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Some Wise Geeks will get us started: "Rather than using solar panels, which collect solar energy as electricity, store that electricity, and use it to power lights throughout a building, hybrid solar lighting instead transmits the solar energy directly into the structure using optical fibers. By bypassing this intermediary step, hybrid solar lighting (HSL) has a much higher efficiency. Traditional solar panels are able to utilize approximately 15% of the sunlight they receive, and standard light bulbs lose the bulk of their energy in the form of heat—the end result is a total efficiency of about 2% of the original sunlight. By contrast, hybrid solar lighting systems are able to utilize as much as 50% of the original sunlight."
Hybrid solar lighting has been called "a bridge between conventional artificial lighting and fiber optics to achieve a healthier indoor environment and greater energy savings, possibly even making our nation up to 30% more self-reliant in electrical energy expenditures alone."
"With hybrid cars making waves in the auto industry, hybrid solar lighting might be the next big splash—combining the benefits of sunlight with the consistency of traditional electric lighting," writes Michael Schirber at MSNBC. "If used in a top-floor of a building, HSL can deliver 50 percent of collected sunlight as indoor lighting."
