World Community Grid project launched to discover more efficient solar cells

(Nanowerk News) IBM and researchers from Harvard University are launching a new World Community Grid project to discover organic materials to create a more efficient and lower cost solar cell. The path-breaking effort will use idle computer power from volunteers to create large supplies of new clean energy.

Clean energy sources like solar could supply a vast amount of the world’s energy and help eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels, the cause of global warming, if they were more efficient and could be developed at lower cost to make them more widely available.

Current silicon based solar cells are only about 20 per cent efficient and cost about $3 per watt of electricity generated. A newer form of solar powered cells being developed is plastic not silicon based. It holds great promise because it is flexible, lightweight and most significant is much less costly to produce.

IBM will also pilot World Community Grid on a new IBM internal cloud, a network of services and software, when the cloud is not being fully used to provide more computing power to the grid. In the future, IBM plans to expand this capability to clients of IBM cloud computing services if they choose, so that they can become part of this humanitarian research.

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