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SolarCity Says It Has Produced the World's Highest Efficiency Solar Panel
Lucas123 writes: SolarCity, one of the country's leading solar panel makers and installers, today said it has been able to create a product that has a 22.04% efficiency rating, topping its closest competitor SunPower, by about one percent. While the percentages may appear small, SolarCity said the new panels, which will go into pilot production later this month, will produce 30% to 40% more energy with the same footprint as its current panels, and they will cost no more to make.
22.04% is not one percent better than SunPower's 21.5%, it's 2.5% better. Alternatively, it's 0.54 percentage points better. It's not the same thing.
You can't shut us down! The Internet is about the free exchange and sale of other people's ideas!
Re: why Batteries? Those of us who choose to live beyond the grid. It's only 600 metres away from my house but Energex want ~AUD$30K to extend a standard (i.e. non-AC) single-phase service to my house.
Solar panels are a damn sight cheaper than they used to be. My last purchase in 2009 was 6 x 140 watt 24 volt panels @ AUD$1400.00 each. Those same panels are now less than $400 each.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
Has Hawaii mandated solar water heating in all residences yet?
When I lived there in the 90s in drove me crazy that 3% (back then) of the electricity was used on hot water production, but there was free sun everywhere.
If I recall, most of the electricity production there is from diesel generators. A 3% reduction in electricity consumption translates into 3% fewer tankers at risk of destroying their economy with a diesel spill.
Oh... and the windmills on the North Shore weren't spinning. Have they fixed that yet? Constant wind ~11 months of a year and the windmills weren't spinning...
When I was there they said corrosion had destroyed the wind generators. Evidently the people that installed them didn't consider the salt environment when they did the install.
Like this? https://www.anapode.com/produc...
Point is, you need a panel. And you need a microinverter. And you need a wire to the roof. And you need a box, called a combiner box, the wire goes into. There is usually a cutoff switch on that box. Then, after that, the wire from the combiner box is usually backfed into your main breaker panel, with the power going backwards through an appropriate breaker rated for the wire's ampacity. Really, the tricky part is the power company has to come and approve the design and install their 2 way meter. Everything else, any idiot can do.