Slashdot Mirror
Solar Panels As Building Clothing
Makarand writes "A Canadian company is developing a
flexible solar-power generating material that can be
draped over any building. This will allow buildings with curves and complex
shapes to use solar panels. The new material is made of silicon beads,
each acting as a solar cell, placed between two aluminum foils and sealed on the sides
with plastic.
The manufacturing process for the silicon beads can use waste silicon
from the chip-making industry. The material has an overall
efficiency of 11 per cent which is comparable to the performance of
conventional photovoltaic cells. The material looks like blue denim
and architects might love to work with it."
"Oh darling, that bue material is just so to die for"
How long until we can start wearing these/powering laptops with them ?
...mobile phones and wearables like mp3 players.If the material isn't too stiff to be used in clothing that is.
Sweet! now i can have my solar power without the not-so-hot looking (i.e., arguably ugly) panels! My wife and I have thinking about solar for a couple of years now, but the look of the panels have kept us away (or at least undecided).
This might make our decision a lot easier!
Looks like Levi's headquarters could get a facelift
But really, blue denim look, could look really cool if used correctly, but just how efficient is if if we put it on the walls of buildings instead of the roof, where most of the sun hits?
http://www.spheralsolar.com/
Somewhat old really. July 17th they announced this and their 20 megawatt pilot plant came online October 31st it looks like.
GameTab.com - Game Reviews Database
I have to admit I have not read the article, but there again who does, but
1) How strong is it, yeah sure denim-like is fine for cowboy(neal) but when it is stuck to your roof in a force 8 gale how strong is it.
2) Again on strength what is it's ability to function when damaged. Is it like fibreglass that can split if the hard external case is broken. What % damage can it take before it needs to be replaced repaired.
I know this sounds like a whinge but this stuff is only cool if it works
--My sig is bigger than your sig--
The fashionable building, that is.
"Does this make my delivery bay look fat?"
*honk*
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
1. The panels are only usable in some applications due their overall effeciency (quoted as 11% for this stuff) that you can only use it in very sunny places.
2. The cost per kilowatt hour is still not compariable to some very environmentally unfriendly stuff.
So its nice that they have stuff that the architects like for curved surfaces but for the rest of us with smooth flat roofs and commercial buildings with flat sides and roofs, it would be nice to get some panels that have higher effeciency and have lower cost per kilowatt hour.
How will you power your wearable computers, palm pilots, pacemakers even? Blue jeans and denim jackets that generate electricity. This has potential, because as we all know, denim never goes out of style.
I wonder what the care instructions will say...
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Make me a sail out of this material and I will cruise when it is windy, sunny or both. Just throw some kevlar into the substrate. Or use carbon fibers instead of aluminum for the interconnect.
I just know my wife is going to want, no _need_, Levi stonewash solar panels with a hipster fit.
Damn fashion.
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Interior decorating your home in style?
And here is a picture of the material in production
Looks like a robust and flexible solution that can be tailored to a homeowner's needs. Anyone any idea what the sort of price range is/will be to equip your home with this stuff ? and how does it compare with existing solutions ?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
This could be a great boon for people that want to move to solar power but need something less obtrusive due to neighborhood covenants and the like. Of course that is assuming that you could get approval from your neighbors to have a blue roof.
This could also be useful in the automotive industry I would think. No longer would cars have to be designed to fit to a solar panel. The possibilities are out there!
I wonder if I can make a set of clothes out of this stuff to power a wearable computer. It might get hot, but in kentucky the winters are abnormally cold.
Wait, this means that I would have to go outside to use it. Nevermind
"It's the little touches that make a future solid enough to be destroyed" --William S. Bourroughs
Frank Gehry is going to go apeshit over this.
Relevant since he does the most fucked up buildings, AND he's Canadian.
I assume that if this were applied to some plumbing service's building, it would slip partway down the back...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Solar Pants...hmmm...gives new meaning to Hot Pants!
[n8.r0n] http://petesweb.spymac.net/
While a good idea, it's probably not a cost-cutting one. It will probably take a decade of the energy savings revenue to offset the initial cost of draping your building with the material.
