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Solar panels disguised as terracotta tiles in Pompeii
101–110 of 143 posts
Re: Solar panels disguised as terracotta tiles in Pompeii
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given the poorer efficiency, wouldn't it be better use of limited money and resources to put regular tiles on houses and normal solar panels somewhere else? (Honest question. I've always wondered why residential rooftop solar, especially since it's usually government subsidized, makes sense anywhere in the world.)
A properly designed house with solar can be energy neutral over the year in the UK (not notable for its sunny climate).
What does energy neutral mean? What does properly designed mean? And at what cost to comfort or the property? You could turn off all your electricity and heat yourself with kerosene and have used no electricity for the year.
Re: Solar panels disguised as terracotta tiles in Pompeii
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does that mean that in high intensity regions you'd need active cooling or is that not a problem?
So for those not in the know, fun fact, solar panels work better when they don't get hot. So things like airflow for passive cooling do matter. I'm aware of several large-scale solar situated in hot regions with no active cooling, so I guess my answer to your question is no, high effeciency panels in hot environments do not need active cooling. Roof tiles are a different question. There's no airflow underneath them.…
Fun fact: resistance sucks and makes your electrons bump into protons and crash causing waste heat. Super conductors are usually supercooled and have 0 resistance and every electronic works more efficiently cooler.
Re: Solar panels disguised as terracotta tiles in Pompeii
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
So for those not in the know, fun fact, solar panels work better when they don't get hot. So things like airflow for passive cooling do matter. I'm aware of several large-scale solar situated in hot regions with no active cooling, so I guess my answer to your question is no, high effeciency panels in hot environments do not need active cooling. Roof tiles are a different question. There's no airflow underneath them.…
Fun fact: resistance sucks and makes your electrons bump into protons and crash causing waste heat. Super conductors are usually supercooled and have 0 resistance and every electronic works more efficiently cooler.
> resistance sucks and makes your electrons bump into protons
This is a myth with little bearing to reality. Protons (and the atomic nucleus) are insignificantly tiny when compared to the size of an atom. The major contributor to electrical resistance are defects to the crytal lattice of metals and grain boundaries.
Re: Solar panels disguised as terracotta tiles in Pompeii
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fun fact: resistance sucks and makes your electrons bump into protons and crash causing waste heat. Super conductors are usually supercooled and have 0 resistance and every electronic works more efficiently cooler.
> resistance sucks and makes your electrons bump into protons This is a myth with little bearing to reality. Protons (and the atomic nucleus) are insignificantly tiny when compared to the size of an atom. The major contributor to electrical resistance are defects to the crytal lattice of metals and grain boundaries.
The temperature coefficient of resistance is real, though, and could do with an explanation that isn't too quantum.
Re: Solar panels disguised as terracotta tiles in Pompeii
#106This would be great if they can do more styles and not just terracotta. E.g. I own an "old" UK home that has a "normal" tiled roof, but as it is in a conservation area so any attempt at solar will be met with literal outrage. These would be great even if they are only 10% efficient - something is better than nothing and I have this big old roof sitting there and the whole thing could be one huge solar panel. Where ca…
I think this is definitely coming, but it takes time or lots of money or both for a product to arrive on the market.
These terracotta tiles (which are popular in the 1950s-1970s area I live) seem to have proprietary connectors and cabling which complicates installation, regulatory compliance and repair.
Re: Solar panels disguised as terracotta tiles in Pompeii
#107Here's the product datasheet: https://www.dyaqua.it/invisiblesolar/_en/documents/rooftile-... An independent research center lists the efficiency as 0.111: https://integratedpv.eurac.edu/en/products/modules/invisible... Anybody know how that compares to an average panel on the market today? From a quick search it seems like the best you can actually buy is 0.22 efficiency. Edit: The best available on this site is 0.2…
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Re: Solar panels disguised as terracotta tiles in Pompeii
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
>but maybe power plants of the future will look like the pyramids and energy receivers like obelisks. Unless people in the future become religious nuts even worse than today's, I don't see why they'd waste so much space and resources on power-generating burial mounds. The pyramids may be impressive for a primitive civilization to build, but they were functionally completely useless and just a collosal waste of manpow…
People built 1000s of churches and cathedrals which, at face value, was a collossal waste of manpower, materials, and space. And yet we admire them and keep them around for 100s or 1000s of years, because of their greatness. The same for the pyramids. Of course, the effort served a function as well: to establish and maintain a power structure, to give people whose lives hung on strings far more often than ours do a s…
Churches did serve a very practical purpose though. They were gathering places and centers of socio-political power. Unlike the pyramids ordinary people could enter churches at any time. And for most churches were the only places were they were exposed to art and “higher” culture (by medieval standards).
From that perspective they are not particularly less practical than modern museums or most other public buildings.
The Egyptian pyramids lacked all of this.
Re: Solar panels disguised as terracotta tiles in Pompeii
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
People built 1000s of churches and cathedrals which, at face value, was a collossal waste of manpower, materials, and space. And yet we admire them and keep them around for 100s or 1000s of years, because of their greatness. The same for the pyramids. Of course, the effort served a function as well: to establish and maintain a power structure, to give people whose lives hung on strings far more often than ours do a s…
I'm not advocating bulldozing ancient churches or the pyramids, but to build those things (or modern equivalents in terms of resources as a percentage of resources available to the society at large) today would be supremely stupid and wasteful. Arguably, wasting resources on burial mounds might be part of why Ancient Egyptian civilization collapsed, just like the civilization of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) with their st…
We’re still will to dedicate large amounts of resources for building museums, concert halls and other public buildings that fundamentally don’t really have a more practical purpose than medieval churches.
Re: Solar panels disguised as terracotta tiles in Pompeii
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
> resistance sucks and makes your electrons bump into protons This is a myth with little bearing to reality. Protons (and the atomic nucleus) are insignificantly tiny when compared to the size of an atom. The major contributor to electrical resistance are defects to the crytal lattice of metals and grain boundaries.
The temperature coefficient of resistance is real, though, and could do with an explanation that isn't too quantum.
Of course it is! And the explanation isn't even too quantum. Heat induces atoms to vibrate, these vibrations mess up with the perfectly periodic potential that you would have at 0 K and induces electron scattering which leads to more electrical resistance.