Imagine every time you closed your curtains, you were capturing enoughsolar energy to power your laptop. The technology is available, but noone`s packaged it up in a handy DIY kit at your local hardware store.

Sheila Kennedy hopes to be the first. She`s not an interiordesigner but an architect and professor in practice at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology who is convinced that solartextiles will revolutionize the way we collect and consume power.

"I`ve been thinking about what happens when power and light become flexible, literally flexible," she said.

She calls it "soft power," as in the "soft energy path," a term coinedAmory Lovins in the 1970s as a way to describe a world where renewableenergy would gradually replace the centralized grid.

Later, Joseph Nye used the term "soft power" to describe the ability of persuasion, values and culture to influence change.

Kennedy`s work with soft power builds on both of these ideas. For her ,soft power is the ability of flexible materials to convert sunlightinto energy.

"The soft power approach says there are someincredibly sensual, compelling, beautiful spaces and products that wecan be producing using these emerging energy-harvesting materials,"Kennedy said.

Her Boston-based firm, Kennedy & ViolichArchitecture, has been working with thin-film photovoltaic material, afabric that looks and moves like cloth but does the job of a solarpanel.

"These are materials which can be prepared in thechemistry lab or can be found in nature. They produce electricity whenexposed to light. They are very efficient and flexible," she said.

"We are pairing the thin-film photovoltaic material with anothersemi-conductor material, the light-emitting diode; they`re two sides ofthe same coin. One takes a little bit of the energy of sunlight andtransforms it into electricity; some takes that electricity and turnsit into light."

Rechargeable batteries pocketed into the hem of the curtains gather energy that can be downloaded into a larger home battery.

"From a technical view, the thin-film has the potential to be producedin very high volumes, with a very low embodied energy and a low carbonfootprint. These new photovoltaic materials can be produced in the sameway one might print and produce a newspaper, roll to roll. That canmake it very affordable," Kennedy said.

Its limitations are itsperformance. It`s less efficient that glass-based solar technology, butKennedy predicts that`s going to change.

"Right now there`sresearch being done on developing sensitivities in thin-film that willallow the energy to continue to be harvested, even at night. That`sgoing to revolutionize the applications for solar textiles," she said.

The current technology can be found hanging in the Vitra Design Museumin Essen, Germany, in a prototype pre-fabricated home called the SoftHouse.

Farther south and west, the designers are taking theirideas from the Soft House and applying them to a research project for aSoft City.

Kennedy and her team have calculated that by coveringjust 10 percent of a roof area in Porto, Portugal, solar curtains couldprovide as much as 70 percent of the average electricity used by atypical household each day.

"It goes to show that you don`t need a very large area. We`ve calculated that 15 square meters would be enough."

Kennedy envisions a future in which a single homeowner or a group ofneighbors would decide to wean themselves off the centralized grid andpower their homes using the energy they`ve "harvested" themselves fromthe sun.

"You could look at it as a type of urban farming,"Kennedy suggested, adding that one of the reasons people aren`t doingit now is not the lack of technology but old habits and inheritedcentralized building systems in architecture.

"Instead oftu
edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/07/01/solar.textiles/index.html