It is overwhelmingly likely that he wastes his time because the overwhelming majority of concentrating solar solutions has been rendered uneconomical. That is all the information you need to be skeptical about any news on purported improvements of solar concentrators.
Without more detailed information, we can't know for sure whether he's wasting his time, but it's overwhelmingly likely. The problems with PV systems lie elsewhere. For example, the price, heat losses and lifetime of power electronics need to be improved, but that has nothing to do with optics.
So you can't admit that you said "It's easier to land on Mars than Melbourne, Australia" now?
I can't admit saying something I never said.
25-30 years is not the "least" in terms of replacement windows for existing cheap panels.
So if something built thirty years ago with the expectation of lasting maybe ten years actually lasted over twenty years, the same but improved thing manufactured today with the expectation of lasting twenty five years will actually last *less*? Sorry. You don't know what you're blathering about, again.
He's the guy that invents stuff that solar systems engineers eventually end up using...
No, the stuff that solar systems engineers eventually end up using involves semiconductor physics and material science, plus some surface structures like patterning the silicon/binder interface for improved light absorption. Nothing of the sort that is suggested here.
and it's not as expensive as you think which is why the US is converting many coal plants over to it.
But Germany is not the United States. It's utterly irrelevant what the US is doing when discussing Germany. A purpose-built natural gas plant is not expensive as you think either (it's in fact one of the cheapest things you can build on a large scale), so converting coal plants is near useless unless you can afford to waste lots of the gas on your inefficient plant. What do you think is the price of natural gas in Europe?
What does this have to do with NASA or space? (Aside from the fact that Krafft Ehricke's concentrator ideas, unlike this, could actually be a valuable improvement of future solar power, except perhaps for the fact that they don't scale down and therefore are unlikely to be ever implemented before energy storage improves in the period between now and the point in time where we could build such megastructures.)
In a limited set of geographic locations with mostly direct insolation. For most of the world, they're completely useless.
That crippled their adoption because everyone wanted the cheapest panel solution possible, not the most efficient possible, for their rollouts.
Efficiency can be measured in various ways (thermodynamic? economic? raw material utilization?), and economy of operation is of paramount importance. Whatever different pet peeve you have with current installations is probably because you're not the one who has to pay for it.
If you're not factoring in the cost of replacing cheap panels in 15-20 years
The real problem is storage. Conversion is satisfactorily solved by using just a single crystalline silicon junction - it's the *economically* optimal solution for now (and economics is the #1 factor here). Some people hope that in the future, some kind of nantennas could improve over them. It seems unlikely today that other types of semiconductor junctions will beat crystalline silicon on price (amortized over its lifetime - the lifetime of c-Si is crazy good, and that's *old* equipment).
Low light conditions and concentrators are generally opposed to each other in photovoltaics, since concentrators cope very badly with diffuse light. Using brain therefore means rejecting concentrators if you're dealing with low light conditions.
But the same thing may very well apply to the physicist in question, because he's not a solar systems engineer. Either there's something miraculous in his design that makes it vastly more beneficial than all the other types of concentrators that have already failed by now due to progress of flat panels (which we don't know since there are no details in the article), or he's in the same position of proposing solutions detached from reality.
Assuming it's in any way similar, you can already see the problems with transportation. On the plus side, maybe it's somewhat cheaper per capacity by virtue of being a passive optical system. Perhaps it could even justify using better PV cells to improve efficiency. On the minus side, a replacement of a single flat panel will occupy the volume of a hundred of flat panels, with several dozen times the output even if the "reflector box" somehow produced twice as much as a single panel (for example, by using multiple junction cells). Such issues impacting the economy of PV solutions seem to be often neglected by inventors of similar concentrating solutions.
It's sort of a problem with these kinds of solutions. In the past, they were proposed because the price per watt of PV junctions was very high. Nowadays a square meter of PV junctions can cost $100 or less and the mechanical and/or structural complexity of not simply making a large glass pane full of them does not generally outweigh the possible benefits.
The fixed price of electricity paid to HPC is currently *more than double* the price of *solar* in *Germany* in the most recent auctions. That puts things into perspective...not very good perspective for HPC, or the French building it.
