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Clear Solar Panels Double As Projection Screens
EnergyEfficient writes "Metropolis Magazine has an article about a company that is producing transparent solar panels. The panels 'can generate 3.8 watts of electricity per square foot, an above-average level of efficiency.' They come in a thick version that can be used for glazing buildings. Imagine if all those glass skyscrapers could also produce power! As an interesting aside, they can also be used as screens for projection TV units."
Wonder if they are more efficient than the solar panels mentioned in a previous /. story?
- Danny
It's nice to see that projection technology will be getting cheaper, what with the integrated solar panels and all. Wait, how much do the super-efficient panels cost? Oops...
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
Wow, finally, perpetual energy ;-)
"I know, we'll make a solar panel that lets the light just go right through it! What a great idea!
Is it fascism yet?
Most glass is mounted vertically so it will only be good in the mornings/afternoons.....
Yup, something like this is just bound to tear the laws of themodynamics a new one!
- Danny
And how much energy does it take to produce a single square foot. There is a basic falicy that a lot of folks seem to miss. Like the fact that you burn more oil to create an equivianent amount of ethanol from corn. There is a study at cornell that shows this. The same thing holds for all current forms of solar energy. While it will no double have niche applications, it's not going to release the world from dependence on oil, even if we could plater all the skyscrapers of the world with it.
--- http://davidnehme.blogspot.com
Wait I am confused. So you can use them for windows AND screens for projection TV's? Don't most people pull the curtains to dim the room so they can see the screen better?
As an external glaze, PV-TV allows up to 10% visible light to be transmitted through the panel.
Since the PV-TV screens don't have the luminosity of liquid crystalline or a digital TV screen, they perform best when there are no other competing light sources[...]
I can just imagine the problems already...
"Honey," says the wife," when are you going to stop watching movies and do something productive?"
"I am being productive, though!," replies the husband with the back-projection screen TV made from this technology.
It would be a nice way to cut down power costs for these kinds of TV, even if they aren't that great to begin with.
Also, one could have these solar panels put on their house in a nice way to cut down on power consumption a little (or a lot if they efficient enough. I'm not expert on solar panels.).
From the article: "One stumbling block is how difficult it is to quantify the product's value versus its price. (Right now, the technology is priced at $45 per square foot.)"
I wonder how great of a project surface this really is. They say it can be projected on from either the inside or outside, meaning that the surface is really reflective. But they say in the article:
"Since the PV-TV screens don't have the luminosity of liquid crystalline or a digital TV screen, they perform best when there are no other competing light sources, according to MSK spokeswoman Aya Tanida."
That means you can only use it in the dark? i.e. nighttime?
Also if it's really reflective, isn't that going to cut down on the electricity production? I'm sure they have thought about all this, but it's hard to tell from the article. Maybe they have a reflective surface in the middle, the solar collection just outside of that, and supporting material sandwiching that.
It seems pretty neat, but I wonder if they could increase the solar efficiency if they dropped this nighttime only projection feature.
The 3.8 watt output from a single panel wouldn't be sufficient for the lcd to power itself, would it? If not, how many panels would actually be needed? The idea is great, though. Reduce incoming/outgoing light, produce energy to further help offset the cooling or heating costs and (if you can link them) the world's biggest monitor. It's too bad they didn't post any specs of the resolution/refresh rate. Put D3 (or a good pr0n feed) on that, and you might have the only reason for hardcore gamers to step out into natural sunlight.
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
The point is that you can use it with projector TVs. The light from the projector creates the power to run the projector, duh! I'm running over to walmart to buy one for my for my fan powered sailboat right now.
There are lots of interesting things that could be done to produce more ecologically friendly buildings.
The first is simply to make more efficient use of natural light! I stayed for a week in a new residence building at The University of East Anglia (Norwich, UK) and the building really intrigued me. It had hollow lighting columns running up to the top of the building, despite being a rather tall apartment. So there was natural light from the top reaching all floors. That definitely saves lighting costs.
So with approaches like that (using natural light as much as you can) coupled with clear solar panels, you could both use natural lighting and collect power for electrical lighting later on. Improve actual lighting with high-efficiency (85% +) white LEDs (last forever) or high efficiency fluorescents, and you've got one amazing power-efficient building.
The problem is that these supplies -- solar panels, white LEDs have large initial costs. As these costs come down we'll see lots of nice new interiors. I can only expect such things to become more common as people actually realized they're screwed for cheap power.
