<story><title>Printed Solar Panels for Less Than $10 a Square Metre</title><url>https://www.newcastle.edu.au/newsroom/featured-news/the-clever-electronic-inks-rewriting-our-energy-future</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kirrent</author><text>Hey, I know the phd student who printed out these cells and set up the demonstration! It&amp;#x27;s part of the university&amp;#x27;s push for large scale organic solar demonstrations along with the smaller test cells.&lt;p&gt;From talking with him, the technology isn&amp;#x27;t really ready for prime time yet but it&amp;#x27;s getting pretty close. I think the key point is that efficiencies in small scale cells and larger scale manufacturing are still climbing (the same group has achieved greater than 5% in a cm^2 test cell iirc) and the printing is incredibly cheap and very amenable to fast scaling up.&lt;p&gt;It seems pretty obvious that you needed more efficiency for it to be a viable rooftop solution but the guy who set this up claimed that the fact he could just stick down some velcro and stick on the cells opened up some different use cases with cheap and lean installations supporting cheap cells.&lt;p&gt;All in all, if you look at how far the technology has come in the last 5 years alone, then it&amp;#x27;s a pretty exciting field to follow.</text></comment>
<story><title>Printed Solar Panels for Less Than $10 a Square Metre</title><url>https://www.newcastle.edu.au/newsroom/featured-news/the-clever-electronic-inks-rewriting-our-energy-future</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>HillaryBriss</author><text>For a &lt;i&gt;very&lt;/i&gt; rough comparison, according to this, conventional solar panels cost about $10-$12 per square foot, or very roughly $100 per square meter.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.quora.com&amp;#x2F;What-is-the-cost-per-Sq-ft-for-solar-panels&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.quora.com&amp;#x2F;What-is-the-cost-per-Sq-ft-for-solar-p...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Of course, what we really want is a comparison in terms of cost per watt.&lt;p&gt;Maybe equally important to the cost of these panels is the ease and cost of &lt;i&gt;installing&lt;/i&gt; them. These new printed panels are very flexible&amp;#x2F;lightweight and can be deployed easily and even temporarily.</text></comment>