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."
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!
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--
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!
"solar panels in general are very dirty to make and bad for the environment."
The important question is are they cleaner than coal, gas and nuclear.
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
Similar technology is being used in car-washes to pre-heat water. I wonder if the flexible material technology could be incorporated into a system that pre-heats in the winter, and in the summer generates electricity which could be used for cooling. The summer months have some of the highest electrical energy demands as air conditioners are running.
I would imagine that you might be able to reduce the heat incident on the building using this material in the summer. For example, instead of introducing the heated air into the building, you could vent it out the top using either convection or wind-powered turbines.
Solar heating seems like a great alternative. Our house has good southern exposure, and stays reasonably warm during the day even with the heat set low (10C). Right now it is about 19C while it is -22C outside (-7F).
Photo-voltaics may also be useful, but the parent comment's points are quite good explanations for why they aren't in widespread use. On the other hand, if the cost of installing a system is sufficiently low and the esthetic is good enough, this could be a reason for buildings like warehouses and so on to reduce their reliance on non-renewable energy.
The problem with this material for sails is going to be that it alters the strength and weight of the the materials, and extra weight aloft carries a big penalty in performance. The deck is the right place for this technology. I would think it would be excellent for multi-hulls with large deck areas that maintain faily constant angles. The sides of the hull might be good on a monohull to take advantage of certain courses and heal angles, but you'd always have part of the array where the sun isn't shining.
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.
"You do much more damange to the environment...."
If that's the fact, cite it, explain it, or give some empirical reason to believe you that the doped silicon in a solar panel is worse than that in my computer.
This is a canard advanced by conventional energy interests quite a while back, that many people have latched onto, due to what can only be explained as a relative willingingess to accept facts without examination rather than seeking out the facts.
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
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.
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.
I wasn't claiming I could. But that you were doing a comparison of electricity at a third the rate I pay and that's a unreasonable comparison.
*You* may think that the added costs in nukes aren't warrented, but the fact remains they are there and thus must be the compared value. But you admit this yourself, so there's no point in flogging that one further.
Your comment about disposal costs being included isn't quite accurate, you refer to nukes, but I was referring to gas, coal, hydro. Those environmental costs aren't at all included as much of the interesting waste goes into the air, but they do exist.
PV power generation is 25-30 cents an hour now, so it's still considerably more expensive than your utility bill, but if all the costs of conventional power generation were on your bill it would be a much closer comparison.
I think we largely agree though. Don't buy solar to save money, buy it if you have other motivating factors.
According to this document, nuclear fuels can be extended by about 30% via reprocessing, which is useful but hardly makes nuclear power "renewable". Common sense and the Second Law of Thermodynamics say that you can't get something for nothing -- you have to keep shovelling new energy into the system.
"Appropriate Technology" will ruin us. Listen to the engineers, they still believe in a better tomorrow.
Their "better tomorrow" isn't better enough. I want a tomorrow where our energy sources never run out (at least, not for billions of years) and nuclear materials do not find their way into the environment or into the hands of people who would use them to kill. The best way to accomplish this (at least until fusion reactors are viable) is via non-nuclear renewable technologies.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.