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'Reverse Solar Panel' Generates Electricity at Night
(www.extremetech.com)
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this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2026
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Missed opportunity to call them "lunar panels"
But they don't have anything to do with the moon. They harvest energy from Earth's black body radiation
So they should have been called terral panels.
That's a good one!
I was thinking, Earth's radiation is solar energy, emitting back into space after being absorbed. So a normal solar panel gets solar energy coming down, and this thing gets solar energy going back up. So "reverse" or "upside-down" make sense from that perspective. But wind and hydroelectric also harvest solar energy indirectly. Should we call the sideways solar panels? So yeah, I think "terral" avoids a rabbit hole of madness.
Yeah I know, it just sounded catchy to me