A new type of solar panel that allows light to pass through it like a pane of glass has been invented by scientists who said that it is 10 times more powerful than conventional methods of producing energy from sunlight. The discovery raises the prospect of using ordinary domestic windows to generate electricity with minimum structural alterations, although scientists have not yet worked out how much it would cost to convert a domestic home to a solar-powered generator. Instead of coating the entire solar panel with solar cells – the expensive semiconductor devices that turn the energy of sunlight into electricity – the new solar panel works on the principle of concentrating the light, and the energy, at the edges of a pane of glass where it can be collected by the solar cells. Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston said that the ‘solar concentrator’ is made from a film of organic molecules that can be coated on to glass window panes or other surfaces exposed to sunlight. This allows light to pass straight through the window even though it is being used to generate power. It also means that the expensive […]