Slashdot Mirror
MIT Solar Towers Beat Solar Panels By Up To 20x
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."
20x output (compared to a flat panel with the same footprint).
Not really news. This is like excitedly proclaiming that a 20 story building has nearly 20 times the floorspace of a single story building with the same footprint. Uh, no shit? (Or that a 20 story building receives more insolation than a 1-story building; hmm, you think maybe it has a lot more surface area?) I also like that they hand-wave away the fact that it costs significantly more per unit output by saying that cells are getting cheaper. Great.
Not that there aren't uses - it absolutely makes sense to go this route where you have limited footprint space - but it just doesn't seem at all revolutionary. I guess if you tack the letters M-I-T onto a press release it instantly becomes newsworthy.
Quick, someone alert all of the major energy companies so they can buy up the patents and sit on them for eternity!
Well, no. The 7th grader built a single physical model and made rough measurements of it's performance at a single location across a limited span of time. The MIT team built a computer model that can analyze any given configuration and simulate it's output across a wide variety of locations and wide span of time - including variations in seasonal weather patterns.
I'm not saying that what the 7th grader did wasn't cool - but he's built a pinebox derby car, while MIT has built a fully solar powered 55mph family sedan. Apples-to-oranges doesn't even *begin* to describe the differences, not only of degree but of kind, between the projects.
Under conditions where you can see the sun - that's true. But the point of TFA is that these 3D structures are more efficient *in situations where sun trackers aren't more efficient*.
Conditions exactly like those currently outside my window - where the sky is nearly uniformly bright but you cannot see the sun at all due to the clouds. Conditions that are fairly common here in the Pacific Northwest.