Solar Power for Everything.

Neal R. Armstrong and his research group Placenia, are in the running for creating a thin and flexible (and portable) organic solar cell that can power many things. He walks around with one on his backpack and charges his laptop , cell phone, and ipod with it. He thought about how much energy goes into charging these items up and says "You start to do the math and thinking about the number of consumer electronic devices that you and I have added to our lives in the last decade, that I charge up typically once every night- my laptop and my cell phone etc. Then you start thinking about, 'What if I do buy an electric car, and I come home at night and plug that sucker in,' and you do the same thing. We'll shut this grid down in no time." He displays a sample in his office, a 1-inch square of glass with a thin film of indium tin oxide, a conducting transparents oxide, then a thin film of organic dyes and lastly a layer of aluminum electrodes. The thickness is about 400 nanometers (one ten-thousandth the thickness of a human hair), but shine some light on it and you have electricity...pretty amazing! Erin Ratcliff is involved and she said "We're right at the magic moment, We're right there. It's exciting to read the literature and hope that, yes, we will take off. It will be so exciting to say 'I was there for that!'" The things people can come up with anymore..