Called it Nov 6 2017 (on semi-transparent solar panels on greenhouses)

Really cool news in the world of developing sustainable technologies.  The concept outlined in the blog post "Making Green Houses Pull Double Duty" has turned out to be an actual avenue of research.  Researchers at UC Santa Cruz have indicated that not only can greenhouses have a semitransparent solar panel on their exterior to produce electricity, the plants growing inside consume less water than their counter parts (not something suggested in the original post, just very exciting)  To learn more please go to this article on New Atlas or the UC Santa Cruz page.

also really grateful to know that the color for this paneling would be magenta, nice to know.  

It would be fun to imagine a future where smart glass panels allow for the growth of plants, control climate, produce power, and help to regulate the local temperature.  One question I have is can we make a smart glass that normally promotes plant growth, read magenta, but when needed turns optically transparent so to be more comfortable for people to hangout.

Hey a cool idea has a kick starter (Modular home lighting idea may be real)

Good Morning Readers (for those of you on the US East coast at 11:30 Tuesday 12/6/2016)
The article about designing modular home lighting tools for developing economies, has a real world/unrelated pseudo sibling.  This digital trends article (link here) describe a cool wall lighting design that has LEDs in a hexagonal pattern, that can be readily linked together to provide creative lighting solutions.  Very cool to see designers coming up with very similar ideas.


As usual please feel free to comment and provide suggestions for future articles and concepts.

The Traveler Pack Idea is Real

So it turns out the backpack concept proposed in "The Ultimate Traveler's Backpack" is a real product, so that is really cool.  Gizmodo had a run down on a backpack with many of the features I outlined which you can read here.

Hey Someone Did a Thing I Said #3

In my post "Cooling with Hot Water Heaters"  I suggested that it might be a reasonable suggestion to integrate solar hot water heaters and solar panels into a single solution for home energy production (well that and the idea of producing colder mass during the night).  It turns out that a team of researchers in the UK have actually developed a hybrid solar thermal collector and PV array for rooftops.  This is very exciting and I hope that solutions like this do produce a cost effective solution.

On a similar vein I hope that they look into the more convoluted suggestion I had in which the water heating system is used as a refrigeration aid at night.  While this only makes sense for grid connected facilities in hot climates, the ability to cost effectively produce large quantities of both hot and cold materials does wonders for a structures ability to reliably maintain a comfortable climate without straining the grid too much.

Additional Note 10/29/2015  This is an example of pumped thermal systems that could really compliment traditional PV