November 25, 2025 • 11 mins
Want to hear something weird about a sandwich made from solar panels?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
Hey Tagan, Hey Ray, do you want to hear something
weird about a solar panel sandwich?
Speaker 2 (00:17):
I do, mostly because the last few times you've brought
up solar panels on this podcast they've been really fun
and weird.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
So yes, please.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
They're usually accompanied with the word swarm these days for
some reason. I'm sure swarms, But no, this time I'm
going to talk about Australian scientists.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Yes, what are they putting in the sandwich?
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Solar panels, Seagan?
Speaker 2 (00:42):
But no, no, no, no, you said a solar panel sandwich,
which I guess they could go either way. It could
imply that they are I think, because I saw them
in my mind's eye as being bread shaped.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
That would be something in them. But you're saying they're
the meat and the sandwich.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
They are the sandwich. They are the meat, they are
a sandwich, They're all of it. They're the whole meal.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
This is like having bread on bread as a sandwich.
Pretty much, Okay, fine, pretty much? Tell me how this
works before I get weirder.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
You're not munched into the solar panel's tag, and they
don't have to taste good. They're doing something special. Fine,
so a strain scientist at the University of Sydney. They
just built a solar power sandwich and used it to
smash a global record for solar cells, which we do
often in this country.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
I have a lot of soul.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
It's just like, yeah, we set another record for how
efficient solar cells can be. They have built the largest
and most efficient and I'm going to get juggony for
a second and then break it down. Okay, triple junction
pair of skyte silicon solar cell ever reported.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
So sorry, I just like went in on myself.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Spiritually and I started thinking about actual sandwiches.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
Please explain that to me.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Okay, So you know how your standard rooftop solar panel
is basically silicon.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
Sure, I don't know a lot about solar panels, but
I believe.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
You your standard solar rooftop panel is basically silicon. There's
one layer, one type of material, grabs a chunk of
the sunlight turns it into power. Great. Great. The problem
is that silicon can only absorb one slice of the
sun's spectrum. Okay, Yeah, and the rest of it gets
wasted as heat.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Okay, And so I would assume before now that there
has been investigations into using different material to be more efficient.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
You've got it. You've got it. And so what these
researchers have done is stacked three different materials in the
one cell. So they've made their solar sandwich. Top layer
gobbles up high energy blue light okay, yeah, the middle
layer takes the middle bits of the light, and the
bottom layer mops up the low energy reds and infrareds.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
Okay. And so I've got a couple of questions.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Number One, the blue light, I assume that's like real
and not the scams like those blue light glasses.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
It is real blue light, and we do have real
blue light being emitted around us all at once. What
is is the jury on whether or not it actually
causes any damage or whether or not we can use
any gadgets to protect us from that.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
Then my second question is generally, if at all, what
bit does the silicon whe where is that in the
sandwich or is it not in this particular sandwich at all?
Speaker 1 (03:28):
No, the silicon is in the sandwich as well, so.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Which does it take the middling stuff or is it
like the slot bucket at the bottom.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
So there is still partially silicon being used. So what
they've done is they've swapped out a whole bunch of
materials that existed within that silicon layer, so it's not
silicon as we know it in existing solar panels per se.
So working together, these three layers squeeze way more electricity
(03:58):
out of the same sunlight. Obviously, So their big cell
sixteen square centimeters hit a certified efficiency of twenty three
point three percent, which might sound small, but for a
device that size, it is the highest ever reported anywhere.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
Yeah, so way better than once on your roofs, like
did twenty plus percent is amazing, yep, yep, yep.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
And their little test cell, which is one square centimeter
that hit twenty seven percent efficiency. Wow, Plus it passed
like this brutal durability test as well. It did two
one hundred cycles between minus forty and plus eighty five degrees.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
That's massive.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
And it also because clearly this is exactly the same
sort of testing that we would do figures moto when
we would be given a tough phone and would just
shove it in the freezer, chuck it off cliff or
back it over our car.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
I'll leave it out in the sun. Same thing, really.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
Sure under the sun, leave it on the windscreen of
a car in a hot day, totally fine. It kept
ninety five percent of its efficiency after four hundred hours
of continuous light. So these things are super super tough,
which they've built. So how they've gone about this is
they've been tinkering with the chemistry of the perivskyte so
(05:16):
they've been replacing unstable ingredients that existed within it with
more stable ones, and it creates like this crystal lattice
that doesn't degrade as fast.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
That's so cool.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
But also you keep using all of these food metaphors.
