What if every solid surface was able to generate solar power?
Solar power has become the new star of the energy industry in the last few years. Recently, it even became cheaper than coal. But the one limitation that solar power has is that it needs space for setting up big solar cells if you want to generate a significant amount of power. But what if you have a solar cell that can be put on any single surface, thus enabling anything to generate its own power?
Well, that idea may not be an unrealistic one anymore. Recently, researchers were successful in growing a graphene surface on silicon, paving the way for generating solar power using graphene.
Graphene is a very recent invention, first developed in 2004. It is a single layer of carbon atoms in a hexagonal structure. Graphene is a million times thinner than human hair, and 200 times stronger than steel. On top of all this, it is essentially transparent. Graphene has been proposed to be used in everything from power conduction to space elevators.
Graphene, thus could be used as a solar cell, on almost any surface. It would be much cheaper and lighter than existing materials.This would mean that devices, instead of drawing their power from the standard grid, could generate their own power.
So what would be effects of everything being able to generate solar power?
It would be a boost for the IoT(Internet of Things)
The IoT industry was a hot industry a few months ago, but a lot of things haven't really materialized for this field. Apart from all the security issues, the one thing that plagues a lot of these devices, is that they just don't have a lot of battery capacity due to small size, and this is actually interconnected to other issues.
If you have a small battery, you have to use a small CPU, and a more stripped down OS with no updates, which leads to more security vulnerabilities.
So, if these things had in-built solar power generation capabilities, they could be operational for much, much longer. Hell, a lot of these things will be directly interacted with by humans. So that means that they can live off the solar power in the day, and go into hibernation at night, thus saving power. This will enable the device to have a much better CPU and full-featured OS, which will improve security.
It could be integrated into our bodies
Ok, so this is one of the more "out there" ideas I had when I thought about this.
So, at the cellular level, your body converts glucose and oxygen into ATP(Adenosine Triphosphate) in the mitochondria of the cell. But what if the energy generated by solar cells could be converted into glucose? .Graphene solar cells could be attached to our body without it feeling inconvenient. So can we generate energy all day long just through these solar panels? This could actually be a great way to maintain/reduce weight, because you can finely control the amount of power generated.
It would decentralzse power generation
This is perhaps the most important of all the effects.
If everybody could generate their own power, it would bring decentralization to the power industry on an unprecedented scale.
Everyone will have the means to power their electronics, and other devices. We wouldn't have to be dependent on the often corrupt, and slow power industry.Companies could use their huge buildings and other property to generate power.Of course, we would then have our own grid, that lets us buy/sell power. Such a network would be vastly more resilient and fool-proof than current systems. Another great thing about this will be the fact that people will be able to go in remote areas and still be able to generate power through their phones, cars, or even bodies!
So what do you think are some other effects of sticking a solar cell on every solid surface?
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go solar, go green energy!
Yes, solar is the future. Thanks for reading :-)
It is a question of efficiency. Currently solar cells require a large surface area to generate a meaningful amount of energy. Moving forward this problem will diminish. Whether we ever get to the situation envisioned by Nikola Tesla's free energy concept is an open question. There is little doubt, however, that the coming decades will be a game changer for the solar industry. Perhaps graphene will be important to this. Interesting.
Good post. Thanks. Followed.
Thank for reading :-)
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STOPI agree that solar energy part of the future, the only problem being the finite amount of silver for the photovoltaics and lithium for the power cells.