Semi-transparent Organic Solar Cells for Agrivoltaic Application

Abstract

Energy demands grow exponentially every year, and our reliance on conventional energy sources has significantly posed a threat to our existence. With carbon emissions increasing the global average temperatures and causing climate change, there is an urgent need to incorporate alternative energy sources into our daily lives that are environmentally friendly. This has made the solar energy research community extremely interested in finding ways to implement solar energy in areas that were previously deemed unsuitable for solar energy generation, as the traditional Silicon-wafer solar cells were opaque and often heavy due to the nature of encapsulation. One such interesting area of research is Agrivoltaics using Semi-Transparent Organic Solar Cells (ST-OSCs) as a roofing material in greenhouses that can allow wavelengths of light essential for plant growth to pass through, and the rest to be absorbed for solar energy harvesting. In this study, I mimicked the environment inside of a greenhouse with an ST-OSC absorber material PM6:Y6 filter over a petri plate and studied its effects on a model plant, Arabidopsis thaliana. In order to conduct my study, I had to scale up and optimise an ST-OSC fabrication technique and use it for the plant-based study. This study paves the way for future agrivoltaic research and its scale-up processes.