Solar panels are great, don’t get me wrong, and the technology still has plenty of room to improve. But today, they still only capture about 20% of the energy coming from light…and there’s a young, promising challenger on the horizon. The technology is called a nanoantenna skin. It can suck 92% of the energy from infrared light (in theoretical simulations, about 80% in early lab testing). And because it doesn’t simply collect energy from the visible light spectrum, it even can harness the Earth’s solar energy it stores during the day and radiates at night.
Researchers at the Idaho National Laboratory have designed a lightweight, foldable solar panel design which they predict will function at 80% efficiency (the best solar panel prototypes operate at about 40%). The researchers’ secret is the implementation of nanoantennas, which have the ability to absorb not only light, but heat from the sun as well.