Great! Just mount these panels all over the Sears Tower, and I can play Tetris!
Solar illumination is ~1 kw / square meter.
3.8 watts / sqr ft is *not* a great efficiency.
Also, solar cells are just big diodes (in this case, with an area of several square feet).
What happens if a pebble, bird, or bird droppings hit it? Will the diode short? How often can one clean the window without degrading ythe cell?
Let's take a super-skyscraper, assuming a 200' square base that's as high as the Sears tower (roughly 1450' to the roof top). Assuming the building maintains its rectangular cross section from the ground to the top gives us an area of 1.16 million square feet which would generate ~4.4 megwatts of electricity, which is a lot of electricity.
The article calls out a price of $45 per square foot, making the solar panels for such a building cost about $52 million dollars. Surprisingly cheap for that much electrical capacity, though the usage factor would be pretty low, what with it being dark at night and all.
"producing transparent solar panels."
"As an external glaze, PV-TV allows up to 10% visible light to be transmitted through the panel."
transparent Audio pronunciation of "transparent" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (trns-pârnt, -pr-)
adj.
1. Capable of transmitting light so that objects or images can be seen as if there were no intervening material. See Synonyms at clear.
It's been done, well kinda ... in that MIT hack, they rigged up the lights on the building's floors to act as a VU meter and provide assorted other visuals. The scary part I suppose is how easy it was to remotely control a major office complex's lighting system. And that was before IPv6...
Assuming the average skyscraper is approximately 600ft tall (they need to be at least 500ft) and 175ft wide (a wild guess), to cover a building in this 'glass' would cost 175*600*4*45 = $18900000
Is $19 million worth of glass really what you would want to get?
Gee, imagine what they could do with OPAQUE ones!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
My electricity runs about $0.08 per kilowatt-hour. A 1 square foot panel would produce 3.8 Watts X 8 hours (assuming 8 good hours of sunlight) or ~ .03 kW-hr at a cost of $45, which works out to $1500 per kilowatt hour. Cheap for solar, owing to the higher efficiency of the panels, but dismal by commercial generation.
Bright sunlight, regardless of angle?
Diffused light on a cloudy day?
In outer space, facing the sun?
They say absolutely nothing about the preconditions that are necessary to produce that 3.8 watts... and it's simply not possible for it to produce the same output regardless of its environment.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
For comparison purposes a typical power plant will produce on the order of 1000 Megawatts (some are more, some are less but that's a good ballpark). Such a solar panel clad building would produce a fair amount of electricity for a solar application, but it's still a miniscule amount compared to the power demands of even a small city.
A solar powered flashlight?
Has anybody considered that most skyscrapers are surrounded by -other- skyscrapers? Kind of cuts down on the whole direct sunlight thing......
Will I be able to power my mp3 player rom my sunglasses?
Mention the Lord of the Rings one more time and I'll more than likely kill you.
My 110W panels are 4.3'x2.2' for 9.5 ft^2, that's around 11W/ft^2.
Maybe for amorphous it's high-efficiency, but compared to other technologies that's pretty low.
(Please check my math, I've been up for 2 days, and I'm old.)
thats about 34 watts per square meter and the solar spectrum is about 1000 watts per sqaure meter on the surface of the earth (AM1.5g spectrum) so thats about 3.4% efficient cells ... doesnt quite seem worth the effort of producing them to me. Since the amount of energy (ie fossil fuels) that goes into making more efficient silicon solar cells (or gallium arsenide for that matter) would take about 5 years to get back from the devices, it sounds like these things, at such a low efficiency, would actually increase our dependence on fossil fuels.
I don't know where you got that idea.
White LEDs are less efficient than fluorescent lights.
Colored LEDs are quite efficient.
The payoff time is very long... after a couple of decades you'll be beating the power company, but there's a hell of a lot better way to invest your money :-)
In many latitudes the Sun never comes anywhere close to being overhead. I've been in Alaska 28 yrs and never seen the Sun, Moon, or any planets even close to overhead. The highest they ever get is about 60 degrees above the horizon or so.
The article states that the factory where the glass is made is also the largest user of the glass:
The factory is now the world's largest single PV module plant, producing 100 megawatts of energy annually.
