Solar Power From Home Curtains

Passion 07-03-2008

Imagine every time you closed your curtains, you were capturing enough solar energy to power your laptop. The technology is available, but no one's packaged it up in a handy DIY kit at your local hardware store.

Sheila Kennedy hopes to be the first. She's not an interior designer but an architect and professor in practice at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is convinced that solar textiles will revolutionize the way we collect and consume power.

"I've been thinking about what happens when power and light become flexible, literally flexible," she said.

She calls it "soft power," as in the "soft energy path," a term coined Amory Lovins in the 1970s as a way to describe a world where renewable energy would gradually replace the centralized grid.

Later, Joseph Nye used the term "soft power" to describe the ability of persuasion, values and culture to influence change.

Kennedy's work with soft power builds on both of these ideas. For her , soft power is the ability of flexible materials to convert sunlight into energy.

"The soft power approach says there are some incredibly sensual, compelling, beautiful spaces and products that we can be producing using these emerging energy-harvesting materials," Kennedy said.

Her Boston-based firm, Kennedy & Violich Architecture, has been working with thin-film photovoltaic material, a fabric that looks and moves like cloth but does the job of a solar panel.

"These are materials which can be prepared in the chemistry lab or can be found in nature. They produce electricity when exposed to light. They are very efficient and flexible," she said.

Raven

Ideas like this I can get behind and alot of other people can becuase its practical, saves money and also helps the enviroment.

Nina

II do like the idea behind them but I'm really interested in how much you would actually save and what could you actually power/charge with something like this. Since there's really only about 3 things that reall causes you to have a noticeable electric bill.

hugo281

hell yeah this is a good idea and it could hopefully save money on electricity but the thing is where would be a good place to put the batteries so that when the suns up the curtains can get that energy from the sun and store it

Dream

There's only some people's places i could see this from what I see int he pic. If they have alo of silver or gray in their place then it will proably look good. but what do ou use it to power up?

hugo281

well just the essentials like my Blu-Ray, iPOD, MP3 players, TV, the refrigerator, and the TVs and satellite and most important to power the house too, I think this would be a good idea to have Solar Power curtains