Solar power costs could fall significantly

While reading the excellent Lifehacker site’s blog this morning I happened upon an article on site YourGreenDream which carries news about environmental developments and so on.

The article is about a company called Prism Solar Technologies that has developed a method of using a hologram over a layer of glass to redirect sunlilght to solar PV cells. What this means is that you can need far less silicon.

Hopefully if this makes it to prime time this could have several major effects – you can generate the same electricity now for a much lower investment, you can generate a lot more from the same space and same amount of money you might spend on PV now (power a whole house with a rather big panel?) and even better for us in the UK, I imagine it might mean that PV power would be viable on a domestic scale even in the winter. I’d be interested to know if this is the case.

Apparently the increase in light hitting the cells is “only” 10x compared to other lens/collector solutions which can get 100x – 1000x improvements (wow) but are no doubt far more expensive, and the main selling point for this is getting cost down by reducing the amount PV cells required.

I’m wondering if you could actually make an attractive glass roof out of this however, and spend the same on PV that you would in today’s market but get a whole lot of power.