Then their math is off by nearly 4 orders of magnitude somewhere (see other comments in the the thread). "Technology improvements" can't get around the fundame

Then their math is off by nearly 4 orders of magnitude somewhere (see other comments in the the thread). "Technology improvements" can't get around the fundamental limit in the amount of energy available to harvest. Edit: Oh, that's horribly misleading. They seem to be reporting the theoretical maximum output of this harvesting technology - e.g., how much energy could be recovered if they started blasting the panel with a firehose. The amount available in rain is on the order of .2-.4 W/m^2. At that rate you'd never recover the amount of energy as was used to produce the panel.