Hasta La Ideas

I’m that guy who looks all over the place for my sunglasses… then realizes they’re perched on top of my head. But Nepalese science student Milan Karki is the guy who looks around for a renewable energy source, and discovers the solution is on top of his head. And mine. And yours. Karki, you see, has discovered how to make solar panels using human hair.

Karki, just 18, comes from a rural, unelectrified village in Nepal where residents “are living the life of the stone age even in the 21st century.” From a young age he experimented with trying to generate electricity via hydropower, but had to give it up as the money required to fund the project was impossible to attain. Karki’s parents did, however, have enough money to get him an education, allowing him to avoid the illiteracy rates of his neighbors.

He was then able to read books, and a Stephen Hawking tome hipped him to the fact that human hair could generate static electricity. Turning the idea over in his head, he “realised that Melanin was one of the factors in conversion of energy,” he told The Daily Mail. His imagination thus (pardon the pun) sparked, he set about seeing if the naturally-occurring pigment could be used to generate electricity in another way.

Milan and four of his Kathmandu classmates tried to create a human-hair solar panel as a lark—and it worked. With a panel roughly the size of a checkers board, they were able to generate 18 watts of energy, enough to power a CFL or charge a phone.

By using hair in place of silicon—one of the pricey parts of a solar panel—they were able to keep the cost down to $38 per panel. And that’s for a one-off; Karki estimates that in mass production the price would be half that, which makes it about 25% of the cost of a conventional solar panel of similar output.

Best of all, hair is easy to find. (Sunglasses, though, are a bitch.)

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