It can't be, can it? Solar cells that actually generate power at night as well as during the day? How could this be? As far as I know, the name 'solar' means sunlight, and without sunlight, there can be no power, right? Well, just when you thought you have heard of everything, you ain't heard nothin' yet!
Introducing solar cells made with nanoantennas, a breakthrough technology that allows power generation even in darkness. Here's how it works:
These little nanoantennas capture infrared light during the wee hours of the morning and turn this IR radiation into usable power. The trick is this. It needs no sun to do this, because it captures all of it's power from the earth itself.
You see, when the sun warms up the earth during the day, this heat is released back into the atmosphere at night when the temps get a little cooler. The heat that is released can be seen on the infrared light scale, which is the exact principle in use to make night vision goggles. See where I'm going with this? That means that if night vision goggles can see it, so can those little nanoantennas. And because they react to IR light the same way a solar panel reacts to sunlight, you have a system that can turn light waves into energy.
This is pioneering work from the Idaho National Laboratory, and they believe the system can be up and ready with five years on a commercial scale. Why so long you might ask? Even though they are able to capture all that IR energy, there is still no known way to convert it into electricity. That's like standing on a prairie in 1850 with a container of gasoline. All that energy in a can, but the internal combustion engine hasn't been invented yet!
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