West Australian Team Develops ‘Energy-Harvesting’ Glass

For those looking for something new from a glass supplier Melbourne, there’s some good news that may brighten up the day.

In Australia, a new technological development made for the solar energy market was just revealed, which will shake up the global solar energy scene. The technology in question is the world’s first ever commercially viable version of transparent, efficient solar glass.

Developed by a team from West Australia’s Electron Science Research Institute (ESRI) at Edith Cowan University, this new type of glass is state of the art, made with solar cells lining its borders and containing special nanoparticles.

The ESRI’s Director, Kamal Alameh dubbed it ‘energy-harvesting clear glass’, and believes it to be a major innovation that will likely alter the playing field.

He elaborated on the glass’s capabilities, stating that the glass splits up sunlight into its components: visible light, UV and infrared. The glass’s structure and design allows visible light to pass through it with no issue, whilst UV and infrared are diverted into the glass’s borders, wherein they are converted into electricity via the solar cells located in the glass’s edges.

This means that the glass gives its user the solar control, thermal control, electricity, and lighting, all with the structural strength of safety glass. A single square metre of the new glass is capable of producing up to 30 W of electricity.

This innovation was made via a partnership between the ESRI and ClearVue technologies.

ClearVue’s founder and chairman, Victor Rosenberg, made a statement regarding the new innocation, stating that, whilst this glass was not the only solar glass available on the market, most of those models were not perfectly clear, possessing lines, or dots, or a checkerboard-like appearance due to the configuration of the solar absorbing technology used to make them. He states that both ClearVue and ESRI is proud to be the first to possess a perfectly clear solar glass.

This new innovation has already been field-tested, having been used in the construction of a self-sufficient bus shelter in Melbourne. The glass supplier Melbourne that was in charge of that development is also looking at bringing the new glass for testing at Singapore’s Changi Airport.

The team is also looking at the development of a new, energy efficient glasshouse, to be built somewhere in the Perth region.