It sounds like one of those three decker jokes where part three brings you down to earth with a bump, which is presumably why it got written like that. Hedge your bet by hinting that the story could be all rubbish, and then tell it anyway. Because, maybe he’s right:
BOSTON – He predicted the fall of the Soviet Union. He predicted the explosive spread of the Internet and wireless access.
Now futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil is part of distinguished panel of engineers that says solar power will scale up to produce all the energy needs of Earth’s people in 20 years.
There is 10,000 times more sunlight than we need to meet 100 percent of our energy needs, he says, and the technology needed for collecting and storing it is about to emerge as the field of solar energy is going to advance exponentially in accordance with Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns. That law yields a doubling of price performance in information technologies every year.
Tell me more:
… advances in technology are about to expand with the introduction of nano-engineered materials for solar panels, making them far more efficient, lighter and easier to install. …
Is anyone serious now interested in this, other than singularity prophets?
… Google has invested substantially in companies pioneering these approaches.
Okay, but I would have preferred an obscure venture capitalist with a boring name, rather than the overmighty corporation which is, for now, flavour of the decade, and which has, for now, more money than God, to the point where hundreds can have full-time jobs spending it, without making a visible dent in money mountain. How “substantially” has Google invested?
The reason why solar energy technologies will advance exponentially, Kurzweil said, is because it is an “information technology” (one for which we can measure the information content), and thereby subject to the Law of Accelerating Returns.
“We also see an exponential progression in the use of solar energy,” he said. “It is doubling now every two years. Doubling every two years means multiplying by 1,000 in 20 years. At that rate we’ll meet 100 percent of our energy needs in 20 years.”
So, could any of this be true? If it is true, what follows, economically, politically etc.? Beyond the obvious in the shape of disconsolate arabs. Instapundit doesn’t have comments, but we do. My first thought: batteries for laptops and mobile phones are going to be replaced by infinitely powerful black patches on the outside (that’s already happened with calculators, has it not?). Second thought: will big black patches on the roof in due course be enough to power cars? Trains? Lorries? Airplanes? Spaceships?
Third thought: the greenies will absolutely hate this, because there’s nothing they hate so much as technical fixes to their precious and previously unfixable problems. Predictions for what they will say: “The sun is a finite resource! It is running out! Stop consuming Our Fragile Sun! …” And, suddenly they will fall in love with oil industry workers, because they won’t be needed any more.
But, first things first. Is it true?
It has always been the case that of the various “green” energy sources, photovoltaic solar cells was the only interesting one. Wind power and tidal power and that sort of stuff cannot generate enough power for anything but niche applications, but make the solar cells efficient enough and they can actually provide much of our energy needs.
My hunch is that this is still a way off though. Much as I have enjoyed reading Kurzweil’s books, this article contains slightly too many fashionable buzzwords for me to read it without a little scepticism.
BP are one of the biggest investors in Fuel Cells FYI
“Second thought: will big black patches on the roof in due course be enough to power cars? Trains? Lorries? Airplanes? Spaceships?”
I’m afraid not. Solar power averages 1.36 KW per square meter when it impinges on the atmosphere. Given atmospheric absorption and inefficiencies of conversion to electricity, we would be very lucky indeed to convert half of that to electricity. As a quick estimate, the best that we could work toward is a square meter of solar cell for every horsepower(1 HP = 746 watts). So… that Tata Nano is going to have to drag around 33 square meters of solar cell!
Ray Kurzweil has a pretty good track record, so his predictions shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. I hope he’s right. Still, it’s good to keep in mind the warning of Nils Bohr (Nobel laureate in physics): “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.”
Kurzweil is worth listening to. His law of accelerating returns is well argued, has a plausible mechanism (that tomorrow’s technology is developed using today’s, which is better than yesterday’s) and certainly seems to “predict” the past accurately. And you can argue about timescales all you like, but there’s nothing in his predictions about genetics, nanotechnology and robotics that breaks any physical laws. I think free solar energy is only the beginning. It’s another reason why politicos and greens making 50 year predictions is so daft.
You could certainly be driving round in a solar powered car in the fairly near future provided:
a) It’s really a hybrid or a plug-in, (for days when the sun isn’t out)
b) Battery technology, (or capacitors or other energy storage means), keep pace with the development of the solar panels.
c) The state nannys don’t ban it, (or erect such high safety hurdles as to effectively ban it).
a and b look to be not insurmountable. c is another matter altogether. Since the dreaded word nano has already been associated with this technology then I fear the neo-Luddites will have a field day.
