It seems so obvious.  Just make your roof a giant solar panel and put all that square footage to work.  Well maybe it’s not that simple, but at least this gets us one step closer.  Pacific Northwest National Laboritories has created the building-integrated photovoltaics roof shingle that has the potential to significantly impact our solar energy generation capacity.

It’s not clear just exactly how these things could be installed.  I suppose you’d have to wire them all together, of course.  And then what happens when a couple of cells fail, or your wiring pops off a single cell.  The nightmare of the single burned-out Christmas bulb springs to mind.