Technology has changed a lot about your home. Your thermostat could be smart, your doors might be unlocked by a phone and your refrigerator may have a touchscreen on it.
But your windows are still just glass panes in a frame. Improved, maybe, but still basically like the ones your grandparents had.
That might be about to change. In the not-too-distant future, they could generate and distribute electricity.
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Emerging technologies could soon turn ordinary-looking windows into transparent solar panels. While you can’t go to the hardware store and pick up a renewable energy-generating window pane just yet, those days aren’t too far away.
Don’t expect to power your whole home or charge your EV with just a few new windows quite yet, though. Transparent solar technology is significantly less efficient than the opaque photovoltaic panels that go on rooftops.
“I don’t actually see in the next 10 years that we will think of [solar] windows as an alternative to rooftop photovoltaic,” Vivian Loftness, a professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation, told CNET. Loftness, the former head of the university’s School of Architecture, has decades of experience in environmental design and sustainability.
“I don’t think their potential is going to be close to anything near what we can get out of a roof,” she added.
Will you one day get power from solar panels and solar windows?
Can you buy solar windows?
Not yet. At the moment, the closest commercially available options are windows with traditional PV strips mounted on them, which can power the window’s functions.
Ubiquitous Energy expects to be able to have solar windows for sale in 2025 or 2026, CEO Susan Stone told CNET. The company is currently raising money for its first production line; it will take about two years to have windows in showrooms.
The price of those windows is yet to be determined, Stone said.
The University of Michigan researchers are in the process of finding partners to bring their technology market, the university said in a July 2022 news release.
What about larger buildings?
Unless you live in a glass house, solar windows aren’t likely to generate enough electricity to power your refrigerator and heat pump. But what if you own an office building? That’s a market primed for transparent solar technology.
“You see tall office buildings, we see vertical solar farms,” Stone said. “Our vision is for every piece of glass to be energy-producing.”
A skyscraper full of office workers might have a pretty small roof, with little space for a rooftop array, but it has plenty of glass. Solar windows could be the renewable energy source needed to run the fax machines and breakroom fridges of the future.
