[HN Gopher] New materials could deliver ultrathin solar panels
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New materials could deliver ultrathin solar panels
Author : stareatgoats
Score : 52 points
Date : 2022-01-01 14:16 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.stanford.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.stanford.edu)
| LightG wrote:
| This is good, but shouldn't the priority maximising power output
| from X area of solar panel?
|
| I would have thought the industry needs customers to get excited
| about covering their electricity bills (especially now), let
| alone just getting to a point where residential customers can
| enjoy a day of full power without dipping into the grid.
|
| (It's likely I don't know what I'm talking about with the above,
| but I know what I feel as a potential solar power customer. I
| imagine this is addressing a different problem that others are
| interested in, but I wish the industry would solve the most
| pressing problem).
| jacquesm wrote:
| Another entry in this already very long list:
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
| tibyat wrote:
| labawi wrote:
| Thin/flexible cells are often called "eco", because "less
| material", but then I find the composition and they are made of
| Arsenic, Cadmium or similar toxic non-degradable materials that
| _will_ end up in the environment.
|
| This one seems actually seems very ecological, or at least not
| toxic:
|
| > tungsten diselenide and contacts of gold spanned by a layer of
| conducting graphene that is just a single atom thick
|
| They don't mention Cadmium Sulfide surface layer as seems
| standard in CIGS. Hope they don't feel the need to add it in the
| efficiency optimization process.
|
| EDIT: Doing some calculation on CIGS with 700A (70nm) CdS layer
| [1], 1m2 of solar panel would have about 1m2*70nm*5g/cm3 =
| 1m2*70e-9m*5e6g/m3 ~ 0.4g of CdS.
|
| [1] https://www.nrel.gov/pv/copper-indium-gallium-diselenide-
| sol...
| truculent wrote:
| There was an interesting post shared here recently on low-tech
| solar panels, which might be able to trade off efficiency for
| recyclability:
|
| https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2021/10/how-to-build-a-low...
| labawi wrote:
| > The plug was an alloy of zinc and antimony - which we now
| know is a semiconductor. It was alternately capped by German
| silver (a nickel, copper, and zinc alloy) and copper on
| opposite ends.
|
| While the design may be possible to make and repair in
| artisanal manner, it uses a lot of antimony and any repairs
| would likely shed more Sb than there is Cd in an entire CIGS
| panel (though In and Ga may be a concern).
|
| If the design was resource-optimized, it would still have a
| potent monk-killer (Sb) and then it wouldn't be worth it to
| recycle all of the panels.
| bluGill wrote:
| Thin isn't as useful as it sounds. For a few application (drones)
| light weight is important, and thin probably does mean light
| weight. However for most solar application a bit of extra
| thickness is just something you design into your mounting system,
| and since thicker is stronger (think hail and other weather
| phenomenons) you typically design panels far thicker than needed
| to support the cell anyway.
| closetnerd wrote:
| Transportation at the least. Got a place in the mountains -
| moving a few panels was a insanely costly and annoying.
| SQL2219 wrote:
| The new Stanford prototype achieves 5.1 percent power conversion
| efficiency, but the authors project they could practically reach
| 27 percent efficiency upon optical and electrical optimizations.
| That figure would be on par with the best solar panels on the
| market today, silicon included.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I'll believe it when I see it. Solar panels and batteries are
| both subjects that have generated far more in terms of
| improvements on paper than they delivered in real life.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| You haven't been paying attention, I suppose. The cost per
| watt of solar panels continues to drop exponentially, as
| optimizations continue and production continues to scale up.
| Breakthrough research announcements like this happen often,
| and only a handful of such announcements will ever make it to
| production. But improvements certainly /are/ making it into
| production, and lowering LCOE steadily.
|
| Here's an example graph, with both solar and battery costs:
| https://greentechlead.com/renewable-energy/cost-for-
| onshore-...
|
| And compared to fossil fuels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L
| evelized_cost_of_energy#/medi...
