SOLAR ENERGY FROM THE WINDY CITY

Solar energy is in demand because it is clean, renewable, and doesn’t depend on trouble-spots overseas. Long before there was widespread interest in solar power, Roland Winston took a course in physics at the University of Chicago, where he learned how efficiently the sun’s light can be concentrated. For 40 years, Winston kept trying to turn this principle—known to physicists as the “Sine Law”—into practical inventions.

Working at the University of Chicago, Winston kept trying to find the best way to focus sunlight on a device that would collect and intensify the sun’s energy. With funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, he developed a new kind of light funnel called a “compound parabolic concentrator.” His invention is more effective than traditional lenses and mirrors, which produce almost perfect images at the focal point but blur and broaden the images away from the focus. Winston’s non-imaging device can concentrate sunlight up to 84,000 times the natural level of sunlight at the earth’s surface. In fact, this energy level is 15% more intense than the surface of the sun itself.

This solar energy collector has many practical applications, including producing hot water, steam or electricity for residential, industrial, institutional, commercial and utility customers. A new company, Solargenix, opened a factory in Chicago in 2004 to manufacture solar-energy systems based on this technology. The City of Chicago has already agreed to purchase $5 million worth of solar-energy systems from Solargenix.

A former chairman of the University of Chicago’s Physics Department, Winston remains affiliated with the university’s Fermi Institute. He’s also a faculty member at the University of California, Merced. Thanks to the technology he developed with federal support, buildings in the “windy city” of Chicago can be kept warm from a sun that is available anywhere on earth and without the complex geopolitical issues of foreign oil.

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