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MIT Solar Towers Beat Solar Panels By Up To 20x

Posted by timothy on from the if-they-had-pants-they'd-have-been-beaten-off dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A team of MIT researchers has come up with a very different approach to solar collectors: building cubes and towers that extend solar cells upward in three-dimensional configurations. The results from the structures they've tested show power output ranging from double to more than 20 times that of fixed flat panels with the same base area (abstract, full pre-print). The biggest boosts in power were seen in the situations where improvements are most needed: in locations far from the equator, in winter months and on cloudier days."

4 of 159 comments (clear)

  1. Picture... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Picture available here. It's a solar pancake!

    1. Re:Picture... by uigrad_2000 · · Score: 4, Informative

      The Ion cannon article was featured on Slashdot two weeks ago.

      I think a better way to state it, would be to say that efficiency per square foot of ground used is not important, unless the cost of the cells come down.

      Now that there is word of a new manufacturing process to reduce cost, two weeks later, we find an article about how to arrange low-cost cells.

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    2. Re:Picture... by fast+turtle · · Score: 4, Informative

      Did you RTFA? I happened to do so having caught it a couple of days ago. The interesting element to this design is the early/late (dawn/dusk) power generation as the current method doesn't get enough solar incidence to generate anything until 3 hours after sunrise/3 hours before sunset. That's 6 hours of production that's being missed, which is why this design reaches 15-20x the generated power of conventional flat panels.

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  2. paper link by Trepidity · · Score: 4, Informative

    As seems depressingly common in science journalism, they vaguely mentioned the existence of a paper, but don't actually give the title or (dare we hope) a hyperlink to the paper. At least they did mention the name of the journal it was published in.

    In any case, the paper is "Solar energy generation in three dimensions." If you're at a university with a subscription the official version (not open-access) is here. There is also an open-access preprint version at the arXiv.

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