This is Earth & Sky.Some people around the world are generating their own power at home,using solar cells.

"And to the vast majority of Americans that seems a little bit far-fetched. But, of course, you can go to places in the Midwest where people are so far from central power cables that they do have to generate their own power. And to a person like that, generating using solar cells like we've developed is a perfectly legitimate way to think. And so I...,I think it has more to do with the patterns of use than it does anything else."

That's David Carroll, director of the Center for Nano-technology at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. Carroll helps develop cutting edge technologies, for example, flexible solar cells that could be sprayed onto the fabric of tents. He told us that new technologies don't seem so pie in the sky as, eventually, they become commercially viable.

"If I build a big photovoltaic farm somewhere to generate enough power to power a city,well, then those photovoltaics are gonna have to be enormously efficient, because I have to generate enormous amounts of power at one spot. Then when we begin to distribute the power grid to each individual home, well, then the efficiencies of those individual units don't need to be quite as high."

We have more about how people are adapting to 21st century challenges at the Human World section of . We are Block and Byrd for Earth & Sky.

????????????