On the flip-side, Levi's could start selling "hot pants"... just don't get caught in the rain while charging your cell phone in your pocket...
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
Slashdot has a way of posting news, but no backup information sometimes. Or maybe I am the only one who actually reads the articles.... Here is an overview of the technology. Here is a link to the company making this product, speral solar power. Not much in great detail about the strength of these products, other than "very strong" or "stronger than regular solar cells".
Blah Blah Blah.
As someone now employed in photovoltaics, I have to ask you this. Most commercially-available solar panels of the silicon variety are derived from purified sand. Pure silicon does not exist naturally, so silicon dioxide (duh, sand) is broken down and refined into ingots. How is this environmentally unfriendly?
If you're talking about GaAs-panels (cells), they are dirty, I'll grant you that. They are not, however, at all popular. The largest makers of PV are Kyocera, Sharp, RWE Schott Solar and Astropower. None, as far as I know, are selling exotic PV cells or modules in any numbers. They're expensive, and the current technology offers enough benefits to outweigh the point of bothering with fancy stuff.
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Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
the light at the nav table suddenly go dim?
Mate: Ummmmm, sorry Sir. We had to take in a reef. Give us a mo' and we'll patch in the dingy cover to make up for it. Looks like light airs for tomorrow though, so we'll be able to fly everything, including the laundry. Be nice to have some microwaved burritos for chow again.
KFG
Up Up Down Down...
Ok, this is driving me nuts. I distinctly remember entering this approximately 4,348,182 times on my Nintendo, but I cannot remember what game it was. Contra? Metroid? Super Mario? Mike Tyson's Punchout? AAAAAARRRRGH! HELP!
That gun that shot the big balls of flame in Super Contra had to be the best weapon in the history of gaming
Public use of any portable music system is a virtually guaranteed indicator of sociopathic tendencies. -- Zoso
Whatever happened to the basic idea of selling them what they don't got in exchange for what you don't have?
There's a word for it. I think it's "trade." Free or otherwise, although tariffs are an idea so fundamentally unAmerican it's pathetic. If nothing else it implies you can't afford to make a fair deal.
I seem to recall a story about tea.
KFG
This tech is much older. Take a look at this article (note: it's a .pdf file). I first read about this stuff in 1993. Texas Instruments started developing this 1983 (yes, that's two decades ago), finally abandoned it and licensed it to someone else.
... by the Dew of Mountains the thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shakes, the shakes become a warning
Nonsense!
Canada's lumber is cheaper because the lumber industry spent tens of millions of dollars on new equipment and research into better harvesting techniques that don't decimate the forests. The US lumber industry is still stuck in the 1950's with labour intensive harvesting techniques and equipment.
Canada has more trees, not only because we're a much larger country, but also because we replant the forests after they've been cut. We've been doing that since the 1960's. The American Lumber Industry keeps spending their money on lobbying the governments instead of replanting the forests and modernization.
Canada's so-called dumping of forestry products in the US is simply crass politics which have nothing to do with reality. It is the US's imposing of the tarriffs that are illegal
Despite all the crap from Americans about free enterpirse and free trade, the US is the world's most tarriff protected nation. As long as the balance of trade remains positive for them, they are happy. As soon as a foreign country, such as Canada, reverses that trend, up go the tarrifs.
What ever happened to NAFTA, you ask? Obviously it's nothing but smoke for the American government since they still slap tarriffs on us. Only now with NAFTA we can prove that they are illegal.
Wow, waste silicon - imagine that, we don't have to waste that precious natural resource anymore!
To think, now can save the FRIGGIN' SARAHA DESERT from exploitation...
Rather OT; but the WTO has ruled the US tariff against Canadian lumber is in violation of international trade rules (http://www.partnershipforgrowth.org/)
Not that the US ever listens to what international organizations ever say if it doesn't benefit them...
As the bloke below points out, Lomborg's argument on cost is very much relevant and explains a great deal of the slow uptake in the industry over the last few decades. This being said, however, worldwide usage of PV technologies (excluding in toys like solar calculators and whatnot) has easily demonstrated 25% growth rates year-on-year for the last few years or so (Ispra report, June 2002, European Commission Joint Research Centre; also at PVNet).
