Not sure why everyone is trying to couple this to solar panels. The TL;DR for the article is a material that is 97% reflective to incoming light and also a hec

Not sure why everyone is trying to couple this to solar panels. The TL;DR for the article is a material that is 97% reflective to incoming light and also a heckuva radiative source. As such, it bounces away all the sunlight and radiates additional energy out into the void. The international space station uses a similar setup to achieve this- there's nowhere for waste heat in the space station's solar panels to go (there's no air to accept it) so radiation is the only method of dumping it. Nobody does this on Earth, because radiators are heavy and take up a lot of space. It'd be far cheaper to just install more solar panels. Solar panels try to absorb all the light they can; that 10-20% is sunlight to electricity, and most of the rest is absorbed as heat. If you tried to combine the two by stacking, a reflector/radiator with an absorber, you'd render one or both useless. The radiator would block the solar panel's light, or the solar panel would block and reflect the radiated light from the radiator. You could point the radiator down, which would cool the solar panel a bit (making it more efficient), but you'd be heating up whatever was beneath the solar panel. That'd be great in an open field but awful on a rooftop. This invention's biggest application is in the existing situations where you want to dump heat. Air conditioners have large radiator sections (not sure why they call them radiators because they do not radiate so much as conduct and convect the heat away) which would be able to dump a lot more heat with a properly oriented coating using this novel material (also potentially eliminating blowers and fans). I'd really like to see a graph of heat flux versus ambient temperature versus area. If it took 1 square meter versus 100 square meters to dump, say, 1000 watts, that would change this from a curiosity to a breakthrough.