Scientists the world over have been trying to take a space-grade, super-efficient process for creating spray-on solar cells and make it economically feasible–on Earth. Everyone said it was impossible. Until now. There are two things that have kept solar from exploding on the market: efficiency and cost. Never have the two been able to meet. Scientists achieved the ultimate in solar-cell efficiency with a space-employed process called MOVPE. But it was far too expensive to translate into anything practical back on the home planet. Now, scientists from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) say they have cracked the code with a new process of D-HVPE-grown solar cells. While both processes more or less involve spraying chemical vapors onto a substrate, MOVPE always had the efficiency advantage; but the materials used made the process itself hardly feasible from a cost standpoint. In a nutshell, MOVPE’s advantage was its ability to […]