New Technology Turns Windows Into Solar Panels 86
An anonymous reader writes "A start-up in Northern California is working on creating 'solar windows' that could act as solar panels at the same time as blocking sunlight from entering office buildings to reduce their energy needs."
Re:Office buildings? (Score:2, Interesting)
It will eventually be a common technique when building homes. At some point in the future you will have solar shingles, solar windows, in wall solar panels with light redirected from above to make use of the dead space and possibly even solar paint (depending on house style) that all feed into the same generation system. Unfortunately it isn't viable today and all of those technologies have to be developed to be separately viable before they can be combined into some sort of piecemeal home unit that generated/collected enough energy to make a difference. The place you start with the glass materias would obviously be the giant glass buildings all around us, AKA office buildings.