A team at International Business Machines, IBM, has come up with a new solar collector that magnifies the sun’s power by 2000x and could possibly have the potential to power the entire planet.

“We get 85,000 terawatts of energy on the face of the globe and we only need 15 terawatts, so we only need about .4 percent of the surface of the earth to provide all of our energy needs,” said Bruno Michel, one of the lead researchers on the project from Zurich.

The project, called a High Concentration Photo Voltaic Thermal, or HCPVT, has been discussed for some time now, but it seems that it’s finally becoming more of a reality with a $2.4 million grant from the Swiss Commission for Technology and Innovation. Engadget does a good job of describing how the technology works:

“The heat is absorbed into hundreds of tiny solar cells called photovoltaic chips. These gather the energy and are then cooled by micro-channel water, which is why they are safely able to concentrate such large amounts of solar energy.”

On top of combining the power of 2,000 suns, the technology will be able to absorb more than half of the waste heat and turn the byproduct into drinking water or air conditioning. If this project becomes completely efficient and available to the public, it could completely displace fossil fuel power. Check out the lead researcher, Bruno Michel, discussing the project in the video below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_zzE8xMdZc