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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.
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Does the carpet match the drapes?
"Close the damn curtains! Battlestar Galactica marathon starts tonight."
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.
Summer months in the Desert: Closing drapes helps keep heat out, solar technology helps to power the Air Conditioner.
Non-summer months everywhere else: Close the curtains to power the lights that you need because the curtains are closed.
Actually, RMIT (a tertiary institution here in Australia) recently announced that one of their new buildings will be solar-powered thanks to the glass on the buildings. From the article: blah blah blah "with an outer skin of 16,000 sand blasted glass cells, some of which will be photovoltaic solar power collectors to help shade and power the building."
The killer app for renewable energy will be to get the cost down.
Once it makes economic sense for me to go green, I will, but in the mean time much as I want to save the planet and everything I have bills to pay :-(
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Now I just have to block out the sun to get light in my room.
If only there was an easier way...
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I have to admit, solar shutters make more sense.
This wouldn't be bad as a DIY project for a sun-facing wall that gets too much light, though. Or a porch, to power the porch lights (like a solar lantern, but bigger).
Obviously not the solution for everyone. I, for one, have a tree to the south, which would likely displease the new solar curtain overlords.
What would be a cool application for solar fabric is a canopy (say, for an outdoor market). That could provide shade while powering lights or electronics (like cash machines) in the stalls. Or self-lighting party tents.
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.
I have a window with a pretty bad shade and too thin of curtains in my room. After waking up when the sun rises instead of 10:30-ish like normal too many days in a row, I got some black rodeo fabric that lets absolutely no light through and VHB taped it to the wooden frame around my window. Now it's totally black but I leave it on all day and whenever I need to open my window, that fabric feels about 100 degrees and the air trapped behind it is about the same. And that's with my shade closed! If I left it open, black fabric alone could absorb a ton of heat energy. So I think solar curtains would work great.
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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.
The panels turn transparent when they come in contact with water, so it's mainly for when it's raining (I suppose there are other, far less peaceful circumstances in which water can hit them). Otherwise they're translucent.
why not make roofing material photovoltaic = kills two birds with one stone...
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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.
And, moving right along, look at the growth of things like Maker Faires. Or of Make, itself. Plenty of people are doing just this sort of thing.
I could go into waaaay more detail on this but frankly, afaic the store locator on either of those sites says it all. No. You are wrong. Plenty of people do just this kind of thing all across the developed and developing world. Evidently they just don't hang out with you.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Actually I think they will save more power with the curtains open than closed.
I'm shooting from the hip here but looking at the picture I expect there's a serious flaw here. The Curtains look black so they are absorbing a lot of light energy. We know they are highly inefficient. So they mainly heat your house.
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.
Finally most houses are designed to have their windows shaded more or have an oblique incidence in summer time. Thus during the time of maximum sun, and warmth you get the least electricity.
In winter time when the solar flux is less and there will be fewer hours of daylight the direction of incidence will be better. But chances are you'd like the light.
The drapes have no thermal mass so they act like the worst kind of traum wall where they heat up and cool down quickly. No thermal damping.
Seems like archecturally this is a bad idea from the get go regardless of how the solar fabric technology improves. Maybe in northern canada or something it makes sense.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Does anyone else think it strange that we use power-consuming devices to illuminate the interior of our houses and other buildings when we built them with a large covering over the top that blocks out the daylight by design? Seems it might, just possibly, be a bit more practical to design them so we don't block out the light in the first place. We westerners consider ourselves "high tech". Ha! An advanced technology would use daylight directly during the day and store the excess for use at night.
Ouch! The truth hurts!
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.
This assumes that your house is oriented properly and that your windows are large.
In northern climes, windows exposed to the north and to the prevailing winds tend to be small. Windows to the south tend to be big. You want that southern light and heat in winter. Home Design Basics
Curtains are an element in interior design. They have colors, they have folds, they have textures. That does not make for an efficient collector. Your wife may have other plans for that window.
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.
The problem I see is mostly that somebody needs to start manufacturing such turbines, complete with standard output to a battery
No, the problem is there's an incredibly tiny amount of energy in the water from a toilet flush falling 30 feet.
energy joules = m(kg)*h(m)*g(9.8 m/s)
= (3.8*3) * 30/3.28 * 9.8
= 1021 joules.
a kilowatt hour is 3,600,000 joules. so we're talking about 1021/3600000, or .00028 kilowatt hours. My power costs about .10/kilowatt hour, so one flush is equal to $0.000028. If you flush 4 times a day for a year, that's $.04 of electricity. (and this is assuming you're able to capture ALL of the energy, which you can't do, and the water falls 30 feet, which isn't happening in anyones home anyway.