You wouldn’t power the car (or train etc) directly by solar. However, if you can get solar cheap enough, you can use it to get the H2 out of water and use that in a fuel cell. There are demos of this sort of technology around, solar powered H2 pumps.
It’s purely a price thing now. I’m possibly a bit over-optimistic but I really wouldn’t be all that surprised to see solar being as cheap as coal derived electricity in the next decade or so ( as cheap, delivered to hte point of use that is).
The H2 thus becomes the storage system for the solar power, a substitute for a battery if you wish.
Yes, it’s wasteful….but if solar gets cheap enough, who cares?
I reckon the real solar powered economy will have to wait for the orbital solar power collectors. Unless the sun keeps using the Clearasil, in which case they will be needed to fight the ice-age. (And won’t the anti-hiumanists love that.)
Memo to McCain or Obama or whoever: Leave the California and Gulf deposits in the ground for now, but open up the ANWR fields pretty quickly, otherwise you’ll be digging them out from under a few miles of ice.
Heavy industry rely on big rotating machines that require big generation. So long as this is an issue, big alternating current generators such as those powered by steam turbines powered by burning fossil fuels or fission reaction, or by gas turbines will continue to be required.
It’s possible that in the future solar power will be harvested in significant quantities. It’s hard to tell now.
Roy Kurzweil’s prediction isn’t based on any hard facts. It’s a prophecy.
“the greenies will absolutely hate this, because there’s nothing they hate so much as technical fixes to their precious and previously unfixable problems.”
How true – and would I ever enjoy watching David Suziki and Al Gore get in a twist.
A friend of mine is both very keen on, and very expert on, alternative energy installations. He’s electrified a village in Ghana (entirely informally; his landlord hails from there, my friend designed and sourced all the kit, sent it with instructions and supervised “by proxy” etc) jolly good stuff, he installs solar installations over here as a spare time thing, and so on. He’s something of a geek on electrical matters, as am I I guess. Anyway, one thing that drives him barmy is Greens who don’t understand efficiency, and on beery occassions we’ve had a laugh or two about it. You can’t explain to many people that you can’t get more than 100% efficient. People seem to think that, just as computers seem to double in speed every 18 months or whatever, you can do the same with energy technologies.
Solar panels are already up to abut 40% efficient, so at best you can make them 2.5 times as efficient, and that’s it. They’re pretty light already, and you can’t by definition make them smaller because of collecting area.
Two and a half times the efficiency is useful, but it’s not going to throw us into the Singularity is it? It means a panel of a size which currently produces 10W will now produce 25W. Like I said, that’s all well and good, but that’s all it is.
It’s even worse with motors. People have no idea that a modern industrial motor is in the high 90s of efficiency and so any radical new design can only get a few percent improvement. Doesn’t stop people thinking you can improve them endlessly too. And so on.
Solar is a great technology in its place. Questions of scalability are the problem. It’s the sheer surface area required that is the problem.
Area is not a problem, Ian. The geniuses will cover the Sahara desert with panels. Then they are going to deliver the electricity to Europe…oops. Never mind, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.
Ian: if you’re still checking this thread, I used to work on the 51st floor of the Bank of American building in Dallas.
From there, I could literally see square MILES of wasted warehouse rooftops, where instead of picking up energy from solar input… they were instead running chiller units.
The major barrier there is that most properties with roofs like these are leased to the current tenants, and run by property management types, who aren’t about to take financial risks messing with technology experiments.
I’m thinking this is one of those very few times when lawyers can save the world… 🙂
The interesting thing about this is how it will turn the grid on it’s head. Power will have to flow in totally new directions. From decentralized locations in the south to be shipped north to sun poor regions. Regulation will be the biggest threat to solar power.
Ian B,
The thing that matters is cost. The area/$ can increase without obvious limit.
Brian,
You may be interested in the discussion on Wikipedia here. It appears the significant aspect of their work is not the use of nanoparticles, but the fact they can use printing technology rather than vaccuum deposition. There have been a few people talking about grid parity by 2010-2015 for a year or so now. Unless someone makes a major breakthrough, like these guys have claimed to have done, I’m not convinced that can be done in that timeframe without subsidies. But it’s by no means impossible either, and it will definitely happen eventually.
