Dye-sensitized solar cells are promising candidates as supplementary power sources; the dominance in the photovoltaic field of inorganic solid-state junction devices is in fact now being challenged by the third generation of solar cells based on dye-sensitized, nano-porous photo-electrodes and polymer electrolytes. Polymer electrolytes are actually very favorable for photo-electrochemical solar cells and in this study poly(acrylonitrile)-MgI 2 based complexes are used. As ambient temperature conductivity of poly(acrylonitrile)-salt complexes are in general low, a conductivity enhancement is attained by blending with the plasticizers ethylene carbonate and propylene carbonate. At 20 โข C the optimum ionic conductivity of 1.9 ร 10 -3 S cm -1 is obtained for the (PAN) 10 (MgI 2 ) n (I 2 ) n/10 (EC) 20 (PC) 20 electrolyte where n = 1.5. The predominantly ionic nature of the electrolyte is seen from the DC polarization data. Differential scanning calorimetric thermograms of electrolyte samples with different MgI 2 concentrations were studied and glass transition temperatures were determined. Further, in this study, a dye-sensitized solar cell structure was fabricated with the configuration Glass/FTO/TiO 2 /Dye/Electrolyte/Pt/FTO/Glass and an overall energy conversion efficiency of 2.5% was achieved under solar irradiation of 600 W m -2 . The I-V characteristics curves revealed that the short-circuit current, open-circuit voltage and fill factor of the cell are 3.87 mA, 659 mV and 59.0%, respectively.