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Solar Power From Home Curtains
kaliann writes "With the push for more sustainable energy, easy DIY kits for alternative energy sources are likely to become quite popular in the coming years. We may see some big improvements in our ability to 'green up' if these photovoltaic curtains become widely available."
they only produce power when the curtains are closed.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
With the push for more sustainable energy, easy DIY kits for alternative energy sources are likely to become quite popular in the coming years.
Two words. Doubt it. There are all kinds of ways to save money, but most people don't do them. To put it into a computer perspective, how many people do you know upgrade RAM? Out of that many how many do them themselves? How many people upgrade a CPU? How many people salvage CD-ROM drives from old computers? How many save old cases and build computers in them? Very few I would think. Same thing with these, they are a way to save money, but for most people they will just complain about high oil prices, try to get a raise, petition for an increase in minimum wage, repeat. These will be about as popular as running BSD on your toaster. You can do it, it might be cool, but most people don't see the need.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I know we're at a point where solar is looking like a good investment. Still... Isn't it easier for a solar contractor to just make large solar power plants to supplement the grid than worrying about the specifics of installing home to home?
I'm all for the day when I can offset my electricity bills a small amount because I have my house decked out in solar material... I'd rather just have cheaper electricity though especially in the near future. Plugin, hybrid cars are going to start sucking on the power grid. If we don't add more solar or nuclear plants to the grid, we could see an electric shortage in the form of higher prices for one.
Oh and I'm still bummed about the study the government is doing to make sure solar is environmentally friendly. I mean, isn't the waste output from coal plants harmful to the environment? If we had the option to cut that waste back, aren't we helping the environment?
Anyway, the future looks bright to me. The US economy is holding even though it has taken some hits. If we can just get to a new era in surplus solar energy, we can get into some really interesting solutions to getting off oil. Some people think it will be hydrogen. Some people think it will be electric cars. I'm not sure which is going to take off in the long run. I think it is going to be hybrids that make the most initial impact because they don't have the limitations of the electric car's maximum range. For electric cars to have a long range, gas stations will have to be refitted with a tool to swap out battery arrays. Hydrogen faces a similar challenge in that it'd need special fill up stations too. Plug in hybrids work off traditional gas stations.
I like Nanosolar's approach because it is so high tech and also economically feasable. Still low tech solar options such as parabolic mirrors to focus sunlight and run steam turbines could be good at first. I think we have a lot of unused land on Earth, and the faster we can cover it, the faster we can have surplus energy. Surplus energy makes transportation costs go down so you can travel all that you want even if you're poor. And even more interesting is that surplus energy lowers the cost of transporting food, so impoverished people can be supplied better. Oh yeah, and surplus energy also means that everything is cheaper so people have more disposable income which incidentally, also helps poor people.
God spoke to me.
The trend is the other things will become more expensive. So you will pay, do not worry.
Is that enough?
And hail, errant footballs, vandals...
They still let in plenty of light than can be used for generating solar power according to my calculator.
*raises hand tentatively*
I rarely open some of my curtains (the street-facing ones), for privacy reasons most of the year and for thermal reasons in the hotter months. They face north-ish, which means that since I'm in the southern hemisphere they'd be perfect for a solar collector with low cost and reasonable efficiency.
Glass blocks light, but it will also protect these materials from wind and moisture - and also some of that light, perhaps in the UV range if the right glass is used, and that might help prolong the usable life of some of these materials. I'd rather sacrifice a few percent of efficiency and gain years of extra use.
But there's also the environmental and recycling issues to take into account. What goes into the kind of materials, and can we get it back easily once they reach their end of life? Will they contribute to our depletion of our reserves of rare earth elements? From a resource-management perspective, as a species, we might be better off with huge centralised solar, wind, tide and geothermal power plants supplemented by nuclear (or even coal - if we can manage to burn little enough of it) for peak demand purposes than squandering precious materials so we can all have solar curtains.
why not make roofing material photovoltaic = kills two birds with one stone...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Unless they post the watts/hr it can produce under normal conditions. Its like seeing a car in a car lot without a price on it... You just keep on rollin. Seeing this 'form of energy coolness' seems worthless without some type of qualitative evidence. I want to see the watts/curtain/hr.
If you convert the energy in electricity, you won't heat yourself up. Though if you DO use it to heat up your house, well... you've never lived up north eh? When its getting awkwardly close to -40 degrees outside on a sunny day, I definately don't want to keep my house from warming up. Heating can make my power bill goes up quite a bit.
You people really need to get out more. DIY is one of the biggest trends in the industrialized world. Let me suggest an exercise: go to Barnes & Noble or some other megacorp outlet and just bloody well look at the number of DIY-oriented magazines out there. Now I agree that many of them are, to some degree, "aspirational". I used to work for This Old House Magazine so I know this all too well. But plenty of people actually do customize things in just these ways. While you've got one of these magazines in your hand, look at the ads. Those ads aren't from non-profits, my friends. People advertise all of that stuff, and its equivalent in Popular Mechanics and the magazines you'll find in Home Despot, and auto stores, and a dozen other huge demographic pools because people buy assloads of the sorts of DIY tools and parts that those advertisers make.
