Hybrid-Solarpanel wandelt Regentropfen in Strom um | Der patentierte Dünnfilm eines spanischen Forscherteams erzeugt beim Aufprall eines einzelnen Regentropfens 110 Volt.

>For as long as we’ve been capturing the sun’s rays, the clouds have been the enemy. When the sky turns gray and the first drops fall, the steady stream of electrons from traditional solar panels slows to a trickle. But a team of scientists in Seville, Spain, has decided that instead of fighting the rain, solar technology should embrace it.

>Researchers from the Nanotechnology on Surfaces and Plasma Laboratory at the Institute of Materials Science of Seville (ICMS) have developed a hybrid device that actually feeds on downpours. By applying a specialized, “Teflon-like” film just 100 nanometers thick to a high-efficiency perovskite solar cell, they have created a panel that harvests light when it’s sunny and kinetic energy when it pours.

>The new panel utilizes the triboelectric effect. When a droplet strikes and slides across the specially treated surface, it creates friction and has a charge difference. For instance, a droplet may leave behind a positive ion while the surface is negatively charged. The charge is then harvested and converted into electricity.

>To understand why this is a “game changer,” you have to look at the material inside. Halide perovskites are the darlings of the renewable energy world. They are cheaper to make than silicon and have seen their efficiency skyrocket from under 4% to over 25% in just a few years.

>However, they are notoriously delicate. “The inherent vulnerability of halide perovskites to moisture and environmental stressors remains a critical barrier to their widespread deployment,” the researchers note in their [paper](https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nanoen.2025.111678) published in Nano Energy.

So, I did a little back-of-the-napkin math, and during an hour-long heavy rainstorm (7.6 mm/hr) with quite fast-traveling drops (10 m/s), where the panel can extract *all* of the kinetic energy from the droplet with no interference from any previously-fallen drops, you’ll get:

(drum roll)

0.18 Wh per panel. Good news, that’ll keep the LED indicator on the front of the „powered off“ television running. It won’t be nearly enough to run the inverter, though.