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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.
There'd be something ironic about plugging an EV into the road for power... -Randy
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.
Nasch already took care of some of your illogical arguments... but you've made other assumptions that are just plain wrong or at best outdated.
20% efficiency on a solar panel is not uncommon. In fact, you can buy 28% efficient solar panels (as long as you don't live in the US *grumble*). Over their lifetime, of course that rate is going to fall, but it will still remain a bit above 20%.
Given time, that efficiency is only going to improve. Both of these factors right there shoot your 600M^2 theory to shit.
Using you and your family as an example, your average 1.4KW usage could be dramatically reduced without impacting your quality of life in an appreciable manner. I know this is so because I've done it myself. It takes some will power and awareness of what power you are actually using, but it can be done fairly painlessly. You can start by replacing your incandescent bulbs with CFL or better yet with LEDs. One of the largest single power draw in a home is from all the light bulbs. Reducing that can cut your monthly average quite a bit.
You need to turn off stuff you aren't using. Putting things into standby is not turning them off... in fact, many appliances and electronic gadgets don't even HAVE an off switch, they go into standby. So that means you have to unplug them. That's a pain in the ass. However, a simple solution to this is to plug everything you use for a particular activity into a power strip... when you're done, turn the power strip off. This overcomes the leeching power used by wall-warts, as well as gadgets and electronics that go into standby mode. Yes, you may have to wait a few seconds longer for something to power up, but it's not a huge deal.
Another big energy saver is to replace your windows. If you have contractor grade windows in your house, you are leaking energy like a sieve. Replacing your windows with high quality double or triple paned, krypton filled windows with insulated frames will save you a TON of money and energy for cooling and heating.
Do you have an ancient refrigerator? If so, it's probably drawing 2 to 3 times the amount of energy a modern refrigerator uses (or more if it's REALLY old). Might be worth it to replace it.
Do you leave your computer on at night? Turn it off, or at least put it in standby. My system, at idle, draws about 600w, when it's in standby it drops to about 30w. That's a HUGE savings on a month or yearly basis. If you're on Slashdot, chances are you've got multiple computers - I think you see where that's going. If you're using an old computer as a Linux router or something we are all fond of doing - stop. Old computers are incredible power hogs. A cheap wireless router that you can load new firmware onto will suck a fraction of the power, produce a fraction of the heat and noise. It's nice to think you're recycling your computers, but it's costing you more than they are worth in power per year, for sure.
There's lots of things you can do to reduce your power consumption. You can take your 1.4kw to 800kw fairly easily I suspect. That almost halves your 600M^2, coupled with the fact that you can buy efficient PV panels, now you only need about 200M^2. The average house has that much roof space that's likely suitable.
Even if you don't, as long as you are offsetting some of your power needs, it goes a long way to helping bring about a more energy efficient future.
Is it going to be uncomfortable? Probably a bit, but not cripplingly so, and once the "new" way sets in, it will seem silly that we didn't do it a long time ago.
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.
Well, actually, downspouts are what the folks I know are looking at first. In fact, just last night I shared a few drinks with one of the folks in the local downspout disconnection program and we talked about this a bit. Keep in mind, though, that I live in one of the rainiest places in North America and even here, even focusing on industrial buildings with flat roofs, everybody I know who is working on it is having trouble making it pay.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Study some heat transfer principles. Depending on their reflectivity, these curtains may cause the roof to absorb MORE heat than the roofing does.
Ideally, solar installations for home use will not transfer heat directly into the house. A curtain laying directly on the roofing surface will absorb some light and create some electricity. However, light and heat that is not reflected will absorb and the greater part will transfer through to the house a large amount of heat. A smaller portion will radiate from the house.
Solar panels are typicaly elevated above the house. The air gap allows the panels to be cooled by airflow.
The actual news here is that they can create solar fabric. I'm sure they can design a roofing system that will use the material to generate electricity while the system maintains an air and water seal and reflectivity of the largest part of the sun's energy.
TANSTAAFL GIGO Acronyms to live by!
The more I think about the current situation we are in with power, I am coming to realize that we are here because the power companies/governments want us to be dependent. If we all had solar/wind power our house and fueling the electrolysis fuel cell to create hydrogen for our car, we wouldn't need them. We wouldn't be "contributing to the economy." So rather let's destroy the economy to maintain the status quo. /soapbox
If the material is strong enough, it could be used in a Yurt, where the fabric is the wall.
That could be fantastic if you think about an easy to build shelter that powers its own electronics inside.