Tag Archives: solar

Window-Powered Buildings

glass A company, XsunX, is producing some really enlightening technologies. They envision buildings that produce their own energy through solar power, they imagine a future where the very glass you are looking through is also powering your computer.

Glass as solar panels, this just makes sense. Office towers need power during the day, which is conveniently when the sun is up. I hope that this company makes these products inexpensive.

“XsunX is also developing an opaque solar cell that is so thin and flexible that it can be integrated into other building materials, such as roofing and siding. The possibilities are virtually endless.”

Soaring Solar

Solar boat It seems that every year solar power efficiency improves and that this increased energy production allows for more and more uses. People also figure out other ways to use the sun’s heat. And what’s technological innovation without a competition? Well, we all know there are solar-powered competitions around the world like the classic World Solar Challenge that travels across Australia.

Did you know that there are solar powered boat competitions? I didn’t. The Frisian Nuon Solar Challenge is all about raising boats that gather power from the sun’s rays. Recently, Technical University of Delft won the competition.

Tempted to get your own solar boat, check out all of these crazy looking solar boats.

See Solar Run

A Drawing of the Sun from the USA EPA siteA solar cell absorbs a small range of light wavelengths based upon the density and width of silicon crystals. Light strikes the crystals and causes electrons to propagate along the network. We call this flow of electrons electricity.

More crystals of different widths in the network mean that more different wavelengths can be absorbed and more power can be generated. Adding different layers of crystals to absorb a wider range of wavelength is one way to increase the power, but the process to spread these crystals over a surface is very expensive and energy intensive.

Prism Solar Technologies is going a different path by splitting the incoming sunlight and concentrating specific wavelengths onto a variety of cells designed to collect those specific wavelengths, yielding 25% greater electricity yields. These concentrators and splitters are orders of magnitude cheaper to produce than solar cells and increase the power of each solar cell. Oh, by the way, the Prism splitter is clear.