MIT Solar Towers Beat Solar Panels By Up To 20x 159
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."
Picture... (Score:5, Informative)
Picture available here [extremetech.com]. It's a solar pancake!
Re:Picture... (Score:4, Informative)
That's an interesting article, but I found the link about using an ion cannon [extremetech.com] to make cells 1/10th as thick at 1/2 the cost of cheap chinese cells to be potentially more revolutionary.
At this point we're not especially limited on space for solar installs. Our problem is that our collection systems aren't cheap enough.
Re:Picture... (Score:5, Informative)
The Ion cannon article was featured on Slashdot two weeks ago. [slashdot.org]
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.
Re:Picture... (Score:4, Informative)
This. These 3d shapes give a better yield for a given footprint, but actually cost more.
Hey, If you can make individual flat panels cheaply enough, I'll pave half an acre with them for all I care about the "footprint". That said, I really don't understand why no major company has come up with mass produced smaller panels in a roofing-shingle form factor, but, entirely different topic.
Now, the part of this that does appeal to me involves the improved yield at high latitudes - But does that mean improved only against the footprint, or against the surface area? If the former, hey, cool, I live just far enough North that solar won't realistically pay back the investment given the present dominant efficiencies and prices; If the latter, then to repeat myself, just make 'em cheaper, I'll provide the space.
Solar shingles are available (Score:3)
Solar shingles have been around for quite some time.
http://www.google.com/search?&q=solar+shingles [google.com]
If our conversation is going to follow the pattern of a typical slashdot discussion thread, you will now need to retroactively define the terms "major", "mass produced", and "smaller" in such a way that you can insist that I am not only wrong, but also
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Yield at high latitudes is not a big deal even for conventional solar arrays. Solar PV is huge in Germany (basically due to federally mandated feed-in tariffs for over a decade.)
Now consider that Berlin is at the latitude of South Hudson Bay.
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That 10x must have come from Fox News.
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Exactly. All these "researchers" seem to care about is power collection per area of the footprint. Who cares about that? Heck, you could easily beat these towers just by making a giant vertical panel of solar cells 10 times as tall. The efficiency per unit area of the photovoltaic cells will be crap, but who cares, as long as we have the highest power numbers per footprint area!!!
What's important is how much power you're collecting, in relation to the area of the PV panels themselves. How much area the
Re:Picture... (Score:5, 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.
Re:Picture... (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, I read dud RTFA. It said:
While the cost of a given amount of energy generated by such 3-D modules exceeds that of ordinary flat panels, the expense is partially balanced by a much higher energy output for a given footprint, as well as much more uniform power output over the course of a day, over the seasons of the year, and in the face of blockage from clouds or shadows.
This suggests to me that there is no ROI on this method, or at least none that could not be more cheaply matched by simply tilting existing solar arrays [pureenergysolar.com].
I don't discount the possibility that we are seeing another poorly written TFA, and that there is an eventual ROI. But the implication is that the generation of power early and power late in the day may never actually pay for the structures and maintenance needed to collect it, leaving you with zero net gain over a tilted array in northern latitudes.
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I think the wording of the article could stand improvement; meanwhile, without facts and figures upon which to do the necessary calculations, I think any definite statement about ROI (I prefer payback period) is premature. In the interim it seems like some interesting engineering research in its own right and I'll be interested in any follow up.
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You've got to be kidding. You can't have an electric car with a big, tall tower of solar panels sitting on the roof. Simple aerodynamics forbids it.
For portable rechargers, it makes far more sense to have a large multisegmented panel that folds up, not some stupid tower.
Satellites don't need a stupid tower, because they just extend their panels in a large, flat array and point them directly at the sun. There's no reason to have them tilted because they're not sitting on the ground on earth; they're in sp
Bottom line (Score:2)
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Picture available here [extremetech.com]. It's a solar pancake!
so if a solar pancake works, with the down facing solar panels and everything, what about stacking several cubes at their corners, like several of these [wikipedia.org] on top of each other? That way you don't have sections that are not facing sunlight like you do with the MIT solar pancake design since there's no solar panels on the side of the structure, [extremetech.com] with a cube balanced on a tip you'd have a sun facing panel at all times. Set-up would be a breeze too since you don't have to face it towards the sun like the MIT des
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with a cube balanced on a tip you'd have a sun facing panel at all times.
So by extension you then have some portion of the remaining panels NOT facing the sun at all times. If we're talking about ROI, doesn't this present a huge hurdle?
Prior art... (Score:4, Interesting)
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FTA:
A few other efforts — including even a middle-school science-fair project last year — have attempted 3-D arrangements of solar cells. But, Grossman says, “our study is different in nature, since it is the first to approach the problem with a systematic and predictive analysis.”
Re:Prior art... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Being able to predict behavior and optimize the structure is what moves an idea from a proof of concept to something that could possibly be produced.
Re:Prior art... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Prior art... (Score:4, Informative)
According to this Wired article [wired.com] the 7th graders work has been 'debunked' (or rather disproven) due to not actually testing power output but rather the 'open voltage on the circuit'. Unfortunately both the links in the Wired article point to Google webcache results that have expired so it's not possible to verify.
Link (Score:3)
Bad form to reply to oneself, but I found the discussion of the methods I believe the article was referencing in this comment on the Watts Up With That article [wattsupwiththat.com].
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Here's the links to what you're looking for:
http://www.amnh.org/news/2011/08/valuable-lesson-about-variables/ [amnh.org]
http://www.amnh.org/nationalcenter/youngnaturalistawards/2011/aidan.html [amnh.org]
And here's another link about the MIT solar panels:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57404585-76/accordion-shaped-solar-tower-captures-more-light/?tag=mncol;inside [cnet.com]
Re:Prior art... (Score:4, Informative)
Apologies. Reread the GP post and realized the above links don't really deal with what he was getting at.
Here's one that's a bit more helpful, but still doesn't have all the details. It appears all the sites and cached pages are gone.
http://www.treehugger.com/clean-technology/blog-debunks-13-year-olