The technology is interesting, but the title is misleading at best. The water is still boiling, but only a small fraction of the volume needs to be at the boiling point. The tidbit about "cheap and abundant source of steam" is totally uncalled for. Unless you're changing the heat of vaporization of water, you will always get the same amount of steam for the same amount of energy input.
This lead me to an interesting Google search around engine efficiency. I always knew that engines are imperfect engine transfer devices, but I didn't realize how much is lost.<p>Seems like in most scenarios you're getting <i>at best</i> 40% energy efficiency in gasoline engines and somewhere between 17% to 40% in steam engines.<p>Even at 17% efficiency using the sun to generate steam power seems to hold lots of potential. The trick will be to get it working at scale and able to produce a similar level of energy with the same or lower cost as existing technologies. May be a while yet, but it's an exciting time to teach your kids science as this is the kind of stuff that they'll probably see in mass later in life.<p>Source: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_efficiency" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_efficiency</a>
Cool. So it basically improves water's efficiency to absorb energy in the form of light.<p>Can the same idea be applied to improve water's efficiency to <i>exchange</i> heat, to make it cool easier? Then you can slap a turbine and have the perfect steam generator.
The big win seems to be from eliminating much of the heat dissipation that would otherwise normally occur if, e.g., you tried to use sunlight to boil water when nanoparticles aren't involved.