Here Comes the Sun: Harnessing Solar Power for Personal Use

I haven't owned a car for more than two years.

That's a situation I'm now trying to remedy. I'm interested in minimizing my carbon footprint and am leaning toward purchasing a hybrid.

The 2010 Toyota Prius immediately comes to mind. It's set the bar for hybrid technology-some Prius owners report a hefty (if not jaw-dropping) 65 miles per gallon-and is continuing to build on its success.

But there actually is more to the Prius than astoundingly good gas mileage, and one of its newer features is a solar panel-embedded roof that ventilates the cabin when parked. It's a cool item, one that reminds me of an item in this week's PressPac.

The article is about, you guessed it, solar power-more specifically 'personalized solar energy' that focuses on inexpensive energy storage. In ACS' Inorganic Chemistry, Daniel Nocera of Massachusetts Institute of Technology describes how capturing solar energy on a small-scale, for example at your house (or your car!), is an emerging focus of electricity production and could meet the future demand in a sustainable way.

He says it could have a major global impact in poorer areas. "Because energy use scales with wealth, point-of-use solar energy will put individuals, in the smallest village in the nonlegacy world and in the largest city of the legacy world, on a more level playing field."

Read more, including the nuts and bolts of how personalized solar energy works, here.

Images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons