical hurdles and achieve significant milestones with size, electrical power, and color – some of the most important features to developing viable products.”