Sailing the Sun

By designing vertical panels that move in a gale, two Swedish inventors are unlocking a solar future for the windswept north

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WHEN THE 47TH SOLAR panel exploded, Henrik Eskilsson began to fear he had signed on with a madman.

In his SUV, he and Anders Olsson were accelerating across Sweden’s Lunda Airfield, towing a trailer fitted with a steel mast that suspended the panel. As they gained speed, the panel did something unusual: it floated, catching the wind like a hang glider while staying anchored to the mast. The speedometer crept toward 100 kilometers per hour. The device began vibrating. Suddenly it snapped free, tumbled through the air and shattered on the runway.

Eskilsson, who'd previously founded a company that makes eye-tracking software, stopped the car and contemplated why he'd committed to this quixotic project: to revolutionize solar power for billions of people. Many areas in the Northern Hemisphere and some in the Southern lie in zones where traditional solar fields are inefficient, especially in winter—but also in the morning and evening. When the sun sits low, its rays hit horizontal panels at a shallow, grazing angle, delivering little energy. Vertical solar panels that track the sun even as it barely clears the tree line have proved too expensive, requiring multiple motors to rotate them, too much concrete to anchor them and too much steel to keep the wind from tearing them apart.

The shattered prototype was built by Vaja, the vertical-tracking startup Olsson and Eskilsson founded several months earlier, in 2023, to solve this problem. For years Olsson had envisioned building solar systems that moved with the wind like leaves in a storm. He and Eskilsson had consulted with mechanical engineers, who said this design would be impossible. Olsson disagreed. Eskilsson trusted him, although he wondered how many more panels would first have to be destroyed.

They got out of the SUV, took brooms from the back and, in the brisk winter afternoon, began sweeping the runway.