schmiggens
Outrageous
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Registered: Apr 2003
Local time: 09:39 AM
Location: In The Zone
Posts: 18704
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Wearable Solar Panels Available Soon
Dec. 17, 2004 — Wearable solar panels that can be stuck to clothing, helping to charge mobile phones, music players or light batteries, are likely to come on sale within three years, the magazine New Scientist reported this week.
The panels will be pliable and cheap, because they can be mass-produced in rolls that can be cut as required and wrapped around clothes, fabrics, furniture and rooftops to convert light from the sun into electricity, it says.
The innovation is the result of a three-nation research project backed by European Union (EU) subsidies for work into clean energy sources, with the Swedish-Dutch company Akzo-Nobel as one of the partners.
The basic technology is the same as that used for conventional solar panels, which are made of pairs of sheets of semi-conducting silicon, doped with phosphorus and boron atoms.
The new panels are made the same way but, by using polymorphous silicon instead of crystalline silicon, the thickness is little more than photographic film — just one micrometre, up to 10 times thinner than conventional panels.
The yield is not so good, though. The best solar panels now have an energy efficiency of 20 percent, but the new cells are only about seven percent.
Even so, this should be enough to add bendy solar panels to a jacket or rucksack to charge up a mobile phone during a walk, or to a tent flysheet which will charge batteries all day so campers can have light all night, New Scientist says.
Awesome. Can you imagine back-packing around the world with these stuck all over your back-pack and probabaly all over everything  . You'd never run out of power for anything ever again. No excuses for not shaving 
Let's go with this freak show. It's outrageous.
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12-20-2004 06:10 AM
