Developing a sustainable organic hybrid solar cell has long been an active goal of many researchers. While some attempts have been successful in the past only recent developments have enabled organic hybrids to sustain themselves for extended periods of time – with new developments allowing the cells to remain active for up to 8 months instead of a few short hours that have been standard up till now.

The benefits of this are primarily twofold: the development of a sustainably hybrid means that solar cells can be produced for considerably less investment than standard photovoltaic silicon-based cells currently can due to the need to no longer rely upon highly processed and refined silicon, while at the same time they can ensure high energy conversion ratios that cannot be normally realized with pure synthetic processes. The reason for this higher energy conversion ratio lies in an organic cell’s natural ability to quickly and effectively transfer energy from one location to another through the use of quantum transfer pathways, meaning energy first determines the most efficient path possible to travel down before proceeding – thus meaning energy moving from one point to another with 99% efficiency (whereas current high-efficiency silicon-based photovoltaic cells can only maintain roughly 40 to 45% efficiency ratios at their peak performance).

The recent hybrid organic solar cells being produced and explored have been developed by a joint effort between the National Institute for Nanotechnology (NINT) and the University of Alberta and are a combination of a plastic housing with an energy transfer system embedded in a chemical coating to allow for the organic material contained within the sheet to transmit excess energy for usage. By utilizing an advanced polymer coating the initial prototype solar cell developed by the Alberta-NINT team was able to operate continuously at high capacity for over 8 months as of its announcement at Advanced Functional Material conference held on June 22 of this year, however the cell was unfortunately damaged in transit after the announcement and failed to continue functioning beyond the 8-month straight run.

This means that the cells may actually operate well over the record-setting 8-month period thus far, with a potential to operate either indefinitely or virtually indefinitely given the proper circumstances. If perfected to ensure greater hardship and replicated on a mass level (something that should be relatively inexpensive to do given the processes involved) this could mean a revolution within the solar cell industry, providing cheap, effective and highly portable solar energy generators worldwide.