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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."
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.
You can ;)
And here is a picture of the material in production
Well, depending were you are located, the walls might be a very good place to put them. If you notice, solar panels aften need to be oriented at specific angels (depending on your location on the Earth's surface) to provide maximum efficiency. If you have ever driven on US 70 through Frederick, Maryland you would see the BP Solar bulding, and notice that the outside wall is slanted (not sure of the angle) and covered with panels. At that lattitude, I think it is somewhere in the 30 degree angle neighborhood. If they are ever on the roof of a commercial buillding (flat roof) they are on stands to provide the optimum sun catching angle...
Who is the master of foxhounds, and who says the hunt has begun? -Pink Floyd
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
Bjorn Lomborg argues in his much-maligned book that solar power prices are following a kind of inverse Moore's Law, effectively halving in price every N years (I forget what N is), which creates a further disincentive to buy solar now. If it'll cost you $20k for your household array and you'll get the money back in savings from reduced draw off the grid, in say 20 years, but the panels themselves will cost half as much in 5 years, you're better off waiting. And so on.
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
Solar cells are tricky... if you have a thin line shadow casting across a panel you lose the power generated by the half that is on the side of the line away from the terminals. Now if your panel is made up of many tiny cells then this loss drops significantly as this effect only happens to the seperate cells. that's why a bog 8 foot by 4 foot single cell is stupid to have while 90,000,000 1mmX1mm cells are much better.
Second some of the anamorphic silicon types (flexible) cant take bullets without affecting the power output much... you lose that section.. usually a 1 inch by 4 inch piece.
I'm betting that these "bead" types are even more durable.. you can take a machine gun to it and probably not affect the power output at all.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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
The article doesn't say much on this, but the platic coating is designed to make it stronger. From the diagram and details in the article, it looks like the cloth will be about 1.5 - 2mm thick. If it is applied to a relatively smooth surface with a good epoxy, I imagine it should be pretty resilaint to wind. The spherical nature of the silicon beads means contacts will be on all sides instead of on side. So if a minor break occurs, electricity can still flow from the other sides. Nevertheless, I imagine they will test the material for strength against wind, hail, ice, birds, squirrels, etc. before it can even be approved for use in construction. I imagine it will be at least as strong as normal tar shingles, but more wind resiliant because of its size.
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
Not to quibble, but the parent didn't say they were only usable in WARM places.... Just sunny ones. And yes, Alaska, Antarctica, and Northern Canada are indeed sunny places.
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.
Hmm so I guess the South pole and northern canada and alaska are very sunny places?
Actually they are. At least for the half year they are in 24 hour daylight. Also the polar regions are the dryest area of the planet, so you are unlikely to get clouds in the way.
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.
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There appear to be three major challenges to solar... 1. Cost. I can't afford the $50,000 to solar-ize my yard to power my house. 2. DC instead of AC, inverter technology just takes all that hard earned solar power and converts it back to heat. 3. Life expectancy of an array. (everything has an environmental cost. It just depends if the product lasts long enough to make it worthwile)
Tisha Hayes
No, because the underlying surface converts 100% of its absolrbed sunlight to heat! And solar panels are usually more reflective than the surface they replace, so they would reduce global warming on two counts.