Hawaii Faces the Solar Future

Power electronics transforms electricity from a single stream that can be cut off at any point into a series of packets that can be routed like Internet traffic, as GreenTech Media has also reported. Khosla's firm has put $7.7 million into Varentec, which is working on the problem.

The key to power electronics, in turn, may be graphene, carbon bonded in a honeycomb lattice that Wikipedia calls "electronic chicken wire." A Scientific-American blog reports that UCLA scientists recently found a way to make cheap graphene films that can become fabrics storing enormous amounts of electricity safely.

This is important because, over the next decade, 100 million of us are going to figuratively move to Hawaii. More and more of us will be living in places where the intermittent energy of solar cells can be had for less than the cost of grid energy. As companies like Semprius of Durham, N.C., start delivering cells that double the efficiency of current products, as Business Insider reports), that might happen even faster. Aloha.

At the time of publication, the author had no investments in any of the companies mentioned.

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