Nano-Solar Power -Will it Be the Next Revolutionary Technology?
Luke McKinney

Nanotech has fueled the imaginations of science-fictioners for years, with world-changing and ending inventions in equal measure.  But the real strength of this molecular machinery is how it can upgrade existing concepts, and this time it's solar power's turn.  Two trendy technologies and one potentially revolutionary application.

Considering that the Sun already provides all the Earth's organic energy in one form or another, it seems a shame we can't make the machines use it too.  Solar panels have never quite cracked the power:cost ratio that would make them standard, and it turns out all the "add more expensive elements to raise efficiency" strategies are better at the expensive than the efficient bit.

Step forward Idaho National Laboratories, who were working on nano-enhancing existing technologies before realizing that was like fitting a quantum computer to navigate a steam engine.  Now they're working on entirely nano-paneling, and to say it's a whole new deal is an understatement - for one thing, you don't need to make panels anymore.

The new nanonet is flexible and can be printed on many surfaces.  A demonstration was printed on plastic bags, and the conflict of "solar power good plastic bags bad" could give any eco warrrior a serious headache.  The tiny antennae that make up the solar sheets work for the same reason your first car shook like a blender when your engine hit a certain revs: resonance.  The microscopic structures can pick up the infrared wavelengths that only Predators can even see, absorbing energy at 80% efficiency - four times the efficiency of commercial panels.

Not that the technology is perfect.  The system can absorb energy very well, but that's no good to anyone until they work out a way to harvest it from the sheet - when you're dealing with a hyper-complex web of millions of units oscillating at trillions of cycles per second, you can't just solder copper wires to the ends and call them plus and minus.  This isn't a mistake or a weakness in the concept though; it's an issue because no-one has ever done this before.  You know, the kind of thing that happens with cutting edge invention.