Nevertheless, it will take some time to ramp production up and replace existing capacity, so don’t look for any instant changes. Wikipedia in their photovoltaics article does mention a few possibilities the environuts could latch on to – principally that they use some exotic and frequently toxic chemicals in their manufacture. But Cadmium is also used in NiCad batteries, so I don’t think they’ll get very far.
Ian B:
Unfortunately, clouds are also a huge problem, and nights too (although nights are at least predictable). As far as I know, there is no reasonably efficient way to store electrical energy generated during the periods of peak solar power to be reused later when it’s dark or cloudy. And even if there were, in all but a small part of the world, it’s impossible to predict with a reasonable margin of error just how much sunshine you’ll get in a given week/month/season, thus making the solar power entirely impractical as anything but an auxiliary source of energy.
Whether we want to admit it or not, nuclear is the only way to go in the long run.
Rob Fisher:
I certainly won’t deny Kurzweil’s vast achievements in both research and business, but when it comes to his predictions for the future, I’m extremely skeptical. Frankly, I think that when he writes and talks about futuristic topics for the general public, he has definitely crossed into the territory of bombastic sensationalism that sells extremely well, but has no real scientific basis. In this regard, he is much like those theoretical physicists who write pop-science books and articles full of sensationalist extravagant claims about supposedly “cutting-edge” theories that are confusing at best, and outright misleading at worst for typical readers.
This is certainly true for his writings about strong artificial intelligence, which he represents as being just around the corner, whereas in fact it’s been heading nowhere for decades. Just check out the supposedly “intelligent” chatbot at his website(Link). It’s not significantly smarter than the famous ELIZA program written in 1966 — more than forty (!) years ago — and yet he represents it as some modern technological marvel. Thus, considering his wild sensationalist approach to computer topics (in which I am an expert, or at least professionally familiar to a certain degree), I have no trust in his pronouncements on other areas of science and technology, at least not those intended for the general public.
Ivan,
There are various energy storage technologies being developed. Like photovoltaics, they’re not yet at the economic stage, but there doesn’t seem to be any fundamental reason why this will continue to be the case indefinitely.
Take flow batteries, for example. In this sort of battery, the energy is stored by exchanging ions between liquid electrolytes, so that unlike an ordinary battery, when it’s charged up, you can pump the charged electrolyte out into tanks, pump some more uncharged electrolyte in to replace it and keep on charging up more. Your capacity is only limited by the size of your tanks, and you can store it indefinitely, or pump it around the country, or whatever else you want to do with it.
The main issue at present is the rather low energy density – about 325 times lower that gasoline. (So you need a 325-times bigger tank to store it in than you would if it was oil.) Round-trip efficiency is high – storing it in the battery loses about 25% in conversion costs. And it doesn’t have a problem with tens of thousands of charge-discharge cycles (and the active parts can be easily replaced when it does break), so it’s very long lasting.
Like I said, it’s not really economic yet. There are some smallish commercial plants already built, and a 12MWh one going up at some wind farm in Ireland. But if they can develop the chemistry to boost the energy density (one option is already promising a factor of two improvement) it may be part of the long term future. (Or one of the other storage technologies – heat, compressed air, liquid hydrogen, etc. Even making hydrocarbons from CO2, which people are working on in the lab.)
Personally, I’d have said nuclear fission was the second best option to cover the next 30-50 years (after fossil fuel, of course), with solar slowly taking over after that. Fission can of course supply power for tens of thousands of years without running out, but it is likely to remain an engineering feat to build and maintain, while solar has the potential to get really cheap.
However, the record demonstrates that one would have to be a fool to predict the future more than a few decades ahead with any confidence. I’m just guessing. There’s no telling what we’ll be able to do in 50 years time.
Have to agree with your analysis, Ivan.
As far as solar goes, it is currently a non-starter — outside regimes with unsustainable subsidies. The reason is obvious — anyone want to have emergency surgery in a hospital which shuts down after dark & when the sun goes behind a cloud?
Now, solar + energy storage might offer a technical solution, but storage adds costs without adding power output. There are some very interesting ideas out there — check out Mok Industries, for example — but the key is to bring down current costs by about an order of magnitude. Tough to do.