A megawatt isn't a unit of energy, it's a rate of transfer. Do they mean that it produces a continuous flow of 100 megawatts? If so, they would have to have 604 acres of glass (2.4 million of their 1m^2 panels). Of course you need to double that number because they're only collecting power half the day (generously assuming they're at peak output during all daylight hours)
On the other hand, if they're talking about generating 100 megawatt hours over the course of a year, then the plant is generating about 11,000 watts, or enough for about 10 average homes. By those numbers they'd have about 600 panels. That's a lot more reasonable.
Kevin Fox
Are you saying that ALL computers, including the Linux boxes will be powered by Windows.
Arrrrgggghhhhhhh
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
And give us intergrated LCD shutters.
figures never lie but liars sure can figure
it's easy to see how the facts have been twisted in that study. nevermind that growing corn takes co2 out of the air as it grows
why not whine about how much more expensive it it to transmute lead -> gold in a nuclear reactor than dig gold out of the ground...
I think the question most businesses ask is how long will it take to get a return on investment.
The manufacturer specifies 38 W/m^2 or about 3.5 W/ft^2. Used as a window, the orientation would be fixed and I think you would be lucky to get four hours of good light to get something close to full efficiency.
So 3.5*4 = 14 Wh per day.
If electricity is 15 cents/kWh, you could buy 300 kWh for $45 (the cost per square foot of window).
To produce 300 kWh from a square foot of window would take 300 000/14 = 21 428 days or roughly 59 years.
Of course that doesn't take into account connecting your windows into the buildings power and the loss of effieciency there. And I also didn't take into account what the cost of regular windows are to begin with, since that should be reduced from the price, but I would guess they would be a few dollars and might take 10 years off the total.
Once electricy prices increase to $1.50/kWh these babies should be selling like hotcakes.
purves
Am I the only one who is getting really fed up with the ever-increasing advertising going on? This might be a fantastic invention--certainly it sounds very innovative--but if they are planning on selling it as an 'advertising solution' (as though there was some problem with lack of advertising that needed to be solved), it's really more depressing than it is gratifying, in my opinion.
well that'd be cool if they also combine it with the "intelligent" glass which darkens depending on amount of lumination.
you would have a window, which can work as a tv, and you can sunbathe, and it genereates it's own power.
just add a soundbug and you'll get everything a flat surface can be =)
My Kyocera KC120 panels produce 12 watts per square foot, 3.8 doesn't sound above average to me.
Straight from the manufacturer's website:
At 1m2 framed, PV-TV is the world's largest semi-transparent solar panel,...
tinted glass laminate with 10% light transmission designed by architects for optimum shading against excessive sunlight and performance in cloudy conditions
It's not transparent, it's not clear and it's not translucent, it's semi-transparent with 10% light transmission.
3.8 Watts per square foot is a joke. Your average silicon panel (~10% conversion efficiency) is 4 times more efficient. Triple junction panels are 3 times better than that.
http://jsl.com/solar
I just saw the cost of the Sears Tower to be over 150 million. In other words the solar panels would be 25% of the total cost. It could be efficient but it still makes you think or at least me.
Why don't you guys have friends or journals?
The problem for us average consumers is we don't know all the variables with this technology. First and foremost and the most important is will it be worth the money? Then there is the factor of energy prices going up over time. Then there is the factor of inflation. Then there are the factors of how long will it last, how strong/durable is it compared to average glass that thickness. Then there is your geographical location and which angle the glass will be at which will affect how much sun light it will absorb and turn into energy. Then there is the factor of wether the efficiency of the glass will lower over time. Then there is the human element of being broken by purpose or on accident. Then there is the factor of the price going down over time, the energy and time to make this glass, the installation and replacement costs. There are way too many variables to really know how affective it would be until there is an actual real life trial.
Polycrystalline cells don't have this problem, and I can buy top shelf "BP Solar" branded cells with a 20 year warranty! Similar $/Watt too. What does this mean for the MSK-clad building? Will its enviro-friendliness fade? And what effect does age have on its transparency/opacity?
This two page .pdf provides additional and larger images. You can clearly see the etching and degree of tint. It also includes tables of electrical and mechanical specs.
If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it? ~ Albert Einstein
I hear it takes a lot of power to make solar panels, and that a panel will almost never generate over its lifetime the power that was put into building it.
Is this factory using solar power to make their solar panels? If so, would it mean that they've finally got a "green" way of making them?
