This is a real thing from Stanford: peel-and-stick solar panels. Put 'em wherever: glass, wood, plastic, the dog. It''s pretty great and doesn't seem like much of a radical revision in solar technology, but, rather, a change in fabrication technology. Which is important because, unlike a solar power paint job, you should be able to get an amount of power generation from solar stickers that's comparable to regular panels, and it's a thing that could probably happen very soon.There are catches of course. The stickers are actually pretty complicated. The "back" of the material, the part you'd chuck if we were talking about band-aids, is a composite wafer of silicon and nickel. It falls away only after being soaked in water. Once removed, the solar cells themselves will only stick with the help of 90°C heat.All that aside, this is still pretty exciting. "Now you can put [the cells] on helmets, cell phones, convex windows, portable electronic devices, curved roofs, clothing – virtually anything," says Xiaolin Zheng, senior author of a new paper in Scientific Reports. "For that matter, we may be just at the beginning of this technology. The peel-and-stick qualities we're researching probably aren't restricted to Ni/SiO2. It's likely many other material interfaces demonstrate similar qualities, and they may have certain advantages for specific applications. We have a lot left to investigate."So, one imagines printed circuits or LCDs made with this process, e.g. the flexible iPhones of the future. No, it's not as cool as the solar panel spray paint researchers revealed last year, but it does seem a bit more possible in the near-term.Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.
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