Flexible solar cells from the printer

Conventional solar cells on house roofs are known as large, stable panels. But could solar cells also cover retractable awnings in the future, for example? A working group at the Freiburg Materials Research Center and the Cluster of Excellence Living, Adaptive and Energy-autonomous Materials Systems (livMatS), led by Dr Uli Würfel, is producing flexible solar cells from organic materials and printing them on plastic film. The advantage of these materials is not just their flexibility: they could also be used to produce transparent solar cells that could capture sunlight on greenhouses, for example. In the video, Würfel explains the advantages and disadvantages of organic solar cells and what questions remain unanswered.