Imagining some upcoming solar power possibilities

Greetings from an outrageously busy month. I continue my work travel regimen, having recently visiting Indiana and heading to Minnesota this weekend. My Georgetown University intensive class is running this week, and I’m prepping my other class which starts in a few days (blog post on the way).

So this post will be fast:

One of the great signs of progress in our time has been the massive growth in solar power. Prices have fallen, with solar becoming cheaper than fossil fuels, and deployment has soared. Finally solar power is beginning to play a serious role in supplying humanity’s electrical needs. We should expect more solar panels spreading wherever there’s light, if sometimes in the face of opposition.

Along these lines, I’ve been wondering what comes next. How far could solar go? After all, there’s a great virtue in drawing power from the solar system’s generous center.

One possible development concerns even thinner and more flexible solar surfaces. Beyond stiff panels, can we use something lighter, capable of installation throughout humanity’s built environment? Sprayable solar research and development has been progressing for years, often relying on nanomaterials and/or perovskite. Recently an Oxford University team described a very thin solar material: “At just over one micron thick, it is almost 150 times thinner than a silicon wafer. Unlike existing photovoltaics, generally applied to silicon panels, this can be applied to almost any…