Like a flower it moves with the sun.
Everyone's favorite undersea explorer and summer blockbuster director James Cameron is at it again. This time he's working on fixing some of the
problems with solar power.
Cameron himself was an early adopter of solar tech: Besides switching to solar energy on his film sets, he has a 50 kWh array on his own Santa Barbara County property. But even he acknowledges the problems with solar panels, and one of the major hurdles keeping them from widespread adoption: They’re just kinda ugly.
“I happen to like the way solar panels look—the more the better,” Cameron told me by phone last week. “But I can appreciate the fact that not all people like them.”
The impulse to try to make the solar panel arrays more aesthetically pleasing led Cameron to design the Sun Flower. In creating the petaled design, Cameron and his team were able to lessen the footprint and weight of the panels and free up the mechanics of the devices to slowly pivot to try to get the most exposure to the sun throughout the day.
The first Sun Flowers were installed last month on the Malibu campus of the MUSE School, a nonprofit school focused on environmental learning which was cofounded by his wife Suzy Amis Cameron (Cameron actually presented the concept to her as a birthday present in 2012).
The grid-tied system is currently generating about 260 kWh per day, which provides about 75 to 90 percent of the school’s power needs, but Cameron believes in the upcoming summer months the panels could supply the full 100 percent. (He’s looking forward to testing Tesla’s forthcoming Powerwall batteries for storage options, too.) Cameron’s team also developed a dashboard tool that allows students to monitor energy generation in the classroom, with teachers designing lesson plans around the science of solar collection.
Like
Elon Musk before him, Cameron hopes to take the patent and release it to the public.
You can watch a short time lapse video of the SunFlowerTL1 at work below the fold.