Of course, when you start from nothing, anything sounds impressive. However, in Europe we have around 6% of total energy consumption coming from renewable sources. Less than everyone aside from the petrol industry (and even these guys are heavily invested in renewable energy) expects, but still, you have to start somewhere...
PS: No idea why the http://www.pv-net.net link doesn't work, so I've just included it in plaintext
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Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
The first thing that ran through my mind was a contractor at my house once saying 'well, that is what happens when Joe Homeowner buys a hammer'.
Who wants to start a pool on who the first Joe Homeowner that buys this for his house, then paints his house?
I had the best sig, ever. But some fool tried to measure it. Now it is ruined.
The article isn't explicite about this, although they do say something about the round beads helping to gather the sunlight. The implication is that these are a lot less sensitive to variation of the incoming angle of the rays, which not only gives you the flexibility to put them on more surfaces, but also means the efficiency is higher in the morning or evening than conventional panels.
Now, what I want to know is how hard is it going to be to mold these into the deck of a boat? And is the coating durable enough to take walking on it? I guess the top protective layer could be epoxy for good abrasion resistance.
This is realy cool, particularly if you can make it cheaply enough. So what if you can't get above the 11-17% range of efficiency if you can easily make a much larger surface. Further, you might be able to create more complex circuits than just an array of photovoltaic cells, and really give the whole concept of wearable computers a boost. Active matrix displays would be nice.
"... because they are much lighter than conventional panels they don't need specially reinforced structures to support them."
...
I believe this has a greater appeal to an architect than the blue denim lookalike
You mis-understood my sentiment. I agree with you 100% Actually wood has a price determined on the Chicago board of trade, so it is riduculous when the US starts talking about negotiwting a fair market value, that is pure double-speek
Free cell phone tracking
Mirror Man
Of course, this may be enough to get me to pay for the add-free fee.
The next site to slashdot will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and start slashdotting it early!
it was contra
If the Canadians have the trees and know-how to ship us cheap lumber in the US, and not decimate their forests, I say more power to them.
I did hear something about the US and our forests a while back. Apparently we have more trees now than we did X number of years ago. I think X is greater than 50, but I'm not sure. This is because Loggers have to replace the forests they cutdown by replanting. Whether all this is hype or truth I do not know. But I though it was a cool idea anyway.
I hope there's some Lorax out there atleast.
"I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees.
I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.
And I'm asking you, sir, at the top of my lungs"-
he was very upset as he shouted and puffed-
"What's that THING you've made out of my Truffula tuft?" -Dr. Suess
Sean D.
"Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
How long until Duracell and Energizer sue these guys for unfairly promoting competition and the environment at the same time?
Seriously, someone will bitch. You're talking about solar panels that could potentially be much more versatile than conventional panels -- which means they could get used a lot more. I'm not a solar expert, but it seems to me, once they're sold, there's no revenue. They just happily generate free electricity.
Some mega-corporation somewhere (or maybe even George Bush) will sue these guys. It's the American way!
Globe199
11% efficiency is terrible, unless you expect to be sitting on a beach surrounded by mirrors all day. Oh yes, and there's no clouds. Seriously, this is pointless.
As soon as a foreign country, such as Canada
What!? When did this happen?
From what I know of Spheral Solar, they have yet to release any such products on the market. However, another firm, Iowa Thin Film Technologies (http://www.iowathinfilm.com) has been doing this stuff for years. The modules utilize amorphous silicon on a polymer substrate, pressed out through a cool roll-to-roll manufacturing process. Most of ITFT's products are integrated into portable electronics, but they do have large scale building materials used in tents and other devices. According to their web site, their stuff is so flexible it can wrap around a Coke can and continue to function.
As for powering laptops with this stuff, good luck. Laptops suck an enormous amount of power that only the really high-end (gallium aresenide, gallium indium) modules can even begin to touch. Of course, according to ITFT's pictures from this year's CES, they do have a recharge system for cell phones and PDAs.
What do you dope it with? How long do those cells last in direct sunlight? How long will the plastic sheeting encasing these particular cells last?
