Solar Panels that Work at Night

Researchers at the Idaho National Laboratory have taken advantage of advances in nanotechnology to develop a new material which has the ability to soak up much more energy than existing solar panels. The material is basically a flexible sheet covered with thousands of microscopically small antennae which are able to convert infrared waves into energy. These tiny antennae pick up infrared waves in much the same way as the aerial in your radio or cellphone picks up radio waves. it was previously not possible to create an array of antennae of the required size, they needed to be small enough to match the very short wavelength of the infrared.

This material can absorb virtually as much energy on a cloudy day as on a clear day. The most exciting property of this material is that it can absorb energy during the night! This is because the heat soaked up by the Earth during the day is radiated back up into the atmosphere (in the form of - you've guessed it - infrared radiation) at night.

This material should be relatively inexpensive to produce (much less than existing solar panels) and is reckoned to be 80% efficient compared to a typical 20% efficiency achieved by conventional solar panels. Scientists reckon the maximum efficiency achievable with photovoltaic cells is around 40%.

The downside is that at the time of writing this article, the technology does not yet exist to convert the captured energy into usable electricity. This is because the electricity produced alternates at an extremely high frequency and there hasn't been a way found yet to convert it into either an alternating current at an acceptable frequency or a direct current (the type of current you get from a battery). However, the team at Idaho are confident that nanotechnology can come to the rescue again and be the key to a solution to this hurdle.

The aim is for this technology to be commercially available some time between 2015 and 2020.

So we have a relatively cheap material which is up to 4X more efficient at capturing the available energy and keeps absorbing energy 24/7. But it doesn't stop there.

Bad News for the Air Conditioning Industry.

The heat inside a building gets absorbed into the walls. Because heat energy is conducted from hot to cold, that heat energy won't be dissipated to the outside on a hot day, instead it just radiates back inside the building, hence the need for air con. But consider this; place some of this wonder material inside the building and it will absorb the infra red radiation, i.e. it won't be radiated back into the building. So you have a material that can cool down a building without the need for an expensive air conditioning unit. Not only due you save on the substantial amount of electricity needed to run the air con, the soaked up heat energy will actually produce electricity for you. And you can have the windows open! Controlling the temperature would be a matter of adjusting the exposed surface area of the sheet.

Cooling down your computer.

This could be used to absorb the heat produced in devices containing electronic circuitry, like your PC for example. No need for a noisy, energy sapping fan. You may find the inside of the tower not gettting clogged up with dust so easily too.

Other places.

Because of the flexibilty of the material it could be used in clothing (absorbing body heat) so could be pariculary useful for cooling down long distance runners for example. It could be placed in cars, thus negating the need to use the cars air con whilst also charging the car battery (not using the cars air con will dramatically improve your fuel consumption).

Being flexible and relatively cheap, users of this material should be able to exploit at least twice the surface area for energy collection than would be practicable with conventional solar panels. Multiply that by the fact that this material is around 4 times more efficient at collecting energy and multiply that by the fact that energy can be collected 24/7 as opposed to just daylight hours with a clear sky (another factor of 2+) and you have a material which is producing perhaps 16X more electricity for you than  the photovoltaic solar panels of 2009. This makes energy self sufficiency for the majority of households a realistic aspiration and would have a dramatic effect on the average persons carbon footprint.

Demand on the grid would decrease substantially, thus reducing the cost of electricity. Driving an electrically powered vehicle rather than a gas guzzler may become more attractive. Businesses, Offices, Warehouses and Retail Outlets will all be able to reap the benefits of this new material. They could reduce their energy costs substantially and reduce their carbon emissions too.

With traditional solar power, wind turbines and tidal power, the quest for economically viable sources of renewable energy has been ongoing for many years, but if the team at Idaho can crack that last obstacle, this new material could trump them all and truly be one of the most significant technological developments of our age.