Energy payback period for solar cells (at least the single crystal kind)averages 4 years, and that is dropping as the tech improves. Single crystal solar cells typically last 20 years.
Assuming you could convert 100% of the sunlight that falls on a solar panel into electricity, and you had a solar panel that was 1 square foot, and the sun was directly overhead, and the sky was not overcast, exactly how much electricity could you generate from that one panel?
:-)
Please put it in terms I can understand. Like, "enough electricity to power a 40 watt bulb" or "enough to make your electric car go 60 miles per hour".... cause I won't know how to convert volts/amps to real world cases.
Here's one:British Petroleum solar products
A coal fired powerplant costs about $900k / megawatt or about $4 million compared to the solar panel. So you can build 13 similarly powered coal powerplants for the cost of one solar panel mounted to the Sears Tower. If you go nuclear (a bit cleaner than coal), then the cost is about $1 million / megawatt. This is still much cheaper than solar. Only by increasing fees/fines to help clean up the environment dirtied by coal plants, will it be economical to use solar power.
Why should maintenance costs be comparatively smaller? Please post some figures. If you don't know what you're talking about, then it's equally valid to claim that maintenance costs should be large.
Also, please remember that when you invest money in something, you lose interest that you would have earned had you put it in the bank instead. You need to compare against the alternative of putting the money in the bank, and using some or all of the interest to buy energy from conventional sources.
don't know where you get 5 years, but all of them I am aware of have at least a 20 year warranty, and last quite a long time. I know mine are 6 years old now, nothing wrong with them, good as new, and there are literally thousands and thousands of installations out there much older than mine. Heck, my batteries are even older and they are still working fine, the new desulphators vastly increase your battery life with just normal flooded lead-acid storage batteries.
I think the industry has matured around you,maybe, take another look. Solar and wind are quite useful and practical now for a lot of applications. I've been following these clear panels for several years now, glad to see they are finally getting to retail. Another good technology for joe homeowner is complete solar roofing systems. Normally say you got your regular roof with shingles, etc. The new systems completely eliminate that, the solar system IS the roof, so it has the same cost cutting aspect to it that replacing normal glazing with PV panels has.
The story you cite does not show this.
Your (and the article's) point may be valid, but 328 gallons is still more than 140 gallons. (the difference in energy density doesn't quite make up the difference (9.7 kwh/l for gasoline, 6.1 kwh/l for ethanol)
I'm not an expert on this issue, but I found more information here, and a study with results showing that ethanol production does indeed produce more energy than we put into it can be found here.
-jim
Seems to me the most useful application would be in car glass for gas/electric hybrids. The power generated by the clear solar panels would go into the cars electric propulsion system when it is running and trickle-charge the batteries when sitting out in the parking lot.
Hey, who knows. Maybe one day drivers trying to park in parking decks will fight over top-level spaces to get their batteries charged.
theDunedan
Comparing solar panels with ethanol is insightful? Nothing Cornell University says about ethanol has any bearing on solar panels. Ethanol is fuel. Solar panels are machines. Comparing the two would only make sense if the energy cost of manufacturing solar panels exceeded their entire lifetime electricity output, which it doesn't.
In comparison, the major generators in Victoria, Australia, Loy Yang, a set of brown coal burning power plants, produces 500 MW per station, for a total of 2 GW. I somehow doubt that a building can produce even one fifth of that, no matter the size of the building and the number of panels that may be put in as windows.
Let's see. A map of solar energy falling on the US suggests up to about 3000 (let's overestimate) BTU per square foot per day. That is, armound three million joules per square foot per day. That's around 35 watts per square foot. 100 megawatts is about three _million_ times that. So you're looking at a bit over 275,000 square metres to generate 100 MW of power from solar. That's a square, about 525 metres by 525 metres. And those figures are based upon horizontal facing.
Looks like somebody got some units incorrect...
At first, I read it as 3.8kW and said, "Hunh? That's more than the Solar Constant, 1.367kW per square meter." Then I reread it and saw that it was simply 3.8W. This sounded much more reasonable... and small.
This means that a 60W light bulb would need almost 16 square feet to function. Well, that of course is a reason to move to compact flourescents or LED light bulbs. But my computer takes up a bit of power. So does a refridgerator. So does a washer/dryer.
