If the tabloid scaremongering and green activists are to be believed the UK and many other places around the globe are on the verge of a giant precipice into which sand, water and various chemicals will soon be blasted to shatter the rocks within and eject natural gas from ancient shale beds in the process we almost expletively call fracking...

It is quite a bizarre proposition. We have spent the best part of two centuries hacking and sucking out fossilized sunshine in the form of oil, coal and natural gas from the countryside around us. Admittedly, some of that countryside would otherwise be rarely seen if it had not been for the pioneering miners and oil tycoons. But, do we really want to dig up the countryside on a supra-industrial scale to extract carbon-rich fossil fuels that were produced by prehistoric photosynthesis, when we could tap the sunlight we receive even on a cloudy day with none of those troublesome carbon dioxide emissions?

This journal and countless others regularly reveal and discuss the latest solar power news, of course. It always hinges on materials science after all. The trouble is compared to chlorophyll we have nothing that even comes close to the 60% energy-extraction efficiency of green plants and their ability to store the sunlight (as carbohydrates) for later use. Even the sharpest cutting edge research notches up mere fractions of a percent improvements or perhaps carves out a storage material for entrapment of the hoped for hydrogen economy that might emerge from artificial photosynthesis.

Maybe what is needed is a smart solar panel, one that like the best modern web site design adapts to demands and the environment in which it is being used. This is where Glint Photonics comes in. They are hybridizing (or is it hyphenating?) too seemingly disparate and unrelated technologies of the modern era - photonics and microfluidics. Photonics are, of course, famous for their patterning, color shifting and alleged cloaking abilities whereas microfluidics are the realm of lab-on-a-chip devices. Glint's technology will seemingly allow sunlight to be trapped optimally using the ability of microfluidics to actuate the energy-absorbing components on the microscale. Basically, the device acts to focus more sunlight on to the photovoltaic cells than would otherwise reach the active surface and without having to change the orientation of the panel as the sun moves across the sky. Even sunlight that would otherwise be lost or reflected is trapped by continuous internal reflection until it hits photovoltaic material at the edge of the panel. In May this year Glint's founder and CEO Peter Kozodoy revealed some of the details of this developing system on the conference circuit and more recently to the general media.

While efficiency needs to be optimized there are hints that the device would halve the cost of solar energy from a current 8 cents per kilowatt hour for normal panels to around 4 cents. Of course, to paraphrase Gerald Ford we won't get solar power to work over night. I am still not sure whether he understood the irony of his statement or whether it was a clever allusion to the nocturnal downtime of any solar power device. Nevertheless, we must decide are sustainable and renewable systems such as solar, wind, tide, even nuclear better alternatives to fracking natural gas...

David Bradley blogs at Sciencebase Science Blog and tweets @sciencebase, he is author of the popular science book "Deceived Wisdom".