So now imagining when you're talking about like they took
parts of the silicon out to create this other thing,
I'm like, so it's devon.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Like what, Yes, it's devon.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
T it's the devon of the solar panelwall.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
It's like you know that like big Mac that's been
sitting undisturbed for twenty years or something.
Speaker 3 (05:55):
Yeah, and be totally fine.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
They've basically made that out of a normal hamburger.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
I still fully believe that you could take a bite
out of that and be absolutely fine, And that's terrifying.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
I do it.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
They've used gold nanoparticles as well, so they haven't like
used it as a shiny layer or anything like that.
But they've used tiny dots.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
They've used gold leaf solar panel sandwich.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
They've just kind of done it and around and then
that that improves how the electrons and the lights flow
through the cell. So I think a good way to
think about it is that they're basically hot rotted a
solar panel at an atomic level.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
Yeah, I love that.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
See that's like a much more app mods mods.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
It is silicon, but not as we know it, because
they've pimped it. They've done an exhibit. I'm showing my
age now.
Speaker 3 (06:52):
No, I understand.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
It'd be like anyone that gets to go to Taiwan
for computex or if you have seen anything out of
that or online, seen any kind of modern cases, especially
the ones that use cooling the crazy it looks like
the terminator for some reason or whatever.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
I'm just imagining that on a roof.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
Well, this is the kind of technology that you would
be able to use in other materials as well, Like
if they've worked out how to make things more stable
in temperature extremes and still maintain efficiency and still allow
you know, electricity and ions and electrons that everything move
through it. The applications of that are massive. I'm thinking
(07:34):
of this being used in something like quantum computing, because
of course I am. I'm always thinking about how things
can be used in quantum computing.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
Well, it makes sense because of just the amount that
temperature is important, like absolutely vital in quantum computing.
Speaker 3 (07:48):
Like that's amazing.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Yeah, it's awesome. So there's a few things about this
that are really really cool and I cannot wait to
tell you the final bit.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
More than the gold leaf on the sandwich orf.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
You know what's good about this. It's cheap, is it.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
It's never going to get bunded.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
The pero skite cells, they're really cheap to make, but
they've been really finicky and unstable outside the lab until now,
until they've been able to kind of mess with the
chemistry of them. So now we can scale them up,
we can make them stable. You know, beat silicon alone.
It's more efficient, So we're going to get more electricity
out of the same area of roof cheaper to produce
(08:33):
cheaper solar power for everyone. And this is the first
time a large triple junction pair of skite cell has
been built, certified by independent labs and stress tested So
this isn't just they've worked out how to do something
(08:54):
in the lab. This is about to be an actual
product that we can put on the.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
Market, real world application.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Oh my gosh, the amount of things that we invent
that we can't take to market for one reason or another.
If this does not make it into industry, I'm going
to be personally devastated.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
You've got to extreme it's because our big mining has
come in and shut it down or something. I've got
a question not to go into inside a trading corner,
but do we happen to know who I was making
those are really cheap?
Speaker 3 (09:25):
It was the ceales that were cheap, right? Yeah? Who
was making the cheap sales? Like? What what companies are
doing that now? They are have the IPO? Are they
on the on a market?
Speaker 1 (09:35):
That's a really good question taken. We might have to
get in touch with our friends at the University of Sydney.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Not that not financial advice, but it would be very
interesting to know who's manufacturing them.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Not financial advice, not financial advice, but we want to
buy the sandwich please would that be code? Like could
you imaine? It's like, yeah, we'd like a triple triple
deck a sandwich. We'd like the with like the cool
kids club sandwich.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
Thanks, so you like I'm thinking even smaller scale, Like
I'm thinking like a typical businessman. It's like, no, no, no,
we don't want to buy the sandwich. Who's making that
compartment that goes into the sandwich? That's what I want
to know. The ketchup that like, who's making that? That's
why I'm interested in buying from.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
We will find out.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
This is not a financial podcast. I'm so sorry.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
This is just two friends talking about the future, talking
about diversifying the boot foolia.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
And that's it for this episode of Weird Tech. If
you have any weird tech that you would like us
to cover, or if some of your tech is being.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
Weird we want to hear about it.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
You can hit us up on all social media platforms
at weird Tech Media. We're a Weird Tech Media production
and a proud member of the iHeartRadio Network. This episode
was edited by the podcast Butler. Please remember to subscribe
on your favorite podcast platforms so you don't miss the
next episode, and until next time, stay weird
Hey Tagan, Hey Ray, do you want to hear something
weird about a solar panel sandwich?
