Molecules for converting sunlight into electricity

The dream of generating electricity from sunlight in large scale at low cost may not be that far from reality in this century. Rapidly emerging solar energy technology using low cost dye sensitized photovoltaic cells on plastics would be a real boost for the third world countries. Though the conventional silicon solar cells are efficient in converting solar energy into electricity until now, the non conventional solar cells based on molecular photosensitization by colored materials in wide band gap semiconductors is a fast growing field of basic scientific and industrial research. Present state-of-the-art cells using molecular dyes shows energy conversion efficiencies of 10–11%. In this article, we present the concept of dye-sensitized photovoltaic (DSPV) cell and the progress in current research. The important contributions of molecular dyes that are used as photosensitizers in these photovoltaic or solar cells are also described.