Cheap Solar Technology and Personal Maps

I know I tend to focus on what's wrong a lot... so here are a couple of things that are right.

First, Weekend Edition Saturday had a story this morning on Nicole Kuepper, an Australian doctoral student who has invented a way to make solar receptors cheaply and with minimal technological infrastructure.


Unlike the usual receptors, her iJET panels don't require use of a clean room, can be made with relatively common metals/chemicals and an inkjet printer, and only require a baking temperature akin to that used when making a pizza.

She won Australia's Eureka prize for the invention, which she said on NPR was the result of making a mistake in the lab: she omitted an important step in the process of making receptors, but then they worked anyway.

Kuepper's invention, which will take five years to commercialize, could mean cheap solar power for the 2 billion people who live without electricity. Without, of course, adding to the need for dirty power sources. (Aside from a lot of nail polish and acetone to use in making the panels.) Now if there were just easy-to-make batteries to store the energy for those times when the sun doesn't shine...

Second, I ran across a great website called communitywalk.com. It's a site where anyone can go and create a map to display the information they're interested in, and then be able to place it on their own website. It's like YouTube for maps.

For instance, the first map I saw showed the area around Pike's Peak, highlighting all of the points of interest to green consumers. In looking through the site since then, I found a map of all child care options in St. Paul. Or a list of all homeless shelters in Minneapolis. And if I didn't find a map of something I was interested in, I could make it myself.

This is a real service for lots of people trying to deliver information through the web (tourism industry, realtors, restaurants, shops), but I think primarily of nonprofit organizations.