Speaker 2 (00:17):
I do, mostly because the last few times you've brought
up solar panels on this podcast they've been really fun
and weird.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
So yes, please.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
They're usually accompanied with the word swarm these days for
some reason. I'm sure swarms, But no, this time I'm
going to talk about Australian scientists.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Yes, what are they putting in the sandwich?
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Solar panels, Seagan?
Speaker 2 (00:42):
But no, no, no, no, you said a solar panel sandwich,
which I guess they could go either way. It could
imply that they are I think, because I saw them
in my mind's eye as being bread shaped.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
That would be something in them. But you're saying they're
the meat and the sandwich.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
They are the sandwich. They are the meat, they are
a sandwich, They're all of it. They're the whole meal.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
This is like having bread on bread as a sandwich.
Pretty much, Okay, fine, pretty much? Tell me how this
works before I get weirder.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
You're not munched into the solar panel's tag, and they
don't have to taste good. They're doing something special. Fine,
so a strain scientist at the University of Sydney. They
just built a solar power sandwich and used it to
smash a global record for solar cells, which we do
often in this country.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
I have a lot of soul.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
It's just like, yeah, we set another record for how
efficient solar cells can be. They have built the largest
and most efficient and I'm going to get juggony for
a second and then break it down. Okay, triple junction
pair of skyte silicon solar cell ever reported.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
So sorry, I just like went in on myself.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Spiritually and I started thinking about actual sandwiches.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
Please explain that to me.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Okay, So you know how your standard rooftop solar panel
is basically silicon.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
Sure, I don't know a lot about solar panels, but
I believe.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
You your standard solar rooftop panel is basically silicon. There's
one layer, one type of material, grabs a chunk of
the sunlight turns it into power. Great. Great. The problem
is that silicon can only absorb one slice of the
sun's spectrum. Okay, Yeah, and the rest of it gets
wasted as heat.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Okay, And so I would assume before now that there
has been investigations into using different material to be more efficient.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
You've got it. You've got it. And so what these
researchers have done is stacked three different materials in the
one cell. So they've made their solar sandwich. Top layer
gobbles up high energy blue light okay, yeah, the middle
layer takes the middle bits of the light, and the
bottom layer mops up the low energy reds and infrareds.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
Okay. And so I've got a couple of questions.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Number One, the blue light, I assume that's like real
and not the scams like those blue light glasses.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
It is real blue light, and we do have real
blue light being emitted around us all at once. What
is is the jury on whether or not it actually
causes any damage or whether or not we can use
any gadgets to protect us from that.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
Then my second question is generally, if at all, what
bit does the silicon whe where is that in the
sandwich or is it not in this particular sandwich at all?
Speaker 1 (03:28):
No, the silicon is in the sandwich as well, so.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Which does it take the middling stuff or is it
like the slot bucket at the bottom.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
So there is still partially silicon being used. So what
they've done is they've swapped out a whole bunch of
materials that existed within that silicon layer, so it's not
silicon as we know it in existing solar panels per se.
So working together, these three layers squeeze way more electricity
(03:58):
out of the same sunlight. Obviously, So their big cell
sixteen square centimeters hit a certified efficiency of twenty three
point three percent, which might sound small, but for a
device that size, it is the highest ever reported anywhere.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
Yeah, so way better than once on your roofs, like
did twenty plus percent is amazing, yep, yep, yep.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
And their little test cell, which is one square centimeter
that hit twenty seven percent efficiency. Wow, Plus it passed
like this brutal durability test as well. It did two
one hundred cycles between minus forty and plus eighty five degrees.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
That's massive.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
And it also because clearly this is exactly the same
sort of testing that we would do figures moto when
we would be given a tough phone and would just
shove it in the freezer, chuck it off cliff or
back it over our car.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
I'll leave it out in the sun. Same thing, really.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
Sure under the sun, leave it on the windscreen of
a car in a hot day, totally fine. It kept
ninety five percent of its efficiency after four hundred hours
of continuous light. So these things are super super tough,
which they've built. So how they've gone about this is
they've been tinkering with the chemistry of the perivskyte so
(05:16):
they've been replacing unstable ingredients that existed within it with
more stable ones, and it creates like this crystal lattice
that doesn't degrade as fast.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
That's so cool.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
But also you keep using all of these food metaphors.
