The first is to make sure that most of the sunlight which falls on it is absorbed, rather than being reflected.

ECONOMIST: Solar power

My guide Claudine Buehler, whose husband, father, uncle, aunt and grandfather all work or worked in the watchmaking business, explained that the buildings were laid out this way in the early 19th Century to maximize the amount of sunlight that could flood into the first-floor workshop windows.

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Here on Earth, Natcore Technology has created the world's first commercially viable absolute black silicon cell, which can make virtually 100 percent of received sunlight available for conversion into electricity.

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This was when it was first pointed out that, because sunlight near the lunar poles comes in at a shallow angle, the floors of the deeper craters there might be in permanent shadow.

ECONOMIST: Creative destruction

First Solar used loan guarantees from the Department of Energy to construct another project in the Southern California desert, called Desert Sunlight, which it sold in September to NextEra Energy Resources LLC, a subsidiary of NextEra Energy Inc.

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