This solar cell doubles as a battery and stores its own electricity

It’s a solar cell! No… it’s a rechargeable lithium-air battery! No… wait… it’s both: It’s the world’s first all-in-one solar battery! The new device, developed by Ohio State University, is essentially an air-breathing lithium battery that recharges via a built-in solar cell. This is significant, because one of the biggest problems with wide-scale solar power deployment is that you also need huge banks of batteries to store electricity — to even out spikes in generation when it’s cloudy or dark – and not only are those batteries expensive, but a lot of electricity is lost simply by traveling from the solar panels to external storage. An integrated solution is both cheaper and more efficient — about 25% cheaper and 20% more efficient, according to the researchers.