There are also fascinating new possibilities that might help us get more energy from the sun. Graphene is an incredible new material created in 2004 at the University of Manchester. It is unbelievably thin and flexible, just one carbon atom thick, which makes it almost two-dimensional. At the same time it is remarkably strong, doesn’t corrode and conducts heat and electricity efficiently. This one material could drastically change the economics of solar power, because most solar cells today use expensive indium, whereas carbon atoms are not exactly rare. So far graphene is not very good at
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