Self-Illuminating Buildings
I may be overly obsessed with illumination technologies, but a couple of weeks ago when I was driving to Philadelphia, it was all I could think about. I was staring at this skyline covered in skyscrapers and industrial building, and they were all glowin’ like the frickin’ sun, and it struck me how much energy they must use with conventional lighting.
As usual, Japan has an answer: buildings that illuminate themselves by absorbing sunlight and saving its energy for use at night. This also seems to imply that the full panels themselves are illuminated, rather than individual points of light around the frame (it does say 320 individual LEDs, but from a distance this might look like a distributed illumination). The thought of how a city full of these would look at night is simply breathtaking.
Of course, 4.6 hours per night is insufficient, especially considering that number is likely on a sunny day. There’s some great new solar panel technologies coming, though, which could hopefully allow for a surplus on sunny days to be stored in a battery array for the cloudy ones. Or you could always tap into the grid here and there and still be saving power simply due to using LEDs instead of incandescents.
Of course, in the meantime I look forward to the day when all the existing buildings are retrofitted with LED bundles in their current arrays.
