Solar panels work by absorbing energy from particles of light, called photons, which then generate electrons to create electricity. Traditional solar cells are only capable of capturing part of the light from the sun and much of the energy of the absorbed light, particularly of the blue photons, is lost as heat. This inability to extract the full energy of all of the different colors of light at once means that traditional solar cells are incapable of converting more than 34% of the available sunlight into electrical power.

The Cambridge team led by Professor Neil Greenham and Professor Sir Richard Friend has developed a hybrid cell which absorbs red light and harnesses the extra energy of blue light to boost the electrical current. Typically, a solar cell generates a single electron for each photon captured. However, by adding pentacene, an organic semiconductor, the solar cells can generate two electrons for every photon from the blue light spectrum. This could enable the cells to capture 44% of the incoming solar energy.

Reading about CO2Stats (via TechCrunch), a company who says it monitors your website’s environmental footprint and purchases renewable energy to neutralize it:

[...] The carbon footprint of air and automobile transportation is widely known, but few people are aware that the electricity generation required for information and communication technologies (ICT) is now responsible for 2% of global CO2 emissions, exceeding the emissions of the entire aviation industry. With CO2Stats it is for the first time possible to get precise emissions data on a site-by-site basis, enabling fine-grained ownership and management of environmental footprints at the experience level.

We’re paying more attention to green issues and energy conservation with things like recycling, asking more questions of manufacturers and suppliers about their supply chain and their social responsibilities regarding the environment.

So why not concerning your website?

I’m already green thanks to my hosting service, DreamHost.

How about you?

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