Israeli scientist captures power of 1000 suns in Negev Desert

First Israelis made the desert bloom; now it's time for that blistering desert sun to run the power grid. A cutting-edge scientist in Israel's Negev Desert has tapped into the sun's energy in a new way. Professor David Faiman's solar power breakthrough magnifies the sun by a factor of a thousand, so it can yield an incredible 4,500 watts per square foot.

Professor Faiman, head of the National Center for Solar Energy in the Negev desert, has invented a super-reflector. According to his calculations, using just a dozen square kilometers in Israel’s Negev desert he could supply enough electric power for a million people, roughly one sixth of Israel's population.

Professor Faiman explained: “The achievement is that we separate out the collection function of a photovoltaic cell to the light conversion to electricity function. When we collect the light, instead of using a huge area of solar cells, we use an equal area of cheap glass mirrors and they are curved in such a way as to concentrate the light onto a very small solar cell, the size of just one cell, and in this way you concentrate the light a thousand times and you can get a thousand times more power out of a small cell”.