Can you make electricity which costs 2.5 cents per kilowatt hour yet? Don't forget to add disposal costs. When you can do that, your photovoltaics will be competitive with nuclear power and sometimes natural gas.
Are we being honest here? Anyone who covers their building with solar cells right now is doing it more to make a statement than to get power. If that statement is one of self sufficiancy, great and more power to them. If the statement is "environment friend" the speaker is ignorant or dishonest.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
For those too lazy to visit the site, this is not a soft cloth. It is two layers of metal foil covered in silicon beads topped with a clear plastic film. Strength should be much higher than mylar and it can be bonded to pretty much any other base material; metal, plastic or glass.
It also comes in multiple colors; the website shows brown spanish tile versions. I've no idea if there's a performance hit for aesthetics but at this point I don't care if it's 5% efficient if people start using it. That's still up to 50 watts/m^2 of pollution free power that wasn't there before.
To properly compare this to normal PV panels, go look at a nice glass enclosed mall. Pay attention to the heavily reinforced angled glass skylights. You'll see lots of angle iron in very particular shapes to keep things solid. That's the kind of crap you have to do with glass-substrate PV. Then there's the whole "cracked by hail" thing to deal with. This stuff may lose a couple of beads but it won't shatter and if the insulating material's good, it won't short out.
This will amount to architectural facade; build your normal structure then bolt this stuff on. The weight will be far less than architectural concrete. From the design it could quite possibly be cut and shaped in the field; a massive bonus to construction. No special order components. Order a couple of spare sections of it and cut/sand to fit.
I've been on slashdot so long I'm starting to get out of touch with the cool stuff if it ain't on slashdot.
http://www.solarnature.com/flashlights.html
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
The material looks like blue denim
So, does this mean professional buildings can only wear their solar panels on casual day?
Deploy this as a flexible solar sail. Generate electricity.
Land on the 'insert celestial body here'. Unroll powerplant. Generate electricity.
From the company's web site:
"Spheral Solar Power cells produce electricity at considerably lower cost than conventional solar technology, and on a cost-par with fossil-fuel based electricity in many regions of the world."
I hate to post this point redundantly, but we need to stop thinking of this as the "traditional", expensive solar panel in a new form factor -- it's also much cheaper, and that's even more important IMHO.
Share and Enjoy: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
See also uni-solar roofing & flexible cells
One of the big patent holders in the amorphous silicon solar cell business is Ovonic. They have the patents that allow you to spray on solar cells onto almost any surface.
Good for them. Yea. Whoop.
I'd like to stake out a claim that because they hold the patent on this solar cell technology, they are maintaining a price point to maximize their profit, rather than creating a price point that would make solar energy cheaper or even economical.
Consider:
For under $5000 you can buy a evacuation chamber, chemicals and a book on how to make solar cells in this way on small 8X11 objects. In your home. (Lost URL...otherwise I'd post it.)
Everytime economies of scale or a production advance lowers the dollars per watt on the 'old style' cells from a silicon ingot, the Ovonic price drops in lock step.
At one point in time, the cost of the intergrated Bethlingham Steel roof panels + the Ovonics roll on roofing was more than the Bethlaham Steel with the Ovonic coating sprayed right on. Now, it seems this is no longer stocked, but that could be why the price was lower - to move some stock.
Solar will drop quite a bit in price once the patents run out on the Ovonics process. Until then - Ovonics will make money on thier patent.
Boron and phosphorus. Basically the doping materials make the current feasible.
... it lasts for similar periods. What you really need to worry about is delamination, which comes from the adhesive you stick in between the cells and the glass coming apart. Again, we sell ours for a guaranteed 20 years, which is standard in the industry, so replacement costs on the part of the consumer or installer are a moot point.
There are installations extant for the last 20 to 30 years, still producing electricity.
My company makes modules (no, I'm not interested in advertising it here, so no names) guaranteed for 20 years. This is against weather damage. We use tempered glass tested by firing half-inch steel balls at a distance of 2-3m at 15m/s to hold the cells. (No damage, by the way) The plastic sheeting, or polyvinyl fluoride (Tedlar, by DuPont -- OK, I'll concede the point here), is a derivative/related material to Kevlar
Electricity is still too expensive compared to non-renewable sources, I will freely admit this. However, I think you need to get out of the US-centric mindset: Japan has by far the highest level of PV installations, currently about half the world total. Africa finds it an economical alternative to nonrenewables. I don't think either region would do it just to make a ecological statement, do you?
