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A new technology has emerged in the field of renewable energy. Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a new kind of antenna forged from carbon nanotubes that concentrate one-hundred times more solar energy than a standard photovoltaic cell. This is a revolutionary discovery, as the amount of surface area needed to create an efficient solar panel is going to be decreasing in the near future. Just as computer chips have gotten exponentially smaller and more powerful over the years, so will solar arrays. An article from Power Online discusses this exciting topic in one of their latest articles:
"[These] new antennas might also be useful for any other application that requires light to be concentrated, such as night-vision goggles or telescopes. Solar panels generate electricity by converting photons (packets of light energy) into an electric current. Strano's (Charles and Hilda Roddey Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering and the team leader of the researchers who have discovered this new technology) nanotube antenna boosts the number of photons that can be captured and transforms the light into energy that can be funneled into a solar cell."
The article maintains that in the future, your entire roof might not need to be covered in solar panels, but rather just have a few small locations where these new antenna arrays are present. However, there will likely be a myriad of other uses for these nanotubes, ranging from the powering of smaller devices to advances in satellite, space station and space shuttle construction. With this new breakthrough, it is likely that the renewable resource industry will see a huge boost in the months to come as the process is streamlined for mass production.
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