Topic: I want to design solar panels (Read 345 times)

Go to school. Get a formal education. That experience will give you the knowledge and unlock available jobs in industry.

There's even trade schools focused to renewable energy production (such as solar).

In reality, unless you become a materials scientist, you're not going to be fabricating photovolitic solar cells.

If it were that easy, I'd have already setup automated manufacturing pipelines producing solar panels years ago. 

Great idea, If you are looking to start a crowdfunding campaign?
Check out Crowdcreate (www.crowdcreate.us) They are #1 Rated and Globally Ranked by Forbes. They had been crowdfunding Indiegogo and Kickstarter and raised millions.

I'm interested in developing chemical systems to harness and convert solar energy much more efficiently than the ones we have today. My first problem is that my knowledge of chemistry is rather basic and inadequate but I figure this won't be a huge problem because there are plenty of books and resources out there online. My second problem is that even if I gain enough knowledge to fully understand the most recent advances in the field and more importantly - build upon those advances, I still won't have the money nor the resources to apply those theories to practice since that will require expensive equipment, reagents, etc.

I guess I could find a startup that will hire me and let me use their labs to perform my experiments. The problem with this option is that the owners of the startup will probably want to keep the patents for themselves. I would like to have ownership of the patents so that I can put the ones that I feel are the most worthy into the public domain.

Therefore, it seems to me that the best option is to publish the theory first (either in a journal or on arXiv) and then find people who are willing to invest money into it via Kickstarter or another similar crowdfunding platform. This approach is handicapped however by the fact that theory doesn't always translate neatly into practice and that not all research results are derived in such a straightforward manner (ie. sometimes the practice comes before the theory, or the theory is put into practice and the results are used to modify the theory, and so on). Another problem I can see with the crowdfunding model is that there is an enormous lag between what is built in a lab and what gets put on a store shelf so staying true to the promise and delivering a tangible product to the original backers could take many, many years.

Anyone got any other ideas?

On a related note, I would also like to do the same thing above but for other areas of science that interest me (i.e. biochemistry - which is actually my main area of expertise).