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Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
Now we've got something Christo can charge for...
There is a great article about this on Economist.com:
s to ry_id=1560792
http://economist.com/World/na/displayStory.cfm?
The (BC) government reckons that far from subsidising the lumber industry, its (Federal Government's) regulatory regime has hurt productivity and raised costs, without creating jobs.
The irony is that whether or not there is a settlement, British Columbia's lumber producers are set to become even more efficient. The big losers in all this, of course, are American consumers, whose houses are unnecessarily expensive--and protectionists, who are being given a lesson in textbook economics.
This sounds like an interesting direction to take solar energy. It seems to me that the main focus is often on making solar panels more efficient, but that is probably mainly useful on medium and high technology devices, like cars, planes, calculators, etc.
Another direction to go is to make production really cheap and simple. If you manage this, you can allow people in third world countries to create and use them themselves.,Instead of burning firewood, for instance.
Yet another direction would be this one, where you make solar panels interesting for use in/on buildings and the like. I'm sure there are more.
Carl Sagan wrote in one of his books that if you cover just a fraction of the Sahara Desert with solar panels, the enery needs of the entire world would be covered. There are obviously practical problems here, but it points out clearly how much unharnessed energy is available.
eventually when people start putting microchips inside their brains and power themselves with battery power this "building clothing" will be beneficial to use as actual clothing. If youre in contact with sunlight all day with the solar panel suit on you'll never have to break and eat lunch. Think about all the money construction workers will save! Who cares about the atrophy of their stomachs! Gives a whole new meaning to hanging your clothes out in the sun to dry...
this is not a sig.
There was an article a long while back (~1994) about using beads in Solar Panels in Popular Mechanics. It was a nice read because it talked about how cheap they could be made using low cost beads instead of crystalline Si... and since each automatically focussed light (bead) it help efficiency.
Now I happen to own a pair of panels (24") and I must say they do put out quite a bit (these are the huge crystalline growth), but frankly the pricetag is scarry. If I hadn't seen them in a dumpster.....
Parent should be moderated Funny. Moderations of troll on parent should be meta moderated 'unfair'. Anyone care to explain why they consider this a troll?
Nothin' but clear sailin' ahead for our precious cargo!
Uhhh, you mean the hot pants, Captain?
Aye, the hot pants!
Too hot to wear in summer, too cold to wear in winter, too inflexible to make good clothing.
How about making an umbrella out of this stuff for your mobile PC? Blocks sun in summer, rain/snow/howling wind in winter, provides solar power.
Karma: Excellent^(-t/Tau), Tau=Wittiness/Trollishness
If I had thought about it, I would have posted your reply. Perfect post! Good reference too, that book's been a great education for us here.
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Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
Solar shingles with a 20 year warranty. Available today.
I don't know about the rest of the country, but our household budget electric bill averages $82 bucks a month. 20 years, 240 months, that's $19,680 for 20 years of electricy. This site above has a $10K and a $22K system.
Now if you subract the cost of a new roof the deal looks even better. Raise the value of the property, if you live in a sunny area you can even get paid for feeding energy back into the grid. After all a whole roof solar panel that even has some shade functionality would be pretty productive.
Why aren't these at least being put on more new homes?? What a selling point.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
One issue in it's favor is the faddish aspects of 'green building'. Lots of clients want to think that they have a 'green building' but don't want to spend the money or make the compromises required. Slapping some of this on your facade would go a long way - you can see it, point to it and say 'look, green building.' A lot of more effective systems aren't as easily understood or are out of sight.
The biggest down side is the reality of building roofs/skins. Water penetration is the biggest thing that makes architects sweat and loose sleep. Leaky roofs are the biggest source of lawsuits for architects in the US. Roofs undergo massive thermal expansion ranges (for a building product) and are exposed to the weather and physical abuse constantly. I expect a roof to last for decades with minimal maintenance. Anything that claims to be a water-tight roofing surface has to be tested and proven before I'm going to specify it for a project. As with all roofing products, it's not just the stuff that shows up on a truck at the site, but the experience of the roofers who install it and the complete roofing system as installed that is critical.