He knows that. He also knows the limitations of using those numbers for anything. Literally the only thing that number tells you is the fraction of the nameplate capacity that the plant generates in long-term average. Pretty much nothing useful can be divined from that without lots of extra information (capital costs, operating costs, opportunity costs, expected load curves, actual generation curves, etc. etc.)
Tesla makes shitty solar systems (cost-wise); I don't see why you're bringing up one of the worst examples. It's like bringing up Chernobyl when mentioning nuclear power.
Both PV and the high induction motors used in those windmills require rare earths among other materials
An obligatory fact check: Neither PV nor induction generators require ANY rare earths whatsoever. Seriously, school yourself.
and don't recoup their cost within the lifetime before failure(30 years).
This is also provably wrong, by means of example, since otherwise their operators would be asking for much higher feed-in tariffs than they do nowadays.
They could, but why? Natural gas is so expensive around here that doing anything else than running a CCGT in it is inadvisable. The CCGT plant, generating 50% extra electricity using the same amount of gas, would pay for itself very quickly.
"Harmonized", as in after you cook the numbers starting from ideal conditions and applying some BS reasoning?
No, as in, when confronted with data from various sources, you try to correct for the methodological differences to put the results in a meta-study on equal footing.
It is highly doubtful that solar is viable without relying on fossil energy
*This* is an actual example of "BS reasoning", seeing as manufacturing of solar equipment is primarily electricity-intensive.
and EROI also ignores materials inputs, associated mining, and eventual disposal
Of course it doesn't, why would it do that? Cradle-to-grave analysis is a thing nowadays.
Slashdot Mirror
It is overwhelmingly likely that he wastes his time because the overwhelming majority of concentrating solar solutions has been rendered uneconomical. That is all the information you need to be skeptical about any news on purported improvements of solar concentrators.
Without more detailed information, we can't know for sure whether he's wasting his time, but it's overwhelmingly likely. The problems with PV systems lie elsewhere. For example, the price, heat losses and lifetime of power electronics need to be improved, but that has nothing to do with optics.
Chewbacca defense on your part?
Ironically, PV systems are mostly not about optics, though. That's the problem. Also, this.
So you can't admit that you said "It's easier to land on Mars than Melbourne, Australia" now?
I can't admit saying something I never said.
25-30 years is not the "least" in terms of replacement windows for existing cheap panels.
So if something built thirty years ago with the expectation of lasting maybe ten years actually lasted over twenty years, the same but improved thing manufactured today with the expectation of lasting twenty five years will actually last *less*? Sorry. You don't know what you're blathering about, again.
He's the guy that invents stuff that solar systems engineers eventually end up using...
No, the stuff that solar systems engineers eventually end up using involves semiconductor physics and material science, plus some surface structures like patterning the silicon/binder interface for improved light absorption. Nothing of the sort that is suggested here.
and it's not as expensive as you think which is why the US is converting many coal plants over to it.
But Germany is not the United States. It's utterly irrelevant what the US is doing when discussing Germany. A purpose-built natural gas plant is not expensive as you think either (it's in fact one of the cheapest things you can build on a large scale), so converting coal plants is near useless unless you can afford to waste lots of the gas on your inefficient plant. What do you think is the price of natural gas in Europe?
What does this have to do with NASA or space? (Aside from the fact that Krafft Ehricke's concentrator ideas, unlike this, could actually be a valuable improvement of future solar power, except perhaps for the fact that they don't scale down and therefore are unlikely to be ever implemented before energy storage improves in the period between now and the point in time where we could build such megastructures.)
You don't know what you're talking about.
Well, I beg to differ.
Concentrators work.
In a limited set of geographic locations with mostly direct insolation. For most of the world, they're completely useless.
That crippled their adoption because everyone wanted the cheapest panel solution possible, not the most efficient possible, for their rollouts.
Efficiency can be measured in various ways (thermodynamic? economic? raw material utilization?), and economy of operation is of paramount importance. Whatever different pet peeve you have with current installations is probably because you're not the one who has to pay for it.
If you're not factoring in the cost of replacing cheap panels in 15-20 years
Make that 25-30 years at least.
and are agog at the 2x~ price of such efficient collector panels
Make that more like half the price of what you're paying today. (Not sure what's an agog, though.)
Also, you don't seem to understand how far Mars is away from Earth, relative to Melbourne Australia.
