CTRL+P: Printing Australia’s solar panels

AUSTRALIAN scientists have found a way to print large but extremely lightweight solar panels like money.

World-leading boffins at the CSIRO say the A3-sized panels, which are created by laying a liquid photovoltaic ink onto thin, flexible plastic could soon mean everyone has the ability to print their own solar panels at home.

“It would definitely be feasible to do that,” CSIRO materials scientist Dr Scott Watkins has told Sydney media.

“The general concept of being able to manufacture on demand, in a house or in a workplace, is really a key feature of what we’re doing.”

It comes as scientists around the world continue to develop 3D printing – a method of making three-dimensional objects using a digital design.

The potentially revolutionary method could be used to make just about any object from scratch.

Experts from the University of Wollongong and Melbourne’s St Vincent’s Hospital are already testing the idea of printing human body parts, such as replacement organs and tissues.

“In the future, these sorts of devices will be able to recreate parts of people’s joints and bones, conceivably, in the future, even organs,” says Professor Mark Cook.

The CSIRO’s solar panels, which have been in development for five years with a team of experts at Monash and Melbourne Universities, are attracting interest from big companies which see a wide range of applications.

Near-term uses include putting the panels, similar in feel to a glossy magazine page, on to laptops or mobile phones – offering an extra hour of power once the inbuilt battery dies.

They could also be printed on to skyscraper windows or roofs.

“We’re actively talking to a Victorian company at the moment about incorporating them into windows,” says Dr Watkins.

The ability to print solar panels is not new in itself – but what is new is the ability to make them as large and powerful as the Australian version.

At the moment, the 30cm-wide panels generate between 10 to 50 watts of power per square metre and have been proven to last at least six months.

But that lifetime and wattage will be boosted in the future and the printers needed to make the panels far smaller, Dr Watkins says.

Study consensus for global warming

A REVIEW of thousands of studies published over 21 years found “overwhelming” and growing consensus among scientists that humans are mostly to blame for global warming, according to its authors.

This contradicts a widely held view that scientists are deeply divided on the topic – a misconception that complicates efforts to win public backing for climate policy, the authors write in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

“An accurate perception of the degree of scientific consensus is an essential element to public support for climate policy,” they say.

“Communicating the scientific consensus also increases people’s acceptance that climate change is happening.”

Researchers from the United States, Australia and Canada reviewed more than 4000 scientific papers that express a position on whether humans are mostly to blame for recent global warming.

The papers, published between 1991 and 2011, were written by more than 10,000 scientists.

Just over 97 percent agree that manmade warming is a reality.

“Our analysis indicates that the number of papers rejecting the consensus . . . is a vanishingly small proportion of the published research,” the team writes.

In stark contrast, opinion polls conducted in the US from 1997 to 2007 found that about 60 percent of Americans believed there to be significant disagreement among scientists.

“Scientists overwhelmingly agree that the Earth is warming due to human activity,” say the authors, who claim their work is the most comprehensive review of its kind ever undertaken.

“There is a significant gap between public perception and reality.”

The United Nations is targeting a maximum temperature rise of 2C on pre-industrial levels, for what scientists believe will be manageable climate change.

To this end, countries are negotiating curbs to emissions of Earth-warming greenhouse gases released by fossil-fuel burning.

Last week, the level of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere breached a threshold of 400 parts per million – a level never experienced by humans and considered the absolute maximum for the 2C target to remain within reach.