![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() “There’s actually light going out, and we use that to generate electricity at night. That’s because solar panels - like everything warmer than absolute zero - emit infrared radiation. “During the day, there’s a light coming in from the Sun and hitting the solar cell, but during the night, something of a reverse happens,” Assawaworrarit says. The new technology takes advantage of a surprising fact about solar panels. At night, solar panels turn the table and emit photons That flow of energy enables the device Assaworrarit and his colleagues created - an ordinary solar panel outfitted with a thermoelectric generator - to generate a small amount of electricity from the slight difference in temperature between the ambient air and the surface of a solar panel pointed deep into space. An electrical engineer, he welcomed the cloudless nights for an entirely different reason: a clear night means infrared light from the surface of solar panels can freely radiate out into space. Those conditions were “probably the best of the year,” he tells IE.Īssaworrarit isn’t an astronomer grateful that clouds didn’t block starlight from traveling through the atmosphere and reaching the mirror of his telescope. That was good news for researcher Sid Assawaworrarit and his colleagues. The skies above Stanford, California, were unusually clear for several nights last October. ![]() Radiative cooling might reduce the need for costly batteries in some applications ![]()
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