Let's say that it is a television. What's the equivalent of a square foot display (asuming a 5:4 ratio)? About 13"? Can a 13" LCD display work with 3.8W of power? (I don't know. That's why I'm asking.)
I'm not questioning whether it can give power. I'm questioning whether it can give sufficient power to offset the price. Or would the money be better spent elsewhere in green technologies to reduce the actual draw from the grid?
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
But can they withstand hail damage? I live in Dallas, which gets plenty of hot, bright days, but hail is prevalent. I wouldn't want to coat my roof with them if the first hailstorm is just going to take it all away.
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
Can you stack several behind each other to generate more electricity?
$45 per square foot according to the linked page. That's less than $12 per peak watt. It's easy to spend more than that for conventional solar panels, though reasonably careful shopping will get you to the $6-7/watt range and Froogle showed one for $4.70/watt.
Do all four sides of the sears tower get direct sunlight? How many hours of full sunlight? The generating numbers for photovoltaic panels are always full sunlight output. Notice in the article how only the top and one side (the south side in the nothern hemisphere) is clad. Aiming photovoltaics east or west or north is not cost effective.
So you can build 13 similarly powered coal powerplants for the cost of one solar panel mounted to the Sears Tower
It might take $900k/megawatt to build a coal fired power plant, but once built you still have to sustain it. Its costs will continue for the life of the power plant. Once you put solar panels onto a building, aside from a little light maintenance (har har) it's a one-time cost.
Aside from economical benefits, it's also more accessible and conveniant to be hooked up to power from your own building -- there nothing much short of a true disaster that would knock out your power. Being off the grid can be a very good thing.
And of course, factor in the environmental impact. How much coal do we really have left in the world? It takes nearly 100 tons of prehistoric plant matter to create a single gallon of gasoline. I don't know how much prehistoric life goes into coal, but how about let's just not waste it in the first place?
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
I've seen strange math here today. Let's do the numbers.
First, these cannot be used as windows on cars. The minimum tint is something like 20%, and these allow only 10% of the light.
Second, at most two sides of a building receive sunlight at a time. In fact, it's the average of the cosine of the angle of incidence that matters.
Third, less energy gets through the atmosphere when the sun is near the horizon -- much less.
What we really want is the average of the product of the cosine with the transparency of of the atmosphere, which is equivalent to around 3 hours of straight on sunlight per day per 3 panels (none on the north face).
At 3.8 watts/sq-ft, it's about 3.8 watt-hours per day, per sq ft.
Electricity costs $0.08 per kilowatt-hour, so 1 sq ft of panel produces about 0.3 milli-dollars of electricy per day.
Because of clouds, there are around 150 clear-sky equivalent days/year, so that's about 5 cents per year.
Assuming a measly 3.3% interest rate, that income stream is worth $1.50 if that sq. ft. of panel lasts forever, or about 75 cents if it lasts an average of 20 years.
And the panel costs $45 per sq ft.
This is offset by the cost of glass which it replaces, which is neglible.
Most of the costs of production are energy, in one way or another (which is the point that most environmentalist REFUSE to admit). Even including a carbon-dioxide tax, these have to be much cheaper before they can be considered environmentally-friendly.
Why don't we just install a "Spaceballs" style solar glass enclosure around the earth at 26000 miles from the center? Just high enough to keep the geostationary satellites inside (wouldn't want to lose our tv). The surface area should be about.
t ml#IntlConsumption m l . html (seems accurate)
131,657,416,704,000,000 sq/ft
and cost
$5,924,583,751,680,000,000
in raw materials (maybe we could get a bulk discount)
we should also try to cash in on a "free installation"
The output of such a sphere would be
500,298,183,475,200,000 watts continuous
Or (for sake of easier calculation in an already complicated process) if only half of the sphere received light at any given time
250,149,091,737,600,000 watts continuous
250,149,091,737.6 kW continuous
250.15 Petawatt continuous
Power demand in 2002 for the entire world
13,747,393,531.8 kW continuous
0.0137474 Petawatt continuous
sure every living thing on earth would probably die and we would enter a perpetual ice age from the lack of light and heat but, you could throw away the sunscreen and with all that extra energy maybe we could string up some halogens or something along the inside! We could also sell advertising space on it.
