We recently touched on a brilliant idea involving turning the world’s highways into solar collectors, but what if you could turn virtually anything into a solar collector, just by covering it with a thin transparent film? That’s just one crazy idea that may soon be possible because of recent research at the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory and Brookhaven National Laboratory. Working with a semiconducting polymer spiked with Fullerenes, the scientists were able to create a thin film that is effectively transparent, could efficiently generate charge and charge separation, and is scalable to industrial production levels. Existing transparent photovoltaic materials are either slightly tinted like PVGlaze architectural glass, or only partially transparent like Taiyo See-through Solar. In the latter case because the material is created with laser etching that alternates the photovoltaic material with a truly transparent material. The real innovation with the Los Alamos project lies in the fact that the material is fabricated by creating a micron-sized flow of water droplets across a thin layer of the polymer-fullerene solution, which then evaporates, leaving a nano-scale honeycomb pattern that could efficiently absorb light and facilitate electrical conductivity. A material like this could greatly enhance ideas like this Italian greenhouse project that both grows food and collects solar power. Or imagine if the material evolved to a point where it could be applied to existing buildings without significantly changing their appearance. Although there are already a lot of strategies out there for building-integrated photovoltaics , including the possibility of photovoltaic “paint”, this new technology may make even more crazy ideas possible. Imagine if you could solarize your house just buy spraying it with a transparent film…