By John DeFore

In the future, employing solar energy won’t necessarily mean mounting big black panels on your roof or buying from a utility with a solar farm. It might just mean pulling the curtains shut for a while.

Sheila Kennedy, a Boston architect currently teaching at MIT, is in the vanguard of designers envisioning a future in which electricity production grows more and more decentralized, with energy-gathering fixtures surrounding us, either storing electricity for later use or plugging directly into appliances and lighting.

One of her highest-profile projects, a Soft House shown at Germany’s Vitra Design Museum, used a type of photovoltaic cell that can be produced in bendable, textile-like form; its curtains harvested sunlight for domestic use.

Kennedy has said that her calculations suggest 15 square meters of solar-collecting textile would be sufficient to meet most of an average household’s needs, and she envisions all sorts of unconventional structures (like a quickly assembled “zip room”) that would be built around solar curtains and similar materials.

While the architect admits that the “organic photovoltaics” currently lag behind more familiar glass-panel solar cells in terms of efficiency, their more adaptable form make them useful in ways conventional cells aren’t. And at any rate, researchers are bound to improve their efficiency if the idea catches on — with Kennedy actively looking for partners serious enough to bring these ideas into the retail mainstream, that might happen sooner than the sci-fi-sounding premise suggests.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media