See-Through Solar Is Tomorrow’s Threat to Oil
bloomberg.com
See-Through Solar Is Tomorrow’s Threat to Oil
1–10 of 72 posts
Re: See-Through Solar Is Tomorrow’s Threat to Oil
#2Oil is primarily used as fuel for transportation. How can I power my kilowatt car with these? How about flying a megawatt plane?
This seems more like a milliwatt application. Probably nice and useful for phone, but not to replace oil. The title is misleading.
What is the efficiency of this technology compared to the usual solar panels?
We need terawatt-scale energy sources if we want to meet actual demand. How many square kilometers of that glass do we need to install to meet that demand?
Re: See-Through Solar Is Tomorrow’s Threat to Oil
#3They don't speak about the angles (vertical windows vs horizontal roofs) and how much can this impact the energy efficiency in practice.
Presumably it's good to have some vertical panels in a mix to produce energy in the late afternoon when the sun is low but I wonder if there is any quantified study available that would highlight whether or not this is worth the investment.
Re: See-Through Solar Is Tomorrow’s Threat to Oil
#4The efficiency of this technology is ~1%. It's no threat to oil, but regular solar panels (efficiency ~30%) sure as hell are.
Re: See-Through Solar Is Tomorrow’s Threat to Oil
#5They don't speak about the angles (vertical windows vs horizontal roofs) and how much can this impact the energy efficiency in practice. Presumably it's good to have some vertical panels in a mix to produce energy in the late afternoon when the sun is low but I wonder if there is any quantified study available that would highlight whether or not this is worth the investment.
Absolutely. This reads like PR article to me.
Or maybe I've read the submarine [1] too much.
Re: See-Through Solar Is Tomorrow’s Threat to Oil
#6Good solar cells are 40ish% efficient? I'm not a photonics engineer but I wonder how much of the total energy is in the visible range.
Current solar cells are only cost-effective in limited scenarios, it's nice that these could go in more places but even if they reach cost parity with what we have today, the would be less power. We're going to need to see huge reductions in production cost or energy capture before this becomes viable.
Re: See-Through Solar Is Tomorrow’s Threat to Oil
#7Oil is primarily used as fuel for transportation. How can I power my kilowatt car with these? How about flying a megawatt plane? This seems more like a milliwatt application. Probably nice and useful for phone, but not to replace oil. The title is misleading. What is the efficiency of this technology compared to the usual solar panels? We need terawatt-scale energy sources if we want to meet actual demand. How many s…
I think the goal is to replace every window with this, producing an uncountable (Google interview question about Seattle) square kilometers of electricity-producing surface. I think the efficiency has to improve before most people would bother replacing their windows, though.
Re: See-Through Solar Is Tomorrow’s Threat to Oil
#8Only about half of oil production goes to energy and transportation. The other half goes to production of synthetic materials like plastic. Look around you, oil production is not going away any time soon.
Re: See-Through Solar Is Tomorrow’s Threat to Oil
#9They don't speak about the angles (vertical windows vs horizontal roofs) and how much can this impact the energy efficiency in practice. Presumably it's good to have some vertical panels in a mix to produce energy in the late afternoon when the sun is low but I wonder if there is any quantified study available that would highlight whether or not this is worth the investment.
This isn't related to the clear solar panels from the article, but there's been significant research on this for traditional solar panels as well as solar concentrators.
Bottom line is, the mix of panels makes sense for northern cities (e.g. Albany) but not middle (e.g. St. Louis) or southern (e.g. San Diego).
There's a great writeup with links to the raw data at http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/08/solar-data-treas... (this entire blog is amazing).
Re: See-Through Solar Is Tomorrow’s Threat to Oil
#10Only about half of oil production goes to energy and transportation. The other half goes to production of synthetic materials like plastic. Look around you, oil production is not going away any time soon.
Only more reasons to stop using oil for energy and transportation - we need it for plastics.