BLACKWELL: So what if your windows could power your home office or your building where you work? In this week's Mission Ahead, we shine a light on a company which has created new technology that turns windows into solar panels.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Solar panels are a popular method for capturing renewable energy, but they have some limitations. They need lots of space, special installation, and have some aesthetic drawbacks. But what if they looked like this, and every window around you doubled as a solar panel?</s>MILES BARR, FOUNDER AND CEO, UBIQUITOUS ENERGY: We've developed a way of making solar cells transparent by only capturing the invisible light. This is the only technology that allows you to do that.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Ubiquitous Energy isn't the first to develop solar glass. Others have combined glass with solar cells that are thinner and smaller, but they can have drawbacks like lower power efficiency and less transparency. Ubiquitous took a different approach and developed a solar coating from organic dyes designed to match the transparency of standard windows.</s>BARR: Light-absorbing dyes are found all around us. What we've done is we've engineered those dyes to selectively absorb infrared light and also convert that light into electricity.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And that's key because infrared light is invisible to the human eye. The result, the team says, is solar glass that delivers the best combination of energy efficiency and transparency.</s>BARR: The installation here is one of the first installations of this glass.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: For now, solar glass is still less efficient than traditional solar panels are, but its potential for wider use can make up for that.</s>BARR: For example, the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco has 70 times as much vertical surface to its rooftop, and that would mean over 20 times more energy production from transparent solar than opaque solar on the roof. We really see the future of this technology as being applied everywhere.
Company Produces Solar Panel Glass Windows.