Cheap "nanoantennas" for the win

As the price of oil continues to climb, new energy-collecting technologies are being developed, and they increasingly look more and more attractive. One of the latest, revealed by Idaho National Laboratory, is an enhanced variety of solar collector, that is so effective, it can even work at night.

The key to it all is nanotechnology. With this new technology, millions of extremely small twists of metal are molded into banks of "microantennas", which can be placed on almost any material, including plastic sheets. These spiral shaped "microantennas" are about 1/25 the width of a human hair. They are so small that they resonate from the interaction with the sun's infrared rays. This resonation can be translated into energy. During the day, the Earth soaks up a lot of this infrared energy, which is then radiated out at night -- enabling these microantennas to collect power even after the sun has set.

Conventional solar panels can convert about %20 of what hits them into electricity. The research team behind this new tech believes they can hit an efficiency rating of about %80. Also, conventional solar panels are expensive to produce because the rely on high-grade silicon, which is becoming increasingly expensive. These new solar collectors can be manufactured for much less -- the research team aims "to make nanoantenna arrays as cheap as inexpensive carpet."

But! It's not all worked out yet. A big stumbling block remains. While these solar collectors are able to collect solar energy, they are currently unable to transmit this energy into usable electricity. The solar infrared rays hitting the nanoantennas generate a current that has a frequency which oscillates ten thousand billion times a second -- which is far to great of an oscillation that standard electrical appliances can handle. But the teams working on it: "At this point, these antennas are good at capturing energy, but they're not very good at converting it," INL engineer Dale Kotter said, "but we have very promising exploratory research under way."

On left: A plastic sheet filled with zillions of nanoantennas. Each square has 260 million nanoantennas on it.

On right: An extreme close-up of the nanoantena banks, magnified by an electron microscope.