Capture solar power with your curtains

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/07/01/solar.textiles/index.html?iref=newssearch

updated 11:14 a.m. EDT, Tue July 1, 2008

Capture solar power with your curtains

By Hilary Whiteman
CNN

LONDON, England (CNN) -- 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.

...

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.

...

[napoleon_in_rags]

1. That's sweet. I was daydreaming about a sailboat...

...that does it with the sails. Looks like a step in the right direction.

[razors edge]

2. I wanted to look into

getting a patent on solar blinds. Wires where the cords are now and a small inverter that would plug them into the AC outlet.

Never got around to it. :shrug:

[emilyg]

3. Kool.