The Green Optimistic

Unlike the Americans or the Europeans, the Chinese know their way into the cleaner future everybody dreams of. They probably began understanding a long time ago and now bringing into practice the cleanest possible way of transportation: a solar powered electric car.

Kept in secret until yesterday, a newly appeared company, named SiOnyx, unveils an invention of some Harvard researchers, that is going to revolutionize the whole industry. Harvard has been studying their “black silicon” for almost ten years, but nothing has come out of their lab, due to internal policies regarding the output of their discoveries to commercial companies.

Solyndra, a company situated in Fremont, CA, has invented a new type of cylindrical solar panel, cheaper to install and more powerful compared to the conventional panels, which are made of flat solar cells.

Nicole Kuepper, a 23 year-old Australian scientist has invented a method of making cheap solar cells out of simple materials, that any DIY-er could find in his home.

Scientists from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Northwestern University invented a silicon solar cell. The interesting fact is that it’s flexible and it can be printed on a curved surface or a fabric. Although solar paint has been produced, there are a few situations where you’d rather use more solid solar cells (like porous surfaces, where paint cannot be applied well).

The workers say that the newly installed solar panels will save about 200 tons of CO2 in just 2 weeks (the equivalent of 70 tons of oil). It’s just nice. In fact, the Vatican is the only place I don’t think these expensive things will get stolen. The project is estimated to about $1.5 million.

Some recent partnership between UK university researchers and Corus Colours, also a UK-based firm, brought to the surface a promise of future commercialization of cheap dye-based solar panels.

What can you buy for $38,000? Two second-hand Priuses? No. A smaller airplane? Neither. I’ll tell you what you can have for that money: a solar powered desalination device.