Of course, you could put this stuff up as an 'outer skin' over a real roof/cladding system, but then you're paying twice for a roof/skin.
A lot of faddish materials have come and gone. They get installed in some buildings, fail in a few years, get ripped off and replaced with something proven. In the end, this stuff has to prove itself over the long run as a high quality building product before it's going to be used extensively. It will be judged on its price vs. performance like anything else.
In a letter to this same magazine someone raised the point that at 11% efficiency that leaves 89% of sunlight converted to heat. This means a solar panel will convert more sunlight to heat than the surface it is covering and could have a net effect of contributing to global warming.
I wonder if there's anything to this?
A similar point was raised by some researcher that planting trees in places like Siberia to serve as a carbon sink could backfire by reducing the surface covered by highly reflective snow.
As we all know, major technological advances in the computing field are all driven by the pr0n industry...so imagine what a current-generating fabric would be used for.
At the very least, it ought to convince people to produce efficient wearable computers. You know that the guy in jedi-robes must have a pimpin' CPU... but the model who's almost in a bikini might be highly optimized *wink wink*.
People are not using solar panels not because they are ugly or have nowhere to put them. They are not using solar panels because they are very expensive for the amount of power they produce.
These on the other hand are 80+% efficient, cheaper than a photovoltaic array and work well in cloudy conditions:
http://www.thermomax.co.uk/
Add a stirling engine for electricity generation.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
i'm going to build a giant hot air ballon out of this stuff and use my "electrical denim" ballon to power a hydrogen extractor that will pull fuel out of moist air.
Then I should be able to make it around the world no problem since I won't have to start with any gas.
And when I'm done i'll just pick an ugly building and crash into it and change them for the power supply.
I can't believe no one has thought of this yet.
JC Penny has all stocked jeans on sale... Looks like my plain old denim jeans are obsolete :(
That price does not accuratly reflect costs. The cost of generating electricity by nukes. It is about 2.5 cents per kilowatt hour. This includes decomissioning and disposal costs, which are higher than they would be if the federal government would keep it's end of Yucka mountian. Yucka mountian is added to your electric bill and so that's part of your 8 cents. Other things that go into that price are higher cost "peaking" power, distribution, taxes. Windmills and other stuff like that cost lots of money and can be thought of as a "feel good" or a research and development tax.
In short, disposal costs ARE a part of the cost I quoted. Power companies used to be gaurnteed a "reasonable" rate of return on investment. Obviously, covering all of your costs is part of reasonable.
"That sidesteps the issue as I see it!", you might cry. OK, I'll make it easier for you. Find yourself some solar cells that make electricity for less than the rate the power company will sell it to you. If you don't include disposal costs, you are screwing yourself. If you can find such cells, more power to you and let me know about it. I'll slap them on my roof. Remember, however, that economies of scale allways apply. When such cells are invented, it may still be cheaper to make a huge farm of them looked after by a few people than it would be for everybody to slap them on their buildings and hire people to look after them. Centralization and co operation have saved us money in the past and they can save us money in the future, regardless of the technology in question. Self reliance is something you might want to pay for anyway.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
First, it looks to me like the company isn't so much selling solar panels, as it is selling entire solar panel manufacturing systems.
Seems to me that something like RPM's centrifugal power storage units would be ideal to go along with this. That way, you could load up a building's walls and roof with these things, and produce enough to last through the night.
Then sell it as unit solution: Get the whole package, and have power whenever you need it.
But I'll bet these little factories will be extremely expensive.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
since the real problem with solar panels today, and the reason they aren't being used is obviously our countrys lack of flat roofs or walls. oh wait...
Nuclear is renewable. You can breed and reprocess fuel practically forever.
Not to mention that the cost of fossil and nuclear power almost certainly doesn't factor in the (non-trivial) costs of safeguarding their supply of fuels (i.e. how much will this year's Iraq invasion cost the US? How much does it cost to secure each nuclear plant against terrorists? How much does it cost to clean up after a nuclear plant when it is closed down or blown up?)
