US company Ubiquitous Energy has invented a thin coating that turns windows into transparent solar panels, providing other ways to harvest renewable energy in buildings beyond rooftop panels.
Ubiquitous Energy describes its technology as the only transparent photovoltaic glass coating that is “obviously indistinguishable” from traditional windows.
Any surface can be a solar panel
The company was founded in 2011 by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Michigan State University (MSU), who engineered a transparent solar panel by allowing the visible spectrum of light to pass through and absorbing only the ultraviolet and near-infrared light. to convert to electricity.
Standard solar panels look black because they absorb the full spectrum of light, and because of their appearance, their deployment is usually limited to roofs, walls and large rural solar farms.
With Ubiquitous Energy’s coating, which it calls UE Power, it is possible to turn any surface into a photovoltaic panel.

“The mission is to turn all the everyday surfaces around us into renewable energy generators,” Ubiquitous Energy VP of Strategy Veeral Hardev told Dezeen.
“Windows was the first one we focused on, but beyond that, think about cars, transportation in general, portable consumer electronics devices, sustainable farming like greenhouses – these are all something that has seen the light of day to some degree,” he continued.
“Why not improve them so that they themselves can generate renewable energy without changing their appearance?”
Hardev says the company’s modeling shows that with widespread adoption of the technology to the point that in 30 years the coating will be as basic as today’s low-emissivity (or low-E) window coatings, it could’ g recover 10 percent of global carbon. emissions.
All components are completely transparent
A solar window works the same way as any other solar panel. It consists of cells of a semiconductor material that generate an electric charge in response to sunlight.
Cables hidden in the window frames connect them to the building’s energy management system to direct electricity to where it’s needed in the building or store it in a battery.

The innovation of Ubiquitous Energy is that all its materials are transparent to the human eye, including semiconducting compounds, which take the form of dyes that absorb light.
To achieve its thinness – the coating is about one micrometer thick, or about 80 to 100 times thinner than a human hair – it is made using nanomaterials, similar to those used in display technologies .
The semiconductor layers are deposited on the glass using vacuum physical vapor deposition (PVD) – a standard coating process used in the window industry – and Ubiquitous Energy plans to license its technology to existing glass manufacturers so they can include it in their product offerings.
Transparent panels are only half as efficient
Ubiquitous Energy estimates that windows can provide about 30 percent of a building’s electricity needs, depending on factors such as geographic location, altitude and tree cover, and assume they are used in conjunction with solar panels. roof panel to reduce the building’s dependence on the electrical grid. .
Because some light is allowed to pass through, a transparent solar panel is only about half as strong as a typical rooftop solar panel of the same size. But Hardev admits that their potential deployment scale makes up for the loss in efficiency.
“A few years ago, we reported the highest performance for a transparent solar device, with almost 10 percent efficiency,” Hardev said. “Even though there are options that are 20 percent efficient now, we made this conscious trade-off to be transparent so we can put them in places where you can’t put traditional solar panels.”
In theory, cities could produce large amounts of solar power locally without changing the appearance, which would reduce the need for land for large solar power plants.
First factory opened in 2024
Applied in other ways, the coating could be used to make mobile phones that don’t need to be recharged, more powerful cars and self-powered greenhouses, Hardev said.
“We started with windows first because we think that’s the area with the biggest overall impact,” Hardev said, citing the statistic that nearly 40 percent of total global energy is related to CO2 emissions from buildings.
Ubiquitous Energy has completed several demonstration projects, including at Michigan State University and the Boulder Commons apartment community in Colorado.

The company plans to open its first factories producing floor-to-ceiling solar windows in 2024. It also hopes to develop its partnerships, which currently include window company Asahi , Pilkington and Andersen.
Past aesthetic solutions to the issue of intrusive solar panels come from designer Marjan van Aubel, who created colorful skylights reminiscent of stained glass, and Tesla, who released camouflaged Solar Roof tiles.
Architects are also creatively integrating technology into buildings, with designs like BIG and Heatherwick Studio’s “dragonscale solar skin” on the roof of Google’s Bay View campus in Silicon Valley and Shigeru Ban’s sail-like moving wall of photovoltaics at La Seine Musical near Paris.
All images courtesy of Ubiquitous Energy.

Solar Revolution
This article is part of Dezeen’s Solar Revolution series, which explores the diverse and exciting potential uses of solar energy and how humans can make the most of the sun’s incredible power.