I love when people act like progress never happens, we’re in a world where developments happen so fast it’s impossible to keep up with a single field of development because so much new stuff is happening but sure anyone interested in the emergence of printable pv is a rube…

I see the same in ai discussion, I use it when coding all the time but every article about a new development has someone saying it’s useless and a gimmick.

Rapid deployment solar is happening whether you like it or not, the science has been building for a couple of decades and every interesting new study and development opens up new avenues of possibility. This will be a game changer in many situations and it’s something we can see getting closer, studies like this are so interesting because we can see which avenues things are likely to take and consider how it would affect things.

We have a tendency to think of science as someone waking up and inventing something and then it’s ready to hit the shelves but it’s never worked like that. If you’d been reading the news when photography was new you’d see endless news stories about progress towards colour photography, about potential methods and means of a making a single plate colour image - famously you’d have also seen discussions in the letters section of the Times between some of the chemists that’d go on to actually solve it.

Progress happens, science happens - sure you don’t care that they found a way of transferring printed solar onto fabric which avoids the need for the fabric to be able to endure the entire fabrication process but it’s actually a pretty cool thing. The article is kinda dumb I really don’t think this process will hold up to the intense sea air and mechanical stress of being a sail but for simpler uses such as an awning cover over carparks or even better train lines its likely to be very useful - imagine being able to generate the power for electric vehicle charging or train travel simply from a fabric roof which also shades the area from hot sun.

A process that makes the current chemistry cheap and fast to print onto a useful material is a big thing, not as huge as extending the working life of the materials but by being easier to make and replace we might find that there are a lot of uses for rapid temporary deployment of PV in situations like disaster zones but also in seasonal infrastructure which is especially important for things like music festivals, holiday locations (which see power usage vastly increased when tourists are in town), and travel routes.