You can spend an infinite amount on "security" and "clean up" and such costs can be used to kill anything. Decomisioning costs are already included in your bill, indeed they are part of the 2.5 cent figure. So are the cost of all sorts of absurd spending, armored machine gun emplacements, double fences with razor wire, radar and microphones constantly monitored between those fences, "monkey cages" designed to slow progress outside and inside the plant, fixtures designed to injure parachutists, M16 armed security gaurds, games played with Special Forces, and even a new office that must evaluate terror potential of new modifications. Places like Yucka mountian demonstrate that ludites can add unreasonable costs to anything. You have paid 17.5 billion dollars for a two million dollar hole. Still, the costs have been livable. Reading "Fallen Angels", I loved seeing the word "appropriate" in your post. "Appropriate Technology" will ruin us. Listen to the engineers, they still believe in a better tomorrow.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Because when you think about it, solar panels generate electricity for 0 cents per kWh. You just have to purchase and finance them. So they form an attractive price stabilization measure / hedge even at higher finance prices.
That's silly, costs are costs. You can determine the cost of the electricity any source costs. You have the cost of land and equipment, maintenance, and fuel. Solar lacks the fuel cost, but makes up for it on the equipment cost. Money is money, show me the money!
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Ok, this is driving me nuts. I distinctly remember entering this approximately 4,348,182 times on my Nintendo, but I cannot remember what game it was. Contra? Metroid? Super Mario? Mike Tyson's Punchout? AAAAAARRRRGH! HELP!
Oh that's easy, it is the Konami code as it was called. It worked on lots of Konami games, including Contra for 30 lives.
up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A , start
Memories.......
Just FYI, there's also a company called Ball Semiconductor, Inc. that has been developing various design, manufacturing and processing technologies revolving around spherical semiconductors.
--The more you know, the less you know.
I read about this technology about 10 years ago, in Popular Science I think, which would have been before Spheral Solar aquired the patent. Glad someone picked the ball back up!
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2. AC is greate for transmission and doing voltage/current conversions (which is why it is good for transmission), but DC is just as easy to use for most applications. If you are pure DC, you are still going to lose in voltage changes for specific devices, and DC to DC is just as inefficient DC to AC inversion. If you go full solar, you could wire the house anyway you want, but it could get pretty complicated, and might not be worth the hassles unless some significant percentage of people also start switching to DC.
3. Environmental is a consideration beyond just the lifetime, you always have to consider the full circle including the recycle/reuse phase. See 3a above as well, if it doesn't have a life expectency of at least double the payback period, it won't be cost effective either, so it better last 10 years, or be proportionally cheaper.
You must not be a sailor, because if you were you'd know that salt buildup is the major everyday maintenance issue for sailboats. The chemical presence of the salt itself has a corrosive and bleaching effect, plus, it magnifies the effect of UV radiation. This causes paint and gelcoat surfaces to fade and break down, and it *really* causes sails to deteriorate. Sails are washed whenever it's convenient, and it's usually inconvenient. The bigger the sail, the more inconvenient it is! As far as the rest of the boat goes, sailors are constantly washing everything down with fresh water, whenever it's available.
Now, back to sails. In fact, it's more expensive to use sail power than diesel, because sails are expensive, and only last so long. Most round-the-world cruising types find that sails last about 18 months when used continuously, and that's assuming they aren't destroyed by a sudden storm. So when the cost of replacement is figured in (thousands to tens of thousands of dollars), and spread over time, it's actually cheaper to run the boat on diesel power.
That's probably why the efficiency is low :-)
So now fashionable buildings can dress up fancy and catch a suntan. The wonders of science.
I wonder how much energy is required to produce one of these units.
Traditionally, to produce a photovoltaic cell you need several times more energy than the cell could ever hope to generate in its useful life.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Then again, you'd probably gain more from directing a little sunlight into the building where you want it lit (sunlight is perhaps 50% visible and 50% infrared with a trace of UV energy) and eliminating electric lights than from trying to power the electric lights with PV windows.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Solar panels appear to be a better investment than 6% APR tax free. If your business has an electricity budget of several $K per year, than take the following info and plug it into a spreadsheet.
