Photoelectric solar panels are stiff and brittle. Typically, they are optimized for high efficiency in spacecraft, where they unfold as rigid panels. Even earthbound photoelectric cells share this brittleness. Nature's photo-energetic devices — leaves — are flexible, and much better adapted to the atmospheric life. So DREADCO engineers are inventing a flexible photoelectric cell. Daedalus recalls Ovshinsky glass made to become semiconducting like silicon, the strong boron filaments created by decomposing boron hydride on thin hot wires, and the glass cloth woven from narrow flexible fibres. A narrow wire might be given a fine silicon coating by heating it in a silicon hydride gas. A metallized outer return lead would complete a filamentary photodiode, and the whole thing could be woven into some sort of textile.

DREADCO's 'Photofabric' would probably be inefficient. But as bunting, flags, sails, balloon fabric and so on, it would be well adapted to the atmosphere. Domestic users would love to 'fly the flag' at an energetic profit. Photofabric might even generate bulk electricity. Solar energy meets its main problems a few kilometres up, where clouds absorb sunlight. So Daedalus is inventing his 'kalloon', a combined kite and balloon, made of Photofabric and designed to get above this blocking layer.

Cloud-tops are very sharp when seen from the air. This suggests to Daedalus that the density of the atmosphere must fall at that height. His kalloon will nestle in this discontinuity. One old scheme proposes satellites carrying solar cells, to beam microwaves down through the cloud cover. Daedalus's kalloon will also deliver microwaves back to Earth. Cunningly, he will use its control lines as a spaced double Lecher line. Much lighter than any electrical conductor, this could steer energy very efficiently. A computer at the base of the system, like a tireless kite flier, would reel the lines in or out to keep the kalloon floating on the clouds and facing the moving Sun.

The kalloon might claim some government development money; it captures renewable resources. But Photofabric itself could benefit us all as a small-scale, universal power source. It would provide some of our own power, and thus reduce our power bills, for some folk perhaps to zero. It might change the whole assumption that power, consumed in small quantities, must be generated in big central stations.