Could anti-solar panels provide energy at night?

Slashdot - One of the problems with solar panels is that they don't generate electricity at night, so we have to store the electricity they generate during the day to power things during the evening. That works fine, but what if we could develop solar panels that did generate electricity at night? It's possible, and the way it works is pretty surprising.

Researchers from the University of California, Davis explain in a new paper that was just published in the journal ACS Photonics that if you want to create a solar panel that generates electricity at night, then you just have to create one that operates the exact opposite way solar panels work during the day. It's being referred to as the 'anti-solar panel.'

The paper's author explains to Inverse that as heat flows from Earth to outer space, "it's picking that off and converting that into power," using a thermoradiative cell instead of a photovoltaic cell, and he's now working with his team to develop prototypes.

And another paper in September from Stanford researchers also explored the idea of generating electricity at night.