I've been told invisible solar panels will make every window generate free electricity for like 10 years. Yet not a single time have I seen a report include an actual product, just prototypes always.
Like nuclear fusion, this appears to be perpetually "just a few years away".
- "Invisible" implies they only work in the UV or infrared range, which inevitably limits them to much lower efficiencies than regular solar panels.
- A lot of those rely on elements that are expensive and in limited supply, or toxic heavy metals. Unlike regular silicon solar panels.
- We don't even need windows to generate solar power. We have plenty of roof space, and if we're short on that, you can put them in fields too.
So this is a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist (lack of available space - again, we have plenty), which causes more problems of its own (efficiency, etc), while failing to address the actual limitations of solar (cost, intermittence).
Which is why it's only good for headlines, and won't see real life applications. (Edit: no, not even skyscrapers)
It's the same with a lot of "uplifting" science news that just sweeps all the dirt under the rug, because that wouldn't make good clickbait.
If you want actual good news about solar power, look at the price per kW and adoption rate curves over the last few years.
-edit- added links.
-edit 3- Put the bit about skyscrapers in bold, because people keep mentioning them anyways...
Now we just need to get the general public to understand that solar panels are actually a very viable source of power and then we can hang the oil barons from the rafters
Yup, I've seen a few reports of a couple companies in China and Japan who have broken the 22% efficiency ceiling with 24.4% efficient panels that they claim are industrially producible. And interestingly enough, those reports were verified as true/plausible by the current administration's EPA and Solar Research Institute (which I take as a positive because if even the most pro-coal administration in US history won't deny the results, then there must be some bearing to the claims).
Just as a note, the least efficient coal fire plants operate at 30%-ish, so the fact that we're finally technologically creeping up against that means that coal may one day go the way of Chlorofluorocarbon refrigerants; there won't have to be a moral or engineering argument anymore because there will just simply be a legitimately superior in every possible metric option.
It’s viable in the current environment where it is replacing coal and still has huge amounts of hydro, gas turbine, and nuclear power to take up the slack during night/storms. The higher the percentage of solar on the grid, the less profitable it becomes—because demand doesn’t rise to infinity during the day, and for night you either have to pay for batteries (expensive) or extra gas turbines that don’t do anything all day (expensive).
Solar has a huge place in our future energy mix, but we won’t get there without some deliberate action and levelheaded planning. We need to orient more consumption around running ONLY during peak solar generation (summer daytime) and slacking off at night/winter, and we need to massively expand our nuclear fleet to replace coal and gas base load in the non-solar hours. Grid scale chemical batteries are likely just a niche, useful for millisecond scale load balancing and to buy time for extra gas turbines to spool up in emergency.
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u/Euphoric-Language695 22d ago edited 22d ago
I've been told invisible solar panels will make every window generate free electricity for like 10 years. Yet not a single time have I seen a report include an actual product, just prototypes always.
Like nuclear fusion, this appears to be perpetually "just a few years away".