The future’s here, incidentally.

We need some quantitative standard by which we can declare “Yes, now we can Seattle by solar energy.”

‘Cause, you know, then we just have to work on those giant robots.

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I just squeed a bit…

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To Seattle: Something that Nirvana, Starbucks, and Frasier Crane have in common, I guess. Someone else will have to come up with the punch-line for that one.

MIT Super-solar: Before looking at it, I had guessed that it involved nano-something, that it’d be a wildly popular thing that turned out to be the next asbestos, and that in thirty years everyone would be cursing the fools (us) who so carelessly built, bought,and disposed of the stuff — think cell-slicing nano-sediment bio-accumulating in river and lake life. So I’m delighted to see that it’s actually not that at all. I want soar storm windows (though it sounds like they’re necessarily funny colours).

I will say that I don’t see how it can be used to retrofit existing panels in any practical way, and that it looks like it’s a 40x concentrator that sends light to narrow cells around the edges, not something that you slap on to magically get forty times the energy for the same area. So you don’t install one of these at a size of, say 1×2 metres and get power equivalent to a traditional panel of 40 x 2m^2. Instead, assuming an edge width of 1 cm, you’d get the equivalent of 40 x Perimiter x Thickness or 40 x 600 cm x 1 cm = 2.4 m^2. They’re supposedly stackable, so that`s where the real win comes in, but not forty times over.

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