This sounds great, but for some years we hear of various discoveries that will greatly increase solar panel efficiency. Why are we still at 22%-ish?
Rice University researchers propose a way to boost solar efficiency
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Re: Rice University researchers propose a way to boost solar efficiency
#22This sounds great, but for some years we hear of various discoveries that will greatly increase solar panel efficiency. Why are we still at 22%-ish?
Usually the materials to get higher efficiency are prohibitively expensive or dangerous to use at scale.
Re: Rice University researchers propose a way to boost solar efficiency
#23This sounds great, but for some years we hear of various discoveries that will greatly increase solar panel efficiency. Why are we still at 22%-ish?
The primary issue with everything in this category is that plenty of things are possible in the lab or in theory which just isn't possible when applied in reality and at scale.
Blame journalists for hyping this because of the climate change focus.
I am involved in actively looking for better materials and better sources of energy. The reality is that there are no fundamental breakthroughs since oil and nuclear.
No matter what you hear we just haven't had anything that fundamentally changes the game.
So instead of actual breakthroughs in the fundamentals, we get marketing, branding, and communication. But this is not something that can be fixed with that, it's physics, not product innovation
We will most likely get fusion (far out) fuel cells (even further out) before we get any fundamental breakthroughs here.
Re: Rice University researchers propose a way to boost solar efficiency
#24While this is a very interesting and ingenious development, what's needed for greater deployment are lower costs per unit of energy. Increasing efficiency will reduce the cost of land, but land isn't typically a huge factor in solar deployments. In this NREL analysis, land acquisition gets put into "Other Soft Costs" along with permitting, inspection, interconnection, sales tax, engineering, procurement, construction…
I'd expect most of the costs scales linearly with the number of panels: land, installation, maintenance, interconnect, so this should translate pretty directly to cost savings.
Re: Rice University researchers propose a way to boost solar efficiency
#25Interesting work - seems like this could also be used to create a thin film that could yield thermal vision, if indeed the nanotubes upshift IR frequencies to visible light. But I’m not a physicist.
Re: Rice University researchers propose a way to boost solar efficiency
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
I certainly didn't mean to discourage this at all! But I think it's important to point out that even though people often disparage solar photovoltaic for having low "efficiency," that metric is not an impediment to its broad deployment or great utility to us.
Sure it is. Lower efficiency means you need more panels, larger panels, and more support infrastructure. It limits where it can be deployed and makes it less competitive.
Not really. The difference in the land cost is effectively negligible. At this point (and it has been this way for many years), the limit in solar deployments is cost of panels and storage limitations.
There are vast chunks of empty land in AZ, NV, NM, TX, CA that could easily fit enough solar panels (each) to power all of the US. The issue is cost of panels and no base load supply.
Re: Rice University researchers propose a way to boost solar efficiency
#27I wonder if the process of changing heat into light can be used for transferring heat more efficiently than current AC units.
Re: Rice University researchers propose a way to boost solar efficiency
#28> turning heat into light
> channel mid-infrared radiation (heat energy) into light energy
> absorbs thermal photons and emits light.
Goddamnit, no! None of this is "heat", it's just one range of light being converted into another! This is shitty "science"-journalism parroting a common misconception.
After all, the only reason we associate infrared with "heat" in the first place is that it's useful for detecting things which happen to be at a range of temperatures, temperatures which just happen to be slightly warmer than the operating state of self-reproducing bags-of-mostly-water on a small rocky planet.
Re: Rice University researchers propose a way to boost solar efficiency
#29This sounds great, but for some years we hear of various discoveries that will greatly increase solar panel efficiency. Why are we still at 22%-ish?
Could have issues with longevity, too. Who knows.
Re: Rice University researchers propose a way to boost solar efficiency
#30While this is a very interesting and ingenious development, what's needed for greater deployment are lower costs per unit of energy. Increasing efficiency will reduce the cost of land, but land isn't typically a huge factor in solar deployments. In this NREL analysis, land acquisition gets put into "Other Soft Costs" along with permitting, inspection, interconnection, sales tax, engineering, procurement, construction…
Welp, seems like a 4x improvement in efficiency would result in a lower cost per unit of energy.