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In 1866, Napoleon III was presented with a solar-powered device that its inventor claimed could provide inexhaustible energy. The Emperor of France was so impressed by Augustin Mouchot’s Solar Concentrator that he granted the maths teacher funding to continue its development. The success of Mouchot’s invention – which was the size of a small house – meant solar energy started to be taken seriously as a potential alternative to coal, and scientists got to work on improving and adapting the technology for residential applications. Within a few decades, thousands of homes across the US were fitted with solar water heating systems that could heat homes, warm food and wash clothes, however the oil boom in the 20th century saw the popularity of clean energy collapse. It took until the 1973 oil crisis and soaring prices for solar to regain mainstream attention, and 50 years of technological advances later we may now be on the cusp of realising the revolutionary potential seen by the early pioneers of renewable energy. Recent breakthroughs have made solar panels both cheaper and more efficient, while researchers claim to now be close to creating commercially viable alternatives that could transform homes into fully self-sufficient power stations. These new technologies are finally making it possible to move away from traditional energy reliance, transforming the concept of living off-grid from an alternative lifestyle choice to a realistic solution for a sustainable future. So what are these new technologies, and what might a solar-powered home look like in the next few years? Photovoltaic windows The off-grid solar market is predicted to be worth $394 million by 2030, but this may be a low estimate if solar-powered windows finally break into the commercial market. Last year, a team from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland achieved a new efficiency record for dye-sensitised solar cells (DSCs), opening up new commercial possibilities for see-through solar panels. The transparent properties of DSCs make them suitable for use in windows, greenhouses and glass facades, offering a theoretical price/performance ratio that is capable of competing with fossil fuel electrical generation. Photovoltaic windows have already been installed in the SwissTech Convention Center, but the latest efficiency record could precede a much wider spread roll out. Solar-powered paint The Sun beams enough energy to Earth in just one hour to power the whole planet for an entire year, yet less than 10 per cent of the global electricity supply comes from solar energy. One of its limitations is that solar panels require roofs or available land – but what if it was possible to transform entire buildings into electricity generators? Scientists claim that solar paint could achieve this at a relatively low cost in the near future. The technology involves photovoltaic quantum dots that capture light and turn it into electric current. Theoretically, these dots could be 11 per cent more efficient than traditional solar panels. A longer-term prospect is spray-on solar cells that use a liquid form of the so-called miracle material perovskite, which researchers at the University of Sheffield say could be used in “practical mass applications” in the coming years. Combined with solar windows, the technology could mean that every single surface of a building that is touched by the Sun could generate power. Solar trees and battery breakthroughs There are more than a million acres of private gardens in the UK, according to the Office for National Statistics, though the space taken up by solar panels currently make them an unpopular option for most homeowners. UK startup SolarBotanic Trees is aiming to change this with a bio-inspired design that features a shaded canopy with integrated seating, heating and outlets. Speaking to The Independent earlier this month, SolarBotanic Trees chief executive Chris Shelley said the first installations are already planned in Oxford next year. “The idea is to put solar panels on a domed surface like the canopy of a tree, and then place a battery storage system in the trunk,” he said. “The trees could go in people’s gardens to supplement rooftop solar panel setups, or several of them could even meet the annual electrical requirement of a medium-sized house.” The solar trees address the need for battery systems that can continue to supply power when the Sun is not shining. Several companies already offer battery packs for homes, most notably Tesla’s Powerwall that has been installed in more than half a million homes around the world. At Tesla’s Investor Day event earlier this year, the company projected that it will take $10 trillion to achieve a “sustainable energy civilisation”, but will require less than 0.2 per cent of the Earth’s surface to achieve. Renewables expert Dr Brian Azzopardi believes the “remarkable pace” of battery and solar advances over the last few years means individuals can already reduce their dependence on energy grids and look towards a more sustainable way of living. “It has revolutionised the renewable energy sector and opened up unprecedented opportunities for individuals to become increasingly self-sufficient with their energy needs,” Dr Azzopardi, who chairs the Foundation for Innovation and Research at the Malta College of Arts, Science and Technology, tells The Independent. “As battery technologies continue to evolve, becoming more affordable and efficient, the possibility of achieving a self-sufficient lifestyle ‘off-the-grid’ becomes increasingly feasible for a wider range of people.” How long until we see off-grid solar homes on a significant scale? In the same way that some developing countries and communities skipped landlines and went straight to mobile phones, it may be communities with no access to a power grid that benefit most from the emerging technology. One startup targeting under-served markets is Zola Electric, which offers “electrical infrastructure in a box” for places without power. It involves a solar panel and battery setup capable of powering a home, with company CEO Bill Lenihan describing it as a “game-changer” for the roughly 3 billion people living without affordable or reliable energy. “Our solutions are installed in homes, businesses, schools and hospitals in 10 countries across four continents, serving over two million customers,” he told The Independent. “They deliver distributed, clean, digital energy solutions for those that need it most.” For developed countries, achieving self-sufficient living with clean energy first requires electrifying all energy – from gas stoves to fuel-powered cars. Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, says that recent technological advances and incentivised roll-outs mean it already makes economic sense to transform homes into renewable power stations. “Costs have declined so much in recent years, and tax credits are so abundant, that most homeowners can readily install home solar and battery systems,” Professor Jacobson, who detailed how he made the transition in his 2023 bookNo Miracles Needed: How Today’s Technology Can Save Our Climate and Clean Our Air, told The Independent. “I don’t pay any energy bills, generate 120 per cent of the electricity I consume – selling the rest back to my utility – and have paid back the entire solar plus battery system in six years. My energy is free for the next 25 years.” Read More Electric car drives for 100 hours non-stop on futuristic road Massive mineral deposit discovery could meet global battery and solar panel demand ‘for next 100 years’ Geothermal power: Clean energy beneath our feet that could help UK ditch fossil fuels ‘It’s like having your legs broken’: What it’s like to fly as a disabled traveller In the battle of authors vs robots, the entire craft of writing is at stake

The iPhone is a lot of things. It's a social networking portal, it's a games console – sometimes it's even a phone. For Apple's Jon McCormack, Apple's vice president for camera software engineering, it's "primarily a camera that you can text from". It wasn't always this way. When Steve jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007, he famously described it is an iPod, a phone and an internet communications device; the first iPhone had a camera, new iPhones are cameras. The pictures that first iPhone turned out were more useful than beautiful. Today, however, the iPhone's pictures have grown up, and it is now the most popular camera in the world. Now the question is how sharp the pictures should be, and there has even been some criticism that the pictures it turns out are too sharp, if anything. The iPhone's camera is no longer just a useful addition but is used in professional contexts, and is often given as the main reason to upgrade to new models. The new iPhone 15s, in particular the premium Pro and Pro Max, continue Apple's mission to turn its smartphones into cameras like nothing in the history of photography. They have new image formats, the addition of extra focal lengths, and the iPhone 15 Pro Max even includes a 5x lens that makes use of a "tetraprism" lens that bounces light around inside the phone to add dramatically more zoom without making the phone any bigger. All of that additional hardware works in collaboration with improved software: users no longer have to click into portrait mode, for instance, because the camera automatically captures depth information when taking a picture of people, so that background blur can be added and edited even after the photo has been taken. Apple has also added a host of features that many people are unlikely ever to even look at, let alone use, but are important to professionals. They include the addition of Log encoding and the Academy Color Encoding System – both key to those who need them. Apple also says that the new iPhone has "the equivalent of seven pro lenses", despite really only having three; what they mean is that you can choose different crops, which is in part an attempt to appeal to those professional photographers who stubbornly say that they will only ever work with a 50mm lens, for instance. (Those new lens choices are not only a cropped version of the existing lenses, says McCormack, since the phone also has custom neural networks specifically designed to optimise images at that focal length.) Those complex new features are a reminder that the iPhone is many things to many users: some may simply want to remember important events, or snap pictures of their pets. Others might be truly professional photographers, needing to rely on their iPhone to capture valuable and fleeting events. Some people are, no doubt, both – and Apple is aware that the iPhone has to be both, too. "For us, what we feel is really important – especially since computational photography started to blur the line between hardware and software, and really enable anybody to take stunning shots with minimal effort – is making sure that that tool that we have in your pocket is adapting to your needs," says Maxime Veron, Apple's senior director for iPhone product marketing. "So if you're just trying to take a quick photo of your kids can get out of the way and just allow you to do that. And if you want to create a professionally created Hollywood style video, it can also give you the customisation and the power to do that." McCormack says that Apple builds the camera from "the core belief that everybody has got a story that is worth telling". For some people that story might be their child taking their first steps, captured in a video that will be shared with only a few people. Or it might be a photojournalist taking images that are going to be shared with millions. "Our belief is that your level of technical understanding shouldn't get in the way of you being able to tell that story," he says. High-end cameras have often required their users to think about a whole host of questions before they even get to actually pressing the button to take a picture: "the temperature of light, the amount of light, the direction of light, how fast is the subject moving? What are the skin tones?" notes McCormack. "Every second that you spend thinking about that, and playing with your settings and things like that, are seconds that you are drawn out of the moment," he