What if you could wrap, or paint, your house with solar-energy collecting materials?

The current state of solar power as an alternative energy technology leaves much to be desired. Requiring wafers of silicon with the same purity as that in computer chips, it does not come cheap. In fact, because of the silicon expense, the fossil fuels solar energy is meant to replace are available for one-tenth their cost, even with oil at $60 a barrel.

If solar power is ever to realize its full potential as a renewable alternative energy, that will have to change.

University of California chemist Paul Alivisatos may have come up with a competitively priced silicon replacement. And it includes sheets of plastic embedded with nanorods.

What, you ask, is a nanorod?

A nanorod is a very, very–did I mention very?–small semiconductive crystal measuring seven one-billionths of a meter by sixty one-billionths of a meter. By mixing these crystals with sheets of electrically conductive polymers–plastics–Alivistatos has produced an inexpensive, pliable material that, as an alternative energy generator, could match the efficiency of silicon-base solar cells.

Alivisatos uses, for their sunlight absorbing capacity, cadmium telluride crystals, arrayed in “branches’ within the polymer. He is still in the process of refining the alternative energy technology, but is confident enough in its promise that he has founded a company, Nanosys, which he hopes will commercialize it within three years.

The nanorod/polymer cells, if successful, could be rolled onto, painted onto, or even ink-jetted onto, a surface, turning it into an alternative energy solar collector. Picture buildings with exteriors collecting the energy necessary to power their interiors.

And with their much lower production costs, the nanorod solar cells could cause exponential growth in the use of solar power as an alternative energy.

With the energy demands of the world’s population having increased tenfold in the past decade, the enormous untapped potential of clean, renewable solar power,captured in tiny, tiny–did I say tiny?–crystals, may be the only alternative energy resource big enough to replace fossil fuels on the day when they finally fail.