Wut? :-p
There's a Pareto optimum between adding new sources of some input and increasing efficiency of use of what you have.
The real problem is storage. Conversion is satisfactorily solved by using just a single crystalline silicon junction - it's the *economically* optimal solution for now (and economics is the #1 factor here). Some people hope that in the future, some kind of nantennas could improve over them. It seems unlikely today that other types of semiconductor junctions will beat crystalline silicon on price (amortized over its lifetime - the lifetime of c-Si is crazy good, and that's *old* equipment).
Low light conditions and concentrators are generally opposed to each other in photovoltaics, since concentrators cope very badly with diffuse light. Using brain therefore means rejecting concentrators if you're dealing with low light conditions.
But the same thing may very well apply to the physicist in question, because he's not a solar systems engineer. Either there's something miraculous in his design that makes it vastly more beneficial than all the other types of concentrators that have already failed by now due to progress of flat panels (which we don't know since there are no details in the article), or he's in the same position of proposing solutions detached from reality.
Assuming it's in any way similar, you can already see the problems with transportation. On the plus side, maybe it's somewhat cheaper per capacity by virtue of being a passive optical system. Perhaps it could even justify using better PV cells to improve efficiency. On the minus side, a replacement of a single flat panel will occupy the volume of a hundred of flat panels, with several dozen times the output even if the "reflector box" somehow produced twice as much as a single panel (for example, by using multiple junction cells). Such issues impacting the economy of PV solutions seem to be often neglected by inventors of similar concentrating solutions.
It's sort of a problem with these kinds of solutions. In the past, they were proposed because the price per watt of PV junctions was very high. Nowadays a square meter of PV junctions can cost $100 or less and the mechanical and/or structural complexity of not simply making a large glass pane full of them does not generally outweigh the possible benefits.
If some other region was say 10% away from the best then 4x as much would be 40% away and sure that work.
I don't understand that part at all.
You're not the only one who say it like that but it seem completely retarded, why not say 1/4 as good or 3/4 less instead?
Because it's an equivalent, and in my mother tongue your suggestions would be completely retarded.
The fixed price of electricity paid to HPC is currently *more than double* the price of *solar* in *Germany* in the most recent auctions. That puts things into perspective...not very good perspective for HPC, or the French building it.
He knows that. He also knows the limitations of using those numbers for anything. Literally the only thing that number tells you is the fraction of the nameplate capacity that the plant generates in long-term average. Pretty much nothing useful can be divined from that without lots of extra information (capital costs, operating costs, opportunity costs, expected load curves, actual generation curves, etc. etc.)
Tesla makes shitty solar systems (cost-wise); I don't see why you're bringing up one of the worst examples. It's like bringing up Chernobyl when mentioning nuclear power.
Both PV and the high induction motors used in those windmills require rare earths among other materials
An obligatory fact check: Neither PV nor induction generators require ANY rare earths whatsoever. Seriously, school yourself.
and don't recoup their cost within the lifetime before failure(30 years).
This is also provably wrong, by means of example, since otherwise their operators would be asking for much higher feed-in tariffs than they do nowadays.
They could, but why? Natural gas is so expensive around here that doing anything else than running a CCGT in it is inadvisable. The CCGT plant, generating 50% extra electricity using the same amount of gas, would pay for itself very quickly.
Furthermore, current A.I. has absolutely no accountability and traceability on the decisions and guesses it makes
A curious claim. Does your definition of "current AI" exclude the automatic reasoning systems with tracing that we've had for decades by now?
Coal is "being considered in 2019"? You mean they stopped cancelling tens of gigawatts worth of coal projects?
"Harmonized", as in after you cook the numbers starting from ideal conditions and applying some BS reasoning?
No, as in, when confronted with data from various sources, you try to correct for the methodological differences to put the results in a meta-study on equal footing.
It is highly doubtful that solar is viable without relying on fossil energy
*This* is an actual example of "BS reasoning", seeing as manufacturing of solar equipment is primarily electricity-intensive.
and EROI also ignores materials inputs, associated mining, and eventual disposal
Of course it doesn't, why would it do that? Cradle-to-grave analysis is a thing nowadays.
Almost sounds to me like you're responding an entirely different question, since the original was about a tower.