The other factor that greenies tend to forget is that the world uses an almost incredibly large amount of energy. Any large scale energy source will be … well, large scale. And if it intrudes on the likes of Teddie Kennedy’s viewscape (as it undoubtedly must, since it is large scale), then the usual suspects will oppose it bitterly.
So we come back to Ivan’s view — nuclear is the only currently feasible large scale option.
If “we” in the west are too good to use that source, “we” in China & India will plow ahead without the west. Some day, wealthy Chinese tourists will pay good money to go on exciting trips to quaint old London, where barefooted urchins hold up mirrors reflecting the sun’s faint heat to warm their poverty-stricken fathers’ beers.
“My first thought: batteries for laptops and mobile phones are going to be replaced by infinitely powerful black patches on the outside…” that still require energy storage for when it is dark.
One thing to remember is advances in science and technology don’t just make things like solar panels more efficient – it also makes the equipment we want to run from them more efficient too.
Yet I don’t think solar power will make some great leap forward and power everything we use. Not least because there will still be plenty of old technology kicking about and the vast quantities of energy we get through.
What it could do is lower the price at which fossil fuels can be supplanted by synthetic ones – a solar farm in the middle of a desert creating hydrocarbons from CO2 and hydrochloric acid, providing the heat needed for cellulosic ethanol, that sort of thing.
The biggest obstacle to solar power is your local planning department. Especially if you live in a conservation area.
Interestingly, the most visible commercial user of solar is a libertarian, the owner of Whole Foods. Apparently he has decided that between his chosen clientele and what he uses it for, it is a good investment. Most of his energy goes to refrigeration and air conditioning. Both of which tend to share peak draw with peak solar output. He ties into the grid and buys from and sells to the mains as needed. I don’t know how much of the cost side of this endeavor is assigned to marketing but it is popular with his typical customers.
If he is already finding it worth investing in, imagine what even these modest gains will mean to him.
As to some other comments here about efficiencies, the big gains there are going to be in energy storage. The next generation of nanotech capacitors will (already do?) actually have more usable capacity than lithium ion cells. While it is only about 30% of lithium ion capacity, it is 100% useful. LI in actual use is limited to a very narrow part of its total possible range in order to make batteries last longer.
Flow batteries are fascinating. I can imagine a potential use of nanotech there, as well. But I am curious about their failure mode. If a really high energy density medium is developed, what might be the mode and trigger of failure?
Russ
I could literally see square MILES of wasted warehouse rooftops
Sorry, but building roofs are a pin prick in the power requirements. In order to power Texas via solar, one would need to pave vast areas of the landscape, pissing off not just the moonbats, but everyone else.
Tim Worstall, who is a monopoly supplier of scandium, one of the industries essential raw materials, Kevin B and Ian B have nailed the issues.
Fact is, there simply is not sufficient usable solar flux available on the Earths surface to run an industrial civilisation without paving over everything which isn’t farmland. A house roof can run the house, during summer, provided there are no extended cloudy periods. A factory roof has not got a hope in hell of ever doing the job, the energy densities simply don’t exist. It doesn’t matter what the conversion efficiencies are, Earth based solar can never be anything but an ancillary source of power.
The only way solar will ever do the job is via orbital collecting stations. Hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of solar panels collect energy, beam the stuff to farmland as microwaves and roof over many square miles of farmland with wire mesh collectors. No reason why cows can’t continue to graze under the mesh. The loopies, of course, will go apeshit at the idea of feeding children with the harmless beef and milk from these animals.
The biggest problem with Earth based solar is base load power… you have to cover quite a bit of landscape with panels. Your capacity has to be large enough to handle night time, cloudy days, and so forth. You have to have a means of storing energy for use at those times or else an alternate power source that can fill in.
Some of the energy storage problem is being attacked by pumping pressurized gas deep underground and then using the pressure head to generate power when it is needed.
I kind of like Geosynchronous solar power sats as part of the solution… but then I would, wouldn’t I?
A recent technology may solve another part of the problem as well: a cheap transport fuel. Hydrogen has loads of hassles, the biggest of which is well, the size of tank required to store a reasonable amount of it. But a new technology, using some ‘nanotech’ engineering, has created a material that can split off an O from CO2 at 1100F, thus creating a flow of CO which can then be used in the century old Fischer-Tropsch process.. The captured O is released at 1200F so the device works with wheels that rotate between a source stream at 1100F and a hot side at 1200. It releases a continuous CO stream on one side and of O at the other side.