.0081 per year. (They are rated to produce 85% of their peak power after 20 years.)
Scenario 1: Buy solar panels for $55K.
* Saves $3300 per year in electrical costs.
* Power generation drops by
* Electrical costs go up by 3% per year.
* Take the yearly electrical cost savings and invest it at 6% per year.
* Pay 20% of any interest on that investment each year.
* Pay $2K per 10 years for solar equipment maintanence.
Scenario 2: Invest $55K conservatively at 6%.
* Pay 20% of any interest on that investment each year.
* Yearly earnings are reinvested at 6%.
The results are surprising after 30 years.
Scenario 1 ends up with $263K in the bank.
Scenario 2 ends up with only $224K in the bank.
Buying solar panels is better than a 6% APR investment.
Solar panels win since there is no tax on money saved because you spend less for your electricity bills. So, let's see what the results are if we remove the tax on interest to give the investment-only scenario a better chance. The results still favor the solar panels:
Scenario 1 gets $320K after 30 years.
Scenario 2 gets $316K after 30 years.
You mean 25-30 cents a kilowatt-hour (3.6 million joules). You don't measure energy in units of time.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Ok, how many of you have heard how to make a copper-oxide solar cell? Pretty easy to do, right? However, it has a couple of large drawbacks: one, they tend to use saltwater for contacts, and two, they are very inefficient.
Now, I have tried to think of how to get around the whole salt-water issue, and I don't think any of them would really work. Basically, you have to use salt water as a contact because you need a relatively "clear" contact to allow the sunlight through. Notice how on this "solar cloth" (yeah, I know it isn't cloth), the aluminum conductors are very thin - well, they are probably "see-through" thin, like very thin mylar or such. That, or simply a gas deposited aluminum surface on the clear plastic - thin enough to see through (like gold anodize on astronaut helmet facesheilds). Anyhow, it is the same thing in a copper-oxide cell with the salt water.
The thing is, you need a conductor with large surface area, which is why salt water is used. Less surface area is less efficient. I thought maybe you could "draw" a grid with "artic silver" type silver paste or whatnot (kinda like the metal grid on standard solar cells), but the contact area would be very low. I don't know if maybe you could spread such a paste VERY thin, and cover it with a piece of glass or whatnot (bond a couple of wires in beforehand). Anybody have ideas on this?
Finally, I wonder about silicon "blanks" - if you have ever shopped around surplus electronics, you run across piles of these all the time - blank silicon wafers (sometime polished, sometimes not). I wonder if there is a way of using those (the problem is that whole "P-N" junction thing - how do you homebrew a "deposit" system - could you get some borax (for boron) and somehow melt it on one side, and some phosphorous, maybe some iron phosphate fertilizer or something, for the other? Or maybe make a solution and let it dry on the sides (precipitate crystals out)? Maybe then put the silver solder/paste lines down, and a silver backing (or attach alluminum foil to the backside). Anybody have ideas here?
Sure, you could simply buy surplus broke solar cells and build panels, but I have found that you tend to find these silicon blanks more easily than the solar cell pieces, and the pieces tend to go for a lot more money than the blanks...
Anyone - ideas?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I am in fact a boat owner, but I sail in fresh water, so I'm not as familiar with the actual practical aspects of long term salt exposure. I know it's bad, but I was more responding the idea that a salt coating would build up and interfere with transmisive properties and such. As I understand it, the issue is more one of corosive effects than actual build-up, but as I said, salt water isn't big in my world. I'm sure a good rain is welcome for rinsing everything off as long as it doesn't come with too much of a blow.
Aluminium beanies for buildings!!!...no seriously, I could see the use of this if it was portable or easy enough to use/set up in developing countries or way out in the boonies for recreational or industrial applications.
"Real cheap, real soon now" is the curse of solar panels. People have been making such claims since the early 1970s, and none of them have delivered. Ovishinsky, with his amorphous semiconductor panels, got closer than anybody. You can buy his panels, they work, and they're flexible enough to put on sails, but they're no cheaper than crystalline solar cells.