While the cost of solar energy is continually falling, it remains relatively expensive compared to conventional sources of electricity. At UCLA, Engineering Professor Yang Yang and his team of young scientists at Yang Yang Lab hope to bring costs down further still by working on a low-cost solar technology solution.

Yang Yang Lab is located inside one of the newest building on the University of California Los Angeles campus, Engineering V. Some of the studies being conducted inside the lab involve photovoltaic cells, digital memory units, light emitting diodes (LEDs) and thin-film transistors.

Among the team’s most exciting and promising work centers on improving the efficiency of organic solar cells, or polymer solar cells. Compared to conventional silicon-based cells, polymer cells are lightweight, flexible and potentially much cheaper to manufacture. One of the main challenges that remains is boosting the polymer cells’ efficiency.

“We’re at 8 percent efficiency right now, ” said Yang, who has earned six awards and has been a contributor to seven books relative to his research.

Yang and his team have a ways to go in their research before polymer cells can be commercially produced in large volumes. But Yang said he hopes that one day his research will produce an economically and energy efficient solar option — one, we wonder, that might one day help the University of California its renewable energy goal of 10 megawatts.

When asked if the university had any plans to install solar at the moment, Yang laughed and referred back to the central issue of cost.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “We don’t know where to get the money.”