Fischer-Tropsch (If I remember the spelling!) is the technique used by Germany in WWII to make fuel after supplies were cut off so it has a long history of industrial scale production.
So what do we have? CO2 is taken out of the atmosphere and turned into fuel for cars and trucks which then output the same CO2 back. ‘Carbon neutral’ with a vengeance. Oh, and the heat source is solar too…
Talk about energy independence!
Talk about energy independence!
Yeah, but bleedin hot though. Can I do it in my cellar?
But getting back to the main point – Yes, Kurzweil is largely correct on the efficiency gains to be expected over the next ten/fifteen years.
I don’t expect to see a major takeoff in the installation of solar panels though. They may become relatively inexpensive, and they may then be able to reduce day to day power bills, but they, and the power storage infrastructure, will need maintaining as it deteriorates over the years, and this will be a major cost. Silicon may be cheap, but people are expensive.
This problem could maybe be dealt with tho, by not storing the power. Households produce it during the day and feed it to the grid, resulting in a power credit. Later on, power is taken from the grid, drawing on that credit.
Whether dealing with so many small scale and variable producers would be a viable supply and charging regime I don’t know.
Alisa, who wants to destroy the beauty of the Sahara Desert by putting up Solar panels? Allah forbid! Allah’s agents, from Saudi Arabia, will soon be stopping such blasphemes, don’t you worry!
Even if we did start getting more electricity than we knew what to do with (such as homesteading in the outback with solar-powered water condencing units) we would soon use up All our quota, and start insisting on more! Societies would be great if you could just do away with people….
Batteries will not be replaced by black panels, they will be supplemented by them – in fact, they already are.
Nick: also think of all the rare animal and plant species that will be driven out of the desert – a conservationist’s nightmare.
Dale, could you comment some perhaps on why we wouldn’t want to move most of the people who would use the electricity to orbit, with the solar collectors/generators? Or conversely, why that might be the way to go with this?
Thanks in advance.
Dale, could you comment some perhaps on why we wouldn’t want to move most of the people who would use the electricity to orbit,
Well, I am not Dale, but let me try.
Personally, I think it would be great if the population moved off planet, and we were able to return the planet to wilderness and park land. BUT – you want to propose how you plan to move people from the lands of their fathers? Gunpoint maybe? Because that is what it would take.
I wouldn’t want to do it because it would take a Mao, Pol Pot or Stalin to even try.
Mid,
Failure modes would depend on the detailed chemistry of however the density was improved, I guess. I don’t really know, but I would assume that if the electrolytes mixed directly, the reaction would generate lots of heat. There’s also a possibility that one or both could also react with oxygen – and be flammable. But it may well be that the separated electrolytes are perfectly harmless on their own. Consider another example – the iron oxide vs copper system. On their own, both are quite inert – but if you mix them together finely enough, you get thermite. If you’ve ever seen thermite catch fire, you wouldn’t have forgotten it.
Countingcats,
How do you figure the Earth is not big enough to supply solar power to civilisation? I agree that the cities almost certainly aren’t enough, but the whole world? Standard calculations (e.g. Wikipedia, but I’ve seen it in several places) say the total incoming is about 6000 times our current consumption. If you supposed 10% efficiency and take that as a fraction of the surface area of the Earth, you’d need about 850,000 km^2. (Less, since some places gets more than their fair share of sunlight.) For comparison, the Sahara has an area of about 9million km^2, so you’d still have 90% of the desert left over for all the little animals. Not that you’d actually put it in the Sahara – the energy transport losses would be horrendous.
I’m not sure about the area of urban development – I’ve found an FAO document giving estimates ranging from 713,000 km^2 to 3.5 million km^2. Of course, you’d only be able to cover a small proportion of that with solar panels, so I think you’re right that you couldn’t do it without taking up countryside. But I don’t see why you couldn’t do it on Earth. What’s your reasoning?
Whilst I’m a bit dubious about solar power (I’ve heard all my life about how solar power is just around the corner, not that corner, the next one, no, not THAT corner, but the very next one, promise!) we do need it, and not for obvious reasons. Plenty of decent people, who happen to grow cannabis using hydroponics, are being caught by their extravagant use of electricity. I suppose, therefore, that the police will want to outlaw solar so they can go on catching criminals….
