To anyone who pays an energy bill, harvesting free power from the sun sounds attractive. But solar remains prohibitively expensive, at least in the U.S. The up-front cost of the panels and the installation mean the overall savings take years or decades to accrue, which is too long for most homeowners.

A British company called Power Roll is in the process of disrupting this space. Their eponymous product is a film-like solar harvesting material that can be produced in rolls; their production method is closer to producing photographic film than building solar panels. And rather than relying on expensive rare-earth metals like indium, Power Roll's product uses widely-available perovskite, a mineral, as the "active ingredient" that turns sunlight into electricity.

The company says their manufacturing costs are inexpensive and scalable. Moreover, because the product is a film, the thinking is that installation will be far easier. Not just the roof, but every surface of a house could in theory be sheathed with the stuff.

That extra surface area might come in handy. An important component of solar harvesting materials is the PCE, or Power Conversion Efficiency rating, which is simply a measure of how much sun-borne energy hitting the panel actually gets converted into usable electricity. Traditional silicon-based solar panels have a PCE of 22% to 25%. Power Roll's product currently achieves just 12.8%. However, the company notes that the material is still under development and they expect to optimize it further.

Even with a PCE roughly half of the incumbent technology, if Power Roll's product is indeed low-cost, scalable, and easy to install, it would potentially have a gigantic impact on the solar market. "?In just one hour," the company writes, "enough sunlight hits the earth to power the whole world for a year…. We need to generate more solar energy. On more surfaces. In more places."

Here's the company's vision for how their product would be integrated into our environment:

Enter a caption (optional)