Milan Karki, a young inventor from rural Nepal, claims to have figured out a way to replace the silicon in solar panels with human hair. From the
Daily Mail:
Milan and four classmates initially made the solar panel as an experiment but the teens are convinced it has wide applicability and commercial viability.
'I'm trying to produce commercially and distribute to the districts. We've already sent a couple out to the districts to test for feasibility,' he said.
The solar panel, which produces 9 V (18 W) of energy, costs around £23 to make from raw materials.
Treehugger.com (among others) is skeptical:
if you head over to the Daily Mail and look at the photos, you'll see that the hair covers only a very small surface area on the prototype. This doesn't look like it would be enough to generate the electricity they claim to generate. In fact, if we extrapolate from that small surface area, this implies that a panel completely covered would produce much more power; possibly more than what is possible based on how much solar energy hits that surface
Comments
Silicon is the major ingredient in sand and glass and many rocks, but for good solar cells it needs to be purified, which is where most of the expense of making the cells comes in.
My hair would be no good for the solar panels anyway. Being a mixture of blond and gray (white), my hair is highly deficient in melanin.
Then there's the little problem (described in the article Anon linked to) that hair doesn't conduct electricity-- in fact, apparently it's an excellent insulator-- but now we're beating a dead horse.