Either you're pulling my legs here, or Popular Science was incorrect. There are two possible ways to make solar panels. First is using silicon. The highest energy conversion efficiency using a single layer of silicon film is about 30%. The efficiency can be raised further by using multiple layers of films. But the cost goes up nonlinearly with the number of layers. Silicon panels are expensive to make to begin with - it must be as defect free as possible. Any defect would decrease the efficiency.
An alternative way of making solar panels is by using conducting polymers. Polymers can be much cheaper than silicon. The most successful ones are using poly(p-phenylenevinylenes). The first research using this polymer was done in 1994, but the efficiency was well below 1% so it was not practical. Today the highest efficiency achieved is about 4% in the laboratory. The efficiency under industrial production conditions would probably be somewhere between 1% and 2%. It's not yet competitive against silicon solar cells. So I have no idea what the Popular Science was talking about.
Like I said in an earlier post, biomethane production is not practical on an industrial scale. If you want to use that then we have to return to simple rural lives with a self-sufficient agriculture, a life style of 1800's.