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The Dotcom King, Bill Gross & the Rooftop Solar Revolution

Idealab impresario Bill Gross couldn’t wait for the dawn of the sun age. So he built a high-energy, low-cost solar concentrator that will fit on your roof. And overthrow the powers that be.

Shortly after dawn on a typical Arizona morning, a wave of photons born eight minutes earlier in the big yellow fusion reactor in the sky clears the Superstition Mountains and sweeps across Phoenix and the Valley of the Sun. On a fenced-in stretch of gravel at the edge of booming Mesa – the largest suburb in the US – the stream of newly minted light strikes what looks like a lunar lander, all bundled wires and glinting aluminum. The photons ricochet off 25 mirrors arranged in a 5- by 5-foot square and converge in a shaft of light brighter than the sun at high noon.

The tightly focused stream crashes into 100 square inches of silicon suspended over mirrors, sending a spray of electrons dancing down a copper wire. A CPU revs and tiny motors whir. As one, the mirrors adjust their positions ever so slightly. And the latest attempt at keeping pace with humanity’s epic appetite for energy begins another day of pulling power from the sky.

This package of precision engineering is called the Sunflower, which is what one of its early prototypes vaguely resembled, four years and 40-odd iterations ago. The yard it sits in belongs to Arizona State University’s Photovoltaic Testing Lab, where devices that turn sunlight into electricity go to prove their stuff. Over the next three months, a half-dozen Sunflowers will be toasted, roasted, scorched, and drowned.

They’ll endure showers of fake hailstones fired from air guns, snowdrifts simulated with water-saturated foam-rubber blankets, and 25 years’ worth of punishing ultraviolet radiation. If all goes well, the spoilsports at Underwriters Laboratories will crack what passes among them for a smile. A crew of solar-energy fanatics operating out of a converted Korean restaurant in Old Town Pasadena, California, will cheer. And Bill Gross will, well, beam.

By Spencer ReissPage

Full Story: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.07/solar.html?tw=wn_tophead_6

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As solar gets smaller, its future gets brighter
Nanotechnology could turn rooftops into a sea of power-generating stations

Investors along Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park are pouring money into solar nanotech startups, hoping that thinking small will translate into big profits.

Both inventors and investors are betting that flexible sheets of tiny solar cells used to harness the sun’s strength will ultimately provide a cheaper, more efficient source of energy than the current smorgasbord of alternative and fossil fuels.

Nanosys and Nanosolar in Palo Alto — along with Konarka in Lowell, Mass. — say their research will result in thin rolls of highly efficient light-collecting plastics spread across rooftops or built into building materials.

Paul Carlstrom, Special to The Chronicle

Full Story: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/07/11/BUG7IDL1AF1.DTL

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Same idea, different approaches
Nanotech firms take various paths to harnessing sun

Paul Carlstrom

While Konarka, Nanosolar and Nanosys have similar ideas about flexible solar cells, each company approaches the subatomic level differently.

Konarka uses nanotechnology to manipulate and create polymers, or elongated molecules, for use in plastics. This approach, says the company, allows its technology to capture all visible light sources — from both the sun and indoor light.

Nanosolar approaches the production problem by eliminating a process usually used in thin-film deposition technology. "Thin-film" typically describes depositing a fine layer of material on another material. This process usually requires a vacuum so particles form a solid layer.

Full Story: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/07/11/BUG3KDLACC1.DTL&type=business

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