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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.
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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.
Reminds me of a joke. Guy goes into a hardware store, wants a hammer. Hardware store says they cost $10, but they are out of them. Guy goes to hardware store number two. This store says hammers are $20.
"But the store down the street will sell me a hammer for $10, they are just out of them right now!"
"Well, when we are out of hammers, we sell them for $5".
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?
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.
Hell with powering my PDA with it! I want to deliver a massive electric shock to everyone I touch! BOFH-Style electrified doorknobs will become obselete!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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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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.
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.
Score:4, Informative???? The first link points to siding which has nothing to do with solar power, or Spheral Solar Power, Inc.. The second link points to a picture of a denim apparel factory in China.
If you want to learn more about the product, go to the company's web site.
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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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.
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.
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