Solar panels have long been the environmental bastard child of architects. The panels are giant, expensive and often times inefficient. There’s now a new solar product out there that is so powerful it can harvest the moon’s light.
It’s called Rawlemon, and is the creation of German architect André Broessel who’s sole aim for the project was to make inexpensive and efficient solar energy available for everyone. “If all the users of cell phones had one Rawlemon charging device at home, we could close one nuclear power plant, said Broessel.
The solar orbs are much more powerful than traditional solar panels and use a globe filled with water that magnify’s the suns rays by more than 10,000 times, allowing it to harvest energy on cloudy days or from the moon. To keep up with the sun’s shift in the sky, Broessel designed a microtracker that shifts with the sun’s arc across the horizon. This tracking system paired with the ball lens make Rawlemon 70 percent more efficient than traditional solar panels.
Currently, Broessel and his team are working on windows embedded with the solar orb lenses. Meaning, that one day, you might just see sky scrappers with bulbous solar orbs, powering concentrated rays of light from the outside in.
Rawlemon Spherical Solar Energy Generator from Rawlemon on Vimeo.
Via Gizmodo