SUN BALLOONS

摘要

Imagine a UFO parking lot: silver orbs as far as the eye can see. Cool Earth Solar's power plants will look like that. The company's design features inexpensive balloons-plastic film with an aluminum lining-each with a photovoltaic cell at its center. The eight-foot-wide balloons concentrate the sun's rays onto the solar cell to generate a kilowatt of electricity, 350 times as much as the cell without the balloon. No worries of hailstorms or BB guns popping the plant; field tests confirm that these merely create slow, patchable leaks.