Nothing excites the imagination of the general public or researchers in the area of alternative energy like solar power does. You can explain until you’re blue in the face how wind power is cheaper per Kwh than solar, or how nanotech is really having an impact now on saving energy as opposed to generating it.
But it all hardly seems to matter. People want to know how nanotech is going to enable solar power. The latest news item comes out of MIT where researchers have formed carbon nanotubes into a kind of antenna that focuses photons onto photovoltaic cells and reportedly concentrates solar energy 100 times more than a regular cell.
According to Michael Strano, the leader of the research team and Charles and Hilda Roddey Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT, this development could result in smaller solar arrays.“Instead of having your whole roof be a photovoltaic cell, you could have little spots that were tiny photovoltaic cells, with antennas that would drive photons into them,” says Michael Strano in the article.
The work was originally published in the Sept. 12 online edition of the journal Nature Materials.
