Konarka’s Power Plastic Turns Buildings into Power Plants

Solar energy innovator Konarka is out to prove that you can have your sustainable cake and eat it, too.  The Massachusetts-based company has launched a pilot project that will integrate its proprietary Power Plastic solar panels into the non-loadbearing exterior wall of a building, called a curtain wall.

Solar energy innovator Konarka is out to prove that you can have your sustainable cake and eat it, too.  The Massachusetts-based company has launched a pilot project that will integrate its proprietary Power Plastic solar panels into the non-loadbearing exterior wall of a building, called a curtain wall. The new design makes solar energy a seamless part of the building rather than an afterthought.

The solar energy curtain wall project will be constructed in Tamarac, Florida, at an office building owned by Arch Aluminum & Glass Co., Inc. Arch and Konarka have teamed up to demonstrate that an active solar glass wall could enable the structure of a building to generate sustainable energy for its internal operations.  For now the partners appear to be focused on commercial and industrial applications, but if the curtain wall proves cost-effective it could also open the door for integrated solar panels in a wide range of residential and institutional structures.

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Tags: best of both worlds, cheap electricity, curtain wall, glass wall, institutional structures, konarka, pilot project, solar cell, solar energy, solar glass, solar panels, sustainable energy

This entry was posted on Friday, December 18th, 2009 at 10:27 am and is filed under Cutting-edge Research, Innovation, Innovation Needed, Project Energy, Scientific American, Shape of Things to Come?, environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.