Solar power: Turning your house into a light farm
Sheila Kennedy, an architect and lecturer at MIT spoke about solar technology at Pop!Tech in 2007. Now she’s developed her ideas further.
Her firm has been working on soft solar panels which could be used to help harvest sunlight and produce energy off the grid. The basic idea, according to this CNN report, is to produce drapes made of solar panels which can charge up the batteries that are incorporated into them:
Kennedy envisions a future in which a single homeowner or a group of neighbors would decide to wean themselves off the centralized grid and power their homes using the energy they’ve “harvested” themselves from the sun.
“You could look at it as a type of urban farming,” Kennedy suggested, adding that one of the reasons people aren’t doing it now is not the lack of technology but old habits and inherited centralized building systems in architecture.
Now, I’m not entirely sure this is practical - after all, I usually close my drapes at night, when there’s not much light to harvest. But it seems like a significant advance on the ideas that Sheila talked about last year.
Comments
ann Jul 9, 2008 at 10:13 am
I only close my drapes at night too, but I imagined that people who have to actually leave their homes to go to work during the day would close their drapes when the sun is out.
elaine Jul 23, 2008 at 11:24 am
My mother used to close the drapes every day about late morning. It kept the house cooler, and kept the rugs and furniture from fading. Amazing how simple an idea it was and how interesting Sheila Kennedy’s idea is now. I hope she finds a way to make them work.