Green Machines

And from the BBC news site comes this really great idea thought up in the San Francisco Bay Area's Silicon Valley. A company called SolFocus has designed solar panels to focus the energy of the sun onto a small location thereby intensifying the energy from the sun. These panels use 1/1000th the material as traditional solar panels and are much more efficient and viable in today's demand for solar energy. Unlike flat panels it means the expensive materials used to convert the energy to electricity are concentrated in one place. SolFocus claims to use 1/1000th of the area needed by flat panels, which keeps the manufacturing costs low.

SolFocus explained: "These cells have efficiency over double that of the best silicon today. We concentrate the sun 500 times on that small amount of cell, hence the 1000th of the amount of material used, or the expensive part.

"When there is no sun, or you can't see the solar disc, our panels produce zero power. They only produce power in bright sunny locations or when the sun is out."

Contracts have already been signed with the Spanish government for a large scale solar farm in Southern Spain.


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