All conversions made with http://www.onlineconversion.com/
Power consumption data from http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/total.h
Geostationary orbit data from how http://octopus.gma.org/surfing/imaging/howhigh.ht
Radius of the earth from http://www.page.sannet.ne.jp/ikenoue/e-mode/earth
Output and cost from RFTA
If you think that my math is wrong then check and let me know, too tired to think anymore.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Well I've read people worrying about breakability and such with hailstorms. I suppose if you have a clear roof you allready have some kind of special glass?
Anyway, I was thinkin more the lines of having double glass, you know the isolation glass we use in europe. Two layers of glass with a vacuum in between. I suppose you want that anyway to keep the heat/cold out/in (depending where you live) So why not making your double glass with solar capabilites only on the inside. The outer layer could be that strong reinforced glass we all love, where the inner, thinner glass would be your solar glass.
Secondly, normal solar panels work even when there's no sun (cloudy day etc)
So having all 4 sides coverd would always generate power, maybe less then the fully exposed one, but yet some.
Just to note, an average coal plant releases 88 pounds of uranium into the air a day. So, nuclear is much cleaner than coal. :-)
Hurricane Ivan: A 17th century prison collapsed. All of the inmates escaped.
Not that I'm a consipracy theorist or anything, but of course it does. That is the US Department of Agriculture after all. And we're talking about what? Corn ethanol? Hmm, corn is an agricultural crop.
Now, take a look at the first two bullet items from their mission statement:
Do you honestly think they'd ruin a perfectly good opportunity for one of the largest food crops in the US by speaking badly of corn derived ethanol? Please...
Seems to me that if you use it as a projection screen that it would be a perpetual motion device. (It's pretty late, probably someone has alreay said this.)
You are so boring that when I see you my feet go to sleep.
Can you stack say 10 of these panels - that should create 37W per square foot.
Or stack 100 of these panels - that should create 370W per square foot
I was recently thinking of this idea but thought it would have been impossible. I guess that shows my knowledge of solar pannels. Maybe they rely only on a part of the suns rays and not all of it? That is such a cool idea, cars, boats, trans, cities and everything inbetween will benefit.
:)
Maybe one day we'll all live under cities that are enclosed in huge transparent solar pannels, or even better, just encase the earth in it.
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
Growing the corn takes 140 but corn is not ethanol last I checked, converting it into Ethanol I assume makes up the remaining portion of the difference.
----------
Gay mobile porn
I'd be grateful if you could give a source for the 88lbs of U number...
What if one were to compare the opportunity cost associated with spending $10,000 for solar glass as opposed to $1,000 for regular glass, over ten years?
Assume that one buys the $1,000 glass and invests the remaining $9,000, receiving perhaps %5 interest per year. The interest compounded over 10 years comes out to 62.9% of the initial investment, or 0.629 * $9,000 = $5660.05.
So over ten years, the net cost of solar glass might be $5,000, but you also missed the opportunity to make another $5,660, a number which will get larger and larger over time.
That is why one doesn't spend $10,000 today to get back $10,000 over 20 years; most people would rather use that $10,000 and have $20k or $30k at the end of that 20 years.
These are made of flexable amorphous silicon they have light blue tint to them and are semi transparent. They range in length from 5 to 12 feet long 2 feet wide. We throw them out usually for small marks or nicks.
Hmm.. perhaps only some of the light is absorbed (e.g. UV which isn't visible anyway), and the rest is what you see coming through.
Actually, in your example, the site would need 11.111 (recurring)% more energy. ;-)
Ta.
Unless of course you are south of the equator then it becomes a waste to be pointing the things South.
... industries for NOT using power reclemation and "free source" power generation (wind, solar, brake regenerative)
I wonder if there will be any cities that will ever require buildings to have such technologies in the new construction, just as say Germantown Tenneesee requires no backlit signs above a certain height and at that can't diplay food items. They also have restrictions about trees and shrubs having to be every few feet in a parking lot and cobble stone or brick pavers instead of concrete or black tar paving.
Reclamation and regeration could EASILY revoltionalize the tax system in my opinion. One of the number one costs to most cities is paying for the power for stoplights, government buildings, and sign illumination. If this cost were significantly reduced or eliminated, it could be extra money in the taxpayers hands and therefore less tax increases or maybe even a rollback.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
industry news
OLED Solar Panels
Laugh at my ignorance while I learn Rails - a Real ne
From the article: "On the outside of the building, the material can function as a giant billboard."
Cool! - We can now look forward to Blade Runner-type skyscraper sized advertising.
