Windows that let in light and produce electricity at the same time: a recipe for a perfect life and an idea as fascinating as unattainable. At least until recently. Making a thin solar-cell film to stick on a window glass is easy enough. Making it convert sunlight into electricity at any meaningful level of efficiency was the hard part. And now scientists from Australia say they’ve cracked it. The team, led by materials chemistry professor Jacek Jasieniak, developed a new kind of semi-transparent solar cell that featured one important difference from other semi-transparent cells: they had a component replaced with an organic conductor that can be transformed into a polymer, much more stable than the original—and common—solar cell component. The original component, called Spiro-OMeTAD, is notoriously unstable, and has been known to affect adversely the way perovskite solar cells convert light into electricity. What’s a perovskite solar cell? It’s […]