|
| (LOTS of people think about renewable prices as they were ten
| years ago instead of where they are now or where they may be
| in five years. This means lots of people simply have wrong
| priors about the relative cost of different energy sources.
| This is expected: People don't intuitively adapt to
| exponential change.)
| fooblaster wrote:
| The graphs you mentioned are about cost per watt, an
| important metric, but not panle conversion efficiency.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I've been paying _excellent_ attention, the panel
| efficiency for the various crystal lattices and layering
| combinations has hardly moved in the last decade. A little
| bit here, a little bit there.
|
| Sure the price has come down, but that wasn't what this was
| about.
|
| Also, I think the tone of your comment could be a lot
| better than it is.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Here's some progression of panel efficiency over time:
| https://news.energysage.com/solar-panel-efficiency-cost-
| over...
|
| I would suggest it's a matter of "nothing changes in a
| year but everything changes in a decade."
|
| Partial apologies for the tone; I'm personally kinda sick
| of Internet comments crapping on people's work by
| default.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The part that matters is that 'run of the mill'
| monocrystalline solar panels, not exotic ones such as
| triple junction and other very expensive cells have been
| roughly steady over the last decade or so at 20% give or
| take, with their polycrystalline brethren doing a
| slightly worse.
|
| There are prototypes and special application cells that
| do _much_ better than that, but they are typically priced
| in such a way that you would never use them in a regular
| domestic application. But for a satellite or something
| else where price isn 't your first consideration (but for
| instance weight is) they may well make good sense.
|
| FWIW I have been following the renewables scene very
| closely for two decades, have built a house on solar and
| wind power in Canada and am in the process of converting
| a house here in NL to as close to self sufficient as I
| can make it without rebuilding it from the ground up.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| To add to that you simply can't escape physics...
|
| A 200W solar panel with 20% conversion efficiency needs a
| 1000W of solar radiation hitting it to produce that much,
| most of it would be converted into heat, that's roughly the
| average for an area just under 1 sq/m in size.
|
| Thermals are a big problem for solar panels and I'm not sure
| how that would work with thinner panels.
|
| I also don't see how you'll power a drone with solar panels
| regarding how much they weight the surface area seems not to
| be sufficient even if the panels would be 80-90% efficient.
| labawi wrote:
| Panel thickness is not a positive factor for cooling, it's
| only good for structural support. Unless your panels are
| tiny, all the heat escapes through the front/back surfaces,
| thinner being better, though surface treatment and airflow
| is a bigger factor.
|
| If they meant winged drones - those already exist.
| jacquesm wrote:
| On the plus side, every little bit that can be exported as
| electrons does not need to be shed as IR. The problem is
| that quite a bit of that 1000W incident is not in a part of
| the spectrum that lends itself readily to conversion to
| electricity.
| addaon wrote:
| Couldn't one build a dielectric mirror onto the surface
| of the panel to selectively reflect those frequencies
| that aren't converted well, to avoid the thermal load of
| absorbing them? Is the issue that dielectric mirrors are
| too fragile?
| jacquesm wrote:
| No, the problem is that your dielectric mirror would have
| to be a perfect reflector for one set of wavelengths and
| a perfect passthrough for the remainder. In practice
| though it will always be gradients so you'll end up
| reflecting some of what you want and passing some of what
| you don't want.
| namibj wrote:
| They are not too fragile; they can coat them onto the
| solar cell's surface.
| mrfusion wrote:
| The best thing about being very thin is that they could be folded
| up into smaller spaces.
|
| You could unfold 100m of panels from the back of your EV when you
| park. Or carry enough in your backpack to power your lappy.
| dntrkv wrote:
| I get your point, but you can already carry enough panels in
| your backup to power your laptop. I have a 100W folding panel
| that folds down to about 10x8x2.5" I bought it for $200 about a
| year back, you can pick it up today for $140.
|
| Crazy how fast prices are dropping.
| cced wrote:
| Link to model? Any recommendations?
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