Edgehog

Edgehog nanotextures glass so it stops reflecting light. Conventional anti-reflection coatings work at the angles a panel sees at noon; Edgehog's surface removes reflection at every angle, which is why it earns most in the morning and evening, when a flat panel can lose as much as half its incoming light to reflection. The texture is also superhydrophobic, so the glass sheds dirt instead of accumulating it.

Those shoulder hours are the valuable ones. Solar output peaks at midday, when demand doesn't, and falls away exactly as people come home and turn things on. That mismatch is the grid's whole storage problem in miniature. Glass that produces more at the edges of the day is a small structural push against it, on a panel that is otherwise unchanged. The technique came out of a decade of work at Brookhaven, in a part of the panel already made of glass.