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Rather than blighting rooftops as at present, future solar panels could be sprayed onto tiles by a Ghostbuster-style team.

Scientists from the University of Toronto Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering invented a new way to spray solar cells onto flexible surfaces using miniscule light-sensitive materials known as colloidal quantum dots (CQDs).

Illan Kramer at the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering said: 'My dream is that one day you'll have two technicians with Ghostbusters backpacks come to your house and spray your roof.'

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Illan Kramer (pictured) from the University of Toronto's Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering is one of the driving forces behind the developement

Solar-sensitive CQDs printed onto a flexible film could be used to coat all kinds of objects from laptops to aircraft wings.

The surface of a car roof would produce enough power for three 100-Watt light bulbs or 24 compact fluorescents.

And the breakthrough could send prices of solar panels crashing.

The system sprayLD is a play on the manufacturing process called ALD, short for atomic layer deposition, in which materials are laid down on a surface one atom-thickness at a time.

Until now, it was only possible to incorporate light-sensitive CQDs onto surfaces through batch processing - an inefficient, slow and expensive assembly-line approach to chemical coating.

SprayLD blasts a liquid containing CQDs directly onto flexible surfaces, such as film or plastic, like printing a newspaper by applying ink onto a roll of paper.

Potential breakthrough: Rather than blighting rooftops as at present, future solar panels could be sprayed onto tiles by a Ghostbuster-style team

New invension allows for spray on solar power

This roll-to-roll coating method makes incorporating solar cells into existing manufacturing processes much simpler.

Two papers published in the journals Advanced Materials and Applied Physics Letters showed that the sprayLD method can be used on flexible materials without any major loss in solar-cell efficiency.

And the system is easily built using a spray nozzle used in steel mills to cool steel with a fine mist of water and a few regular air brushes from an art store.

He added: 'This is something you can build in a Junkyard Wars fashion, which is basically how we did it. We think of this as a no-compromise solution for shifting from batch processing to roll-to-roll.'

Professor Ted Sargent said: 'As quantum dot solar technology advances rapidly in performance, it's important to determine how to scale them and make this new class of solar technologies manufacturable

'We were thrilled when this attractively manufacturable spray-coating process also led to superior performance devices showing improved control and purity.'

Thing of the past? Traditional solar panels may no longer be the best way to harness the sun's energy