Heh. Reminds me of a caution memo that was circulated in the iceboating fraternity. We use stationary belt sanders to shape a lot of the metal parts in iceboats. Seems a couple of hobbiests, father and son, were using the same equipment working on different projects with different metals in Australia (not iceboats, obviously). They accidentally created and ignited thermite. Big ‘oops’.
On Kurzweil, IIRC, he is predicting the singularity to be around maybe 2040? I think way sooner than that. Waaay sooner. And regarding the distribution of solar power from wherever it is captured to somewhere far away, superconductivity is probably going along a similar improvement path and could very well be high enough temperature to be useful for power transmission in the time frame he is talking about. It might be possible to lay deep sea power cables like communications cables. Australia could export to SEA. And the western Sahara is as close to Brazil as it is to the UK.
Mid: with all dues respect to superconductors, the distances seem to be too great for it to be economical. You are not going to collect enough power from the sun to be able to afford to lose any of it along the way.
Alisa,
My understanding of superconductivity is that it is essentially lossless.
I could well be wrong, but I think the theoretical problems are in the temperature at which it occurs. The practical problems will be in the cost of materials and manufacture.
Mid, Alisa,
The principle cost of superconductors is indeed in refrigeration, although they’re not perfectly lossless because the changing magnetic field of AC current induces currents in its non-superconducting surroundings. There are some limited applications already reckoned to be feasible. Room temperature superconductors would be a revolution.
Whether you can afford any losses depends simply on how marginal your price is. If solar panels are cheap enough, you can make up for any losses by laying out more panels. It’s more expensive and uses up more land, but is perfectly feasible. In practice, people will put the panels close to where the electricity gets used, because that makes the electricity cheaper. But it’s all a trade-off: cheap electricity versus not having to look at acres of black panels.
Geothermal and Solar Thermal can produce continuous power at the rate of 1kw for an investment of $3000 today. That is 9000 kwhs per year. The amount of land needed is small in relation to the amount of land available. Australia alone has many times the amount of land needed to power the whole world.
The running costs of Solar Thermal and geothermal is half the cost of the cheapest coal fired stations.
It doesn’t happen because the capital cost is currently 3 times the capital cost of building fossil fuel stations and at a discount rate of 5% it takes 20 years to get your money back from the lower prices. This is a worse return on investment than selling cigarettes or booze or entertainment and so the investments are not made. Overcome the barriers to investment and the problem can be solved already in a few years.
I saw a solution discussed years ago- use solar energy to get hydrogen from water, and cool and ship the hydrogen via gas pipes to where you can use it locally, either selling it for cars, or converting Coal-fired Power stations to run on Hydrogen. This was discussed in the context of a Solar-Hydrogen economy, 30 years ago, and it was feasible even then. Of course, the best spots for Solar are in the middle of the desert, so you still need to get the water there, but the Grand Scheme is still viable!
Mid, check this out (you can skip the first half of the page, as it deals with a separate issue of electric cars).
I am a real estate developer in the Chicagoland area. We are in the process of developing a semi green technology towh house progect, that utilizes geothermal heating and cooling. And other various and sundry items.
We are in the process of developing another project that will start off where the other left off. We are targeting a no run off and emision free project. We hope to be energy neutral. Our hang up to this point is providing an alternative way of producing electricity.
Does any one have info on the new nanotech solar alternatives?
We anticipate that this community will be a residential laboratory community.
Your thoughts.
Ron
Just registering
Its already dawning or should I say midmorning. Check:
http://www.Nanosolar.com
Its happening while we post our silly comments!
Nanotechnology changes everything, especially the comments made about the solar efficiency not being able to increase due to size limitations.
The future has arrived, now if it would only get off the bus and come visit my home!
I am looking for any updates on the conversion of solar energy to electric through the use of nanotechnology materials. I am in the process of putting a housing project together that has as one of it goals, to be utility neutral. I thought I read about some advancement in photovoltaic cells using a nano fabric.
yeah the closest thing to production nanotech is in printed solar panels which greatly reduces the price for manufacturing thus reducing final cost…and it can be put on about anything… the actual efficiency didn’t go up drastically, however cost and application ease are improved. check uni-solar for some info.
the simplist way to use power generated by solar is to sell it to the power companies as it is being generated. put it right into the power grid.
A centralized power grid is part of the problem. If the government is going to subsidize anything they should create more incentives for individuals to generate their own Alternative Energy and help put power back into the existing grid. That way everyone can help themselves and provide the excess to others.