NOW You're Talkin'

PALO ALTO (CALIFORNIA), Aug 3 (Bernama) -- Stanford engineers have figured out how to simultaneously use the light and heat of the sun to generate electricity in a way, that could make solar power production more than twice as efficient as existing methods and potentially cheap enough to compete with oil.

Stanford University news said that unlike photovoltaic technology currently used in solar panels - which becomes less efficient as the temperature rises - the new process excels at higher temperatures, Qatar News Agency (QNA) reported Tuesday.

Now obviously this isn't a solution for all locations - Seattle wouldn't be contributing too much power to the grid for example, and until we come up with better wind farms, we'd be burning a lot of fossils during winter. But imagine the boon this would be to cheap energy on the whole! Getting just a fraction of your power load from the sun would result in lower costs, less environmental damage and less financing of terrorist states. Downside anyone? Anyone?