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."

Comments

Fabric != cloth

[James McP]

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.

Architect's perspective

[tomdarch]

Like a lot of innovative building products, I'm thinking, "Interesting, but..." It sounds appealing, but there are a bunch of hurdles to get over before I would use it in a project.

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.

Re:dope

[budgenator]

Anyone who covers their building with solar cells right now is doing it more to make a statement than to get power.
When I first started using Linux it wasn't commercialy-viable but I saw it had potential. Sure I was concidered some kind of bizzaro geek for using it at the time but look at it now. No new technology is an instant commercial success and needs a few early-adopters who are able to look past the warts and spur continued developement until it's polished for greater consumption. Photovoltaics will never replace our present electric system, but they might allow a few less generating plants to be required.