Covering less than 2% of the dry land in the United States with only moderately efficient solar cells can produce enough electricity to satisfy the national demand for energy. Unfortunately, despite the 30-40% annual growth of the photovoltaic (PV) industry, the sum total area of solar cells produced and installed to date is orders of magnitude smaller. Furthermore, current manufacturing methods do not scale up sufficiently quickly to fulfill the demand in the next 10-20 years. In this talk, I will discuss the properties of conjugated organic-based compounds, organic PV device architectures, and device physics that potentially enable scalable solar energy harvesting. Specifically, I will describe how Van Der Waals-bonded molecular organic compounds are deposited as thin films onto non-planar substrates, including fibers, and how this novel PV cell form factor can be further engineered to increase the power conversion efficiency. Of note are device architectures that eschew the transparent, conducting, but costly and brittle indium tin oxide (ITO) electrodes.
