Nepalese Teenager Turns Human Hair into Solar Panels

Well, they are still combing through the data and have a few knots to work out, so don’t brush them off just yet.

Aw c’mon you guys! This is clearly a hoax. Human hair is non-conductive. To take advantage of melanin’s properties as a semiconductor you’d have to isolate it chemically from the hair. Since hair isn’t a conductor, clearly you can’t just string a bunch of it in a loop. And just to check, I measured a lock of my wife’s jet black hair. Non-conductive. No energy produced under UV illumination. Here is a photo: http://sites.google.com/site/edwardcraighyatt/CraigsProjects/gizhair.j pg?attredirects=0 At best, this boy is fooling himself. At worst, he’s a liar. Shame for publishing this without any fact checking.

It would be neat though. I think that making these alternative energy sources less costly to produce will encourage people and developers to use more of the “green” technologies.

Even if this WERE real, the mentioned price point is not so revolutionary as to represent a significant savings in an off-grid residential photovoltaic system. Considering the price of putting a frame around it, and considering that hair probably ages FAR worse in sunlight than silicone wafers, it might not represent ANY savings at all over the lifespan of the panel.

Add to this the cost of charge controller, wiring (low voltage high amperage DC wires tend to be large and expensive), fuses, combiner boxes, panel mounts, batteries, and presumably an inverter… and even if the panels cost only 2 dollars a watt complete and in frames, you can see that the savings for a complete system is under 20%.

I’ll stick with my proven solar panels, I have neighbors who’ve had theirs for 20 years with very little loss of output.

“Uh, guys, Edison used hair for the filament in a series of his attempts at producing a commercial light bulb. OK, didn’t work all that well, but it did work…”

@teqjack Hi. The source I read says that he tried many materials such as paper and cloth, thread, fish line, spruce, hay, cork, and “hair out of a red-headed Scotsman’s beard” but the fact that he tried these materials doesn’t mean any of them are conductors. Edison did experiment with *carbonized* filaments made from different organic materials. I am absolutely positive that human hair isn’t a conductor at the voltages mentioned in this article. One additional comment: It looks to me like the filaments interconnecting the gold-like posts in the photos are thin metal wires, not hairs. I am not certain,but I think the black material behind the plastic backing is the human hair. My guess is that the gold-like posts just connect the cells together. Hard to tell from the photos.

I’ve collected some info here: http://sites.google.com/site/edwardcraighyatt/hairsolarpanelnepal

I think it’s great that people are thinking up wild ways to provide cheaper energy. I don’t know if this is the next big thing, or if it will be something else, but 10 years from now there will be some great idea that works!

is if there is a coating around the outside of the hair that conducts electricity. But even then, I’m struggling to see how this could possibly work.how to build a solar panel