So now imagining when you're talking about like they took
parts of the silicon out to create this other thing,
I'm like, so it's devon.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Like what, Yes, it's devon.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
T it's the devon of the solar panelwall.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
It's like you know that like big Mac that's been
sitting undisturbed for twenty years or something.
Speaker 3 (05:55):
Yeah, and be totally fine.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
They've basically made that out of a normal hamburger.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
I still fully believe that you could take a bite
out of that and be absolutely fine, And that's terrifying.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
I do it.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
They've used gold nanoparticles as well, so they haven't like
used it as a shiny layer or anything like that.
But they've used tiny dots.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
They've used gold leaf solar panel sandwich.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
They've just kind of done it and around and then
that that improves how the electrons and the lights flow
through the cell. So I think a good way to
think about it is that they're basically hot rotted a
solar panel at an atomic level.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
Yeah, I love that.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
See that's like a much more app mods mods.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
It is silicon, but not as we know it, because
they've pimped it. They've done an exhibit. I'm showing my
age now.
Speaker 3 (06:52):
No, I understand.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
It'd be like anyone that gets to go to Taiwan
for computex or if you have seen anything out of
that or online, seen any kind of modern cases, especially
the ones that use cooling the crazy it looks like
the terminator for some reason or whatever.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
I'm just imagining that on a roof.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
Well, this is the kind of technology that you would
be able to use in other materials as well, Like
if they've worked out how to make things more stable
in temperature extremes and still maintain efficiency and still allow
you know, electricity and ions and electrons that everything move
through it. The applications of that are massive. I'm thinking
(07:34):
of this being used in something like quantum computing, because
of course I am. I'm always thinking about how things
can be used in quantum computing.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
Well, it makes sense because of just the amount that
temperature is important, like absolutely vital in quantum computing.
Speaker 3 (07:48):
Like that's amazing.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Yeah, it's awesome. So there's a few things about this
that are really really cool and I cannot wait to
tell you the final bit.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
More than the gold leaf on the sandwich orf.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
You know what's good about this. It's cheap, is it.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
It's never going to get bunded.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
The pero skite cells, they're really cheap to make, but
they've been really finicky and unstable outside the lab until now,
until they've been able to kind of mess with the
chemistry of them. So now we can scale them up,
we can make them stable. You know, beat silicon alone.
It's more efficient, So we're going to get more electricity
out of the same area of roof cheaper to produce
(08:33):
cheaper solar power for everyone. And this is the first
time a large triple junction pair of skite cell has
been built, certified by independent labs and stress tested So
this isn't just they've worked out how to do something
(08:54):
in the lab. This is about to be an actual
product that we can put on the.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
Market, real world application.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Oh my gosh, the amount of things that we invent
that we can't take to market for one reason or another.
If this does not make it into industry, I'm going
to be personally devastated.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
You've got to extreme it's because our big mining has
come in and shut it down or something. I've got
a question not to go into inside a trading corner,
but do we happen to know who I was making
those are really cheap?
Speaker 3 (09:25):
It was the ceales that were cheap, right? Yeah? Who
was making the cheap sales? Like? What what companies are
doing that now? They are have the IPO? Are they
on the on a market?
Speaker 1 (09:35):
That's a really good question taken. We might have to
get in touch with our friends at the University of Sydney.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Not that not financial advice, but it would be very
interesting to know who's manufacturing them.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Not financial advice, not financial advice, but we want to
buy the sandwich please would that be code? Like could
you imaine? It's like, yeah, we'd like a triple triple
deck a sandwich. We'd like the with like the cool
kids club sandwich.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
Thanks, so you like I'm thinking even smaller scale, Like
I'm thinking like a typical businessman. It's like, no, no, no,
we don't want to buy the sandwich. Who's making that
compartment that goes into the sandwich? That's what I want
to know. The ketchup that like, who's making that? That's
why I'm interested in buying from.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
We will find out.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
This is not a financial podcast. I'm so sorry.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
This is just two friends talking about the future, talking
about diversifying the boot foolia.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
And that's it for this episode of Weird Tech. If
you have any weird tech that you would like us
to cover, or if some of your tech is being.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
Weird we want to hear about it.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
You can hit us up on all social media platforms
at weird Tech Media. We're a Weird Tech Media production
and a proud member of the iHeartRadio Network. This episode
was edited by the podcast Butler. Please remember to subscribe
on your favorite podcast platforms so you don't miss the
next episode, and until next time, stay weird
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