Do you ever stop to consider your body’s natural induction of thermal rays? At any point, while in the presence of solar radiation, we consume energy from the sun’s rays. This comes to in the form of energy and vitamins. This presumably clean energy gives every living organism life on this planet. Now, what if our buildings were intentionally built with similar goals in mind? Ways to take naturally occurring energy transmittance and harness it for clean energy.
Developers of solar panels have re-designed elements in solar panel creation to the point where they are significantly lighter than before and draw more energy. Solar panels have, over many decades, helped us mitigate some fossil fuels being used. “But Berkeley Lab scientists working with halide perovskites have discovered a material, which acts a stable solar semiconductor, and can be switched between transparent and non-transparent appearances, with just slight changes to temperature or moisture levels.”[1] This will give us the ability to draw energy directly through the windows we look out of. And coupled with drawing energy from the sun, we can mitigate the amount of light entering a space with these same windows. “Today, Yang reports in Nature Materials that his team has created a cesium-based perovskite solar window that turns opaque and produces electricity when heated”[2]
As we move forward with building styles based upon the conserving energy, as opposed to wasting it so fervently and polluting our land and water, we will increasingly create ideas based upon natural cycles of nature with potentially less harmful side effects.
Sources:
Material Transformations-UMN 
Solar energy is such an interesting topic, because I don’t understand why we haven’t already been utilizing this technology to its fullest potential. The sun’s rays are beating down incessantly each and every day, just waiting to be harnessed. One of the previous caveats of solar energy was that the panels simply aren’t aesthetically pleasing. Through earlier research, I read about these new transparent photovoltaics, and can only imagine the possibilities of this technology if implemented in large cities. There are so many multi-story, fully glazed buildings getting amazing light from the morning and afternoon sun washing over their east and west facades. MIT researchers estimated that implementing this tech in a skyscraper could generate more than a quarter of that building’s energy needs without changing the appearance of the building. The beautiful thing about this transparent photovoltaic technology is that it isn’t just for windows, it can be overlaid on most surfaces without obscuring the look of what is behind. I can imagine this technology being implemented on our mobile devices, possibly changing the way we charge our phones even. The possibilities are truly endless when it comes to this technology. I hope that we learn to harness the sun’s ever-present energy to its fullest potential, instead of continuing down the same unsustainable path that we have been treading on for far too long.