says. "And what we want to create is this very deep connection between the photographer, the videographer and the moment." He points to the action button on this year's Pro models, which can be programmed to launch the camera with a push. "It's all about being able to say all of this crazy complexity of photography, or videography – Apple's taken that, and understood that, and hidden that from you," he says. "You as a photographer, you get to concentrate on the thing that you want to say, and finding that decisive moment, finding that beautiful framing, that says the thing that you want to say. "But the motivation for all of this and using all of this crazy, great computational photography, computational videography, is that we don't want to distract you from telling the story that you want to tell." That has meant building the iPhone's camera in a way that the features "unfold", he says. "Out of the box, we are going to give you an amazing thing that is going to cover most of your moments, with lots of dynamic range, lots of resolution, zero shutter lag, so you can capture the moment. "But of course, there are folks who are going to look at this and say, you know, I've got a very specific and very prescriptive vision," he says. He points to a variety of new tools that are built into the phone, such as the ProRAW format, which makes huge files and is not especially useful to most – but can be key to someone who really wants to ensure they are able to process every detail of a photograph after it is taken. Those are hidden within settings, there for the people who need them but not troubling those who don't. Veron also notes that many of those extra features are enabled by "an amazing ecosystem of third party partners" who make apps that allow people to get features they are looking for. It is a reminder of just how much is going on as soon as someone takes a picture with the iPhone. First, light travels through one of Apple's three lenses and hits a 48 megapixel sensor – but that's just the beginning of a long process of computational photography that analyses and optimises that image. The picture that is taken is not just the one image, for example: it is actually made up of multiple exposures, with more or less light, that can then be merged into a picture with the full dynamic range. "This year for the first time, we merge them in a larger resolution," says McCormack. It takes one image in 12 megapixels, to give a fast shutter speed and plenty of light, by combining pixels together; then it grabs a 24-megapixel frame, which collects the detail. "Then we register those together and use a custom machine learning model to go and transfer the detail from the 48 over into what has now become a 24." That creates something like the negative in old camera terms, which the iPhone’s processor can then get to work on, using parts of its chip focused on machine learning. "We use the neural engine to go decompose that photograph, bit by bit." It will notice if people have different skin tones, and develop those parts of the image accordingly; hair, eyes, a moving background and more are all taken to pieces and optimised on their own. (The intensity of that process has occasionally led to questions over whether the phone is working too hard to make its images look good.) Then there's yet more work for the camera system. The iPhone uses tonemapping to ensure that images pop on the bright screens of modern iPhones, but also that they still look bright on a compressed image that might be sent around the internet; one of the many changes that smartphones have brought to photography is that, for the first time, the photos are mostly looked at on the same device they were taken with, but that they can also be sent and seen just about anywhere. If the image is taken using night mode, then there's even more work, with new tools that ensure that colours are more accurate. And that isn't even mentioning portrait mode, which when it registers that there is a person (or a pet) in the frame will gather the relevant depth information to ensure that the background can be manipulated later. That whole process – those five paragraphs, and thousands of calculations by the phone – happen within the tiniest moment after pressing the button to take the photo. The phone may look as if it is serenely offering up an image to its users, but it has been busily working away in the background to ensure the picture is as accurate and vibrant as possible. All that work done by the camera and the rest of the device depends on a variety of choices made not only by the iPhone but by Apple, which accounts for the look of the modern iPhone picture – Veron says that its aim in making those decisions is to make "beautiful, true-to-life memories in just one click". McCormack is clearly keenly aware of the responsibility of that task; his vision decides what the world's memories look like. "This is your device that you carry with you all time the time, and we want to be really, really thoughtful of that," he says. That responsibility carries into the design of the camera within the phone: rumours had suggested that this year's model would include a "periscope" design for the long zoom, bouncing the light through the length of the iPhone, but McCormack says that Apple went for the five-way prism to ensure that it could "both retain the industrial design that we want, to just make iPhone feel so good in your hand, but also be able to get that extra focal length". "It is just of one of those crazy things – only Apple is going to do something like that. And I'm really glad that that's the way we think about product." Read More Tim Cook says Vision Pro release is on track: ‘I watched Ted Lasso Season 3 on it’ Apple Store goes offline as Apple opens pre-orders for iPhone 15 Apple to update iPhone 12 after fears over radiation iPhone 12 is not emitting dangerous radiation, Apple says, amid fears of Europe ban France’s iPhone 12 ban could spread across Europe, regulators say Everything Apple killed off at iPhone 15 event

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HOUSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug 23, 2023--