I, for one, welcome our new Replicant overlords.
How much coal do we really have left in the world?
A lot. Just the US reserves alone are estimated to last at least 300 more years.
I was just reading that Kanazawa Station in Japan will be built using this as an exterior skin. I used to teach English in the Hokurikku region (of which Kanazawa is a part of) and one of my students was an ederly man that sold home solar power units. In this area of Japan I saw quite a bit of solar powered home units. On train rides through the area it's very easy to spot the roof top systems. With electricty in Japan running as high as it does it's easy to see the attraction to solar power. And with a whole building covered in this stuff... you can bet the station will be selling excess power to the power company at peak hours.
Keep in mind that you probably can't use the whole building for power generation. The north side of the building will get virtually no direct sunlight at all, except at the start of summer where it will only be immediately after sunrise, and immediately before sunset. For the other 95% of the year, only indirect light from the sky, or reflections from other buildings, will hit the north side windows. That means it's probably not worth it to put these panels on the north side of the building.
.55 megawatts. Of course, it's still better than just regular glass. Also, if the energy was used to feed the air conditioners, it would be generated where and when it's needed the most. If only these things were as simple and great as they sounded.
Also, only one or two sides of the building will be generating power at any one time of the day, since the sun doesn't shine around corners very well.
Finally, most skyscrapers tend to have other skyscrapers around them to block out the sun. It may turn out that only the top half of any building is really worth putting solar-generating windows in.
After incorporating all these factors, using only 3/4 of the sides of the building, using only the top half of the building, and having the sun shine only on one side at a time, that reduces the 4.4 megawatt number to
What is that in horsepower per acre?
Here's a few: http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~aubrecht/prolif erationAAPTSu03.pdf
http://yarchive.net/nuke/coal_radiation.html
The best: http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/ colmain.html
Ya' know, Google really is your friend! ;-)
Hurricane Ivan: A 17th century prison collapsed. All of the inmates escaped.
http://yarchive.net/nuke/coal_radiation.html
The best one: http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/ colmain.html
Hurricane Ivan: A 17th century prison collapsed. All of the inmates escaped.
So for $45 * 95 square feet, you can run the VOS Pad LEDs. Of course, I acknowledge that you pointed out that this is when all lights are on full. What you failed to mention was that the VOS Pad costs £35,000 (about US$52,500). This is not practical. The return on investment would likely take the better part of your life -- if even that short. Sure, it could take this portion of your energy consumption off the grid, but how much energy was required to make these materials in the first place? How much energy was used by the manufacturing facilities? At a price of £35,000, you can bet it isn't peanuts.
As for OLEDs, yes they look promising. However, until they actually hit mass market, we don't know actual numbers. Looking at this press release, Samsung's 17" display "will consume no more power than a 15-inch display..." Sure you can take away the backlight, but this is not the same as slashing the total power consumption. Reduces it, yes, but doesn't make revolutionary drops. On the bright side (no pun intended), OLEDs have the potential for cost savings.
You're right. We should attack it from both ends or at least leave everything open as possibilities. However I still believe that I was right. We should not concentrate on technologies that only provide marginal improvements for the amount of money/resources spent. We shouldn't ignore them of course, but we definitely shouldn't fixate upon them. We have a limited amount of resources and money. For better or for worse, this is the reality of our world: scarcity and commerce.
Who cares if my electricity bill is reduced by half or even eliminated entirely if the initial cost in materials exceeds what I would pay in electricity for the next fifty years?
If a solution presents itself that uses more resources or costs substantially more than our current methods, it is not a good solution. In some circumstances I could see this PV glass making sense. In most scenarios though, I see it as a curious novelty that makes little sense for the average Joe like myself.
As I look out one of the windows in my bedroom, I estimate that the 2.5 by 3 foot window would cost me around $337.50 to replace just the glass. (I'm sure the framing would add to the cost.) I have three such windows in my bedroom. For some odd reason, I think my money would be better spent on double-paned replacements and using the money saved on both initial investment and heating costs to pay for my energy bills until the technology improves in a few years.
