What if, asks Kyosemi Corporation, instead of looking out the window at your solar array, your window was your solar array?

Thanks to its new invention, the equivalent of silicon “beads” which collect sunlight from any angle to achieve 20 percent efficiency and can be deposited in glass to deliver an almost fully transparent window, it may soon become possible.

Kyoto-based manufacturing company Kyosemi, founded in 1980, has spent the last three decades advancing the possibilities of optoelectronics (opto semiconductor technology and solar power), and its newest brainchild, marketed under the trade name Sphelar®, is a round – rather than flat – photovoltaic cell that optimizes solar energy collection by collecting solar irradiation from any point of the compass, rather than merely from the top as standard solar cells do.

The spherical shape also allows Sphelar® to fit easily into many more applications than flat solar cells, and the tiny solar beads – made from hardened drops of melted silicon – measure a minute seven one hundredths of an inch across, meaning a lot of them can be incorporated into a single surface for remarkably effective solar capture.

Embedded in window glass, for example, and alternated with an equivalent amount of blank space, the solar beads could provide a window with both a view and the capacity to deliver surprising amounts of electricity from a single surface.

It’s an idea whose time has come, and Kyosemi is currently offering products ranging from the Sphelar® Array F12 – which looks like a memory chip and offers voltages from 0.48 to 6 – to the Sphelar® One, a single spherical solar cell molded in a plastic case that looks like a bobby pin and provides up to 0.481 volts.

Also offered is the Sphelar® Dome, designed for outdoor use to power wireless devices and capable of powering up earlier in the morning and later in the evening than other solar devices, thanks to the rounded shape of both the device and the solar cells within.

Providing up to 4.6 volts, the dome reportedly performs as well as equivalent solar panels, but without the need for tracking devices, and – at about 300 grams, or 10 ounces – is highly portable.
In addition, reported efficiency ratings in excess of 20 percent (which are fully competitive with available solar panels) are obtained by using single crystal silicon, which is heated, melted and solidified using microgravity to achieve 99.9999-percent purity.

Not only are the solar beads exceptionally pure, and highly conductive due to their spherical shape, but the method used to create them results in almost zero waste of raw materials.

The drawbacks? Windows using solar beads would be less than 100-percent transparent, and Kyocemi’s advertising – that both sides of the window can collect sunlight –seems odd, given that only one side of any window actually faces the sun (the other, obviously, faces inside).