I hate to break it to y'all but we're not marginal anymore. Customization, the kind that involves wrenches and soldering and sandpaper, has gone mainstream.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Even if they don't produce much electricity, having a curtian of cloth over your roof will reduce your air conditioning needs. Getting electricity too is a bonus.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Your argument is called the "perfect solution fallacy", as well as being a strawman. You point out that solar panels on homes will not obviate the need for a power grid and power plants. Well, nobody (who's reasonable) is arguing that they will, at least not in the foreseeable future. So there's the strawman. Clearly solar panels on homes will not completely and by themselves solve the energy problem. Despite that, we should still use them, because we need lots of solutions to the energy problem, not one solution that takes care of the whole problem at once.
Shingles don't seem to make as much sense as panels for a couple reasons which is why I would suspect that there hasn't been enough market for the shingles hence their discontinuation.
I'm just going based on my sometimes unreliable memory (and maybe pure speculation) here but unless there has be some change in technology: 1) The efficiency of PV cells tends to decrease as their temperature increases, so having panels which allow for some type of airflow behind them which offsets their 'heat magnetism' should be more efficient, even if that percentage is small. 2) The cost factor - I would think that the cost of shingles is much greater than the traditional panel design, not to mention installation cost is probably considerably higher. 3) Risk of damage? - Shingles would seem to be more susceptible to damage.
Of course I didn't RTFA... why would I do that? You really are new here aren't you? Don't let my UID fool you.
Trust me folks, General Electric and the other companies who end up in charge of most huge power stations are even more corrupt and untrustworthy than Microsoft. And while a bad copy of Windows may corrupt your files, a badly run power plant can kill you.
As for economies of scale, think about the physics. A steam turbine may be more efficient if it's bigger, beyond a square meter or so, a photovoltaic panel won't. And given the huge loss of power (up to sixty percent) that comes from having to step the power up, put it over power lines that have their own resistance problems, step it back down again to 110 volt, and route it that "last mile" to your home, even a power source like a wind turbine may be more energy efficient being within sight of the person using it than being part of some huge installation trying to meet the demand of several million people.
And even beyond this, part of how sustainable power systems work best is taking advantage of changes in conditions on a tiny scale, one far too small to merit utility power involvement. Somebody further up suggested a regenerative door stop. Another suggestion was of using the power from water dropping within a structure as it leaves something like a sink. Think of the power that could be recovered doing this in a modern twenty story residential tower, let alone a fifty story office building. Especially since putting back an old-fashioned water tower within the building would make it possible to disproportionately push that water up to the top in the first place in the middle of the night or other times when power is cheap.
There is a place for centralized power generation. But the less power we get that way, the closer we get our lives to being what all this open source stuff is supposed to be all about. Both "free as in beer" and "free as in speech".
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
You could always greenroof part or all of it and, at the least, superinsulate that way, not to mention perhaps having fresh munchies if you have easy access to it. I'm also seeing more and more people phasing this kind of approach in by getting a fifty or hundred dollar panel that is connected to a battery charger and little by little switching to battery-powered devices, including using it to charge their laptops. The toxics from most batteries are an obvious downside, but it's still a good start for some folks.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Again, I don't know what world you're living in, but there are millions of us who are getting this stuff done as fast as we can, including plenty of real companies like Sequential, with stock and everything, who are making quite a nice living selling biodiesel and are already tying up every rational source of supply they can get their hands on. Oh, and those of us who understand things like cellulosic sources never thought that corn-based approaches were ever anything but yet another bit of agribusiness welfare.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
As people keep having to point out, nobody is presenting one form of sustainable power generation as some sort of panacea. Where it's windy, use wind; where currents and tides are strong, use hydro; where it's sunny, use PV, where there's trash land, grow switchgrass; and so on. And even beyond this, per capita demand is a result of many behaviors that people like me are working to change. It's not just about power generation. It's about all kinds of changes from better insulated houses to more mass transit, to eating more food that's grown locally. (Food is actually the biggest energy cost for many Americans.) This doesn't require moving into a teepee and living on uncooked twigs. It's possible to live very elegantly and very comfortably indeed in a sustainable way. We just need to make the changes that make that possible.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Stupid idea, the whole gimmick.
If you want to do solar power, better do it properly and mount decent solar cells in a place where it really can generate power (eg on the roof in the right direction with the right inclination).
The idea of those curtains is just stupid, because you dole out good money to get some crappy cells which end up being mounted in a bad place.
If you happen to live in a hot area, it would be far more ecological if you invested in some proper shading that the load on the air conditioning can be reduced. That saves more that those stupid curtains will ever produce. For the money saved, get decent cells on the roof.
If you live in a cold area - usually with only few hours of good sunlight - the curtains are even more stupid, because they produce even less. Invest in good double or triple glazing to keep the heat in and catch the few sun-rays you get to heat the room.
To sum it up, this junk gimmick is exactly what home shopping TV would try push to ride the eco-wave. Do the environment a favor and forget about that stupid idea.
SO in summer time you will pay more in cooling costs than you gain in electricity. Either that or be warmer. Logically you want the drapes outside where they would be amiently cooled.
Now if you draw the blinds and thus it gets darker and you need to turn on a light well. So much for any gains.
You discount for the fact that not all people are at home at all times.
If I'm not at home, I want my house to remain cool with as little energy spent as possible. That means that if those curtains are put outside windows (or maybe fashioned into blinds of some sort), they both prevent heat entering and produce electricity.
Also, if you put them on windows, it does not mean that windows have become your primary energy source, so it's either electricity or light. It's more like "create power in your spare time" — when you don't need the light, you get some power.
Ignore this signature. By order.