At $45/sq. ft., the $1,012.50 (at least) I would spend on three PV glass windows would not be recouped anytime soon. I like to think of myself as an optimist, but I'm not that blindly optimistic. Assuming 22.5 sq. ft. of PV glass, 3.8W/sq. ft., 7hrs of useable sunlight a day for 22 sunlit days a month (on average), I get a little more than 13kWh (kilowatt hours) per month. Let's say I pay about 10 cents per kilowatt hour -- pretty expensive I think. This means I get back $1.32 every month from these windows. Woohoo! I will have paid for them in 64 years! Well... That's assuming they last for 64 years.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
52 million is a good price for 4.4mw??? no way.
they could just install 3 1.5mw turbins on the top of the tower for 3million saving 49million.
aww the constitution
Annual maintenance for a solar panel system is around 1% of the total build cost. The Sears Tower panel would have an annual expense of $1.5 million. Coal plants have a maintenance cost of $29 / Megawatt-hour. A coal plant that put out as much (little) power as the Sears Tower solar panel would only have $250,000 in annual expenses.
So, let's put it back into perspective.
Sears Tower solar panel:
Cost to build: $150 million
Annual maintenance: $1.5 million
Power generated: 4.2 megawatts
Coal power plant:
Cost to build: $4 million
Annual maintenance: $250,000
Power generated: 4.2 megawatts
It's pretty clear that solar power can't stack up to coal power. And as a previous post mentioned there are 300 years of remaining coal reserves in the ground. We should wait until prices come down on solar panels. Until then, it's a big waste of money to install them.
http://www.nucleartourist.com/basics/costs.htm
If these solar panels work well as projection screens, then how long would it be until building owners use them to display advertising?
This could also being a whole new meaning to the term "war driving". Instead of driving around with a wireless laptop, you'd be driving around with a video projector!
Unfortunately, as interesting as it is, that set of numbers is quite deceptive. The number of isolated skyscrapers is virtually nil; the land value to justify such a building only occurs in major city centers. In such city centers, such buildings are almost a no-brainer; they cluster. Light isn't likely to reach more than 20 or 30 percent of the surface in any significant quantity.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Let's be even more realistic... The Sears Tower *consumes* 140 million-kilowatt hours of electricity at a cost of more than $7.5 million per year. So even wrapping the building completely in solar panels won't come close to providing power for even the tenents.
n iz ing_legend/
http://securitysolutions.com/mag/security_moder
This is revolutionary because it nows allows solar panel installation in a place where no one could before: on windows. I don't understand all the bitching about the panel's inefficiency. The panel is a compromise, if anyone read their website, they etch lines into it with a laser.
...During the manufacturing process a laser scribes a series of ultra fine lines, allowing 10% of visible light to be transmitted through the panel...
Of course the efficiency goes down when you remove 10% of the photovoltaic material, but if you can put it up where windows used to be, you end up winning in the end. This is especially true for office towers and skyscrapers which mostly have exclusively glass exteriors. This technology will not replace existing panels. Current opaque solar technology will always have it's place on roofs and walls. The invention of clear solar panels allows those opaque panels to be complemented by making more surface area available to install panels on existing glazing surfaces.
Divide by zero hurts my brain.
Well, if you do assume oil execs are evil...
then they may well indeed try to kill the next big thing:
then they will try to kill biodiesel (for example), because it's very very easy to produce: they aren't needed to make it. You can make biodiesel from home, without too much difficulty, out of vegetable oil. Try producing petrodiesel (or gasoline) at home...
It's not idiotproof and requires some relatively dangerous chemicals. But not bad at all.
Your product will be a bit more expensive than petrodiesel currently is, assuming you pay for the initial oil stock; but the point the oil companies recognize, is that none of those dollars need go to any big oil company whatsoever.
but am pretty sure this is a cry into the wilderness, being two days later and from an anonymous coward to boot...
To increase the amount of electricty generated, graned the inner layer would not generrate as much electricity, but could they manufacure a mutiple layer semi-transparent window pane? Maybe use the mutiple layers to increase effecincy per square ft.???
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Architects and engineers are looking into ways to make building more efficient. (Sometimes the clients request it, sometimes they sell it to them based on calculations of cost over the life of the building)
William McDonough: he is a leader in the field and has been influencing other high profile architects to include exactly those kinds of features into new construction. Along with passive heating and cooling and natural lighting.
Some recent projects that do not fit the stereotype of sustainable or green building include 4 Times Square (skyscaper) by Fox and Fowle and the David L Lawrence Convention Center by Rafael Vinoly.
"I'm an indescribable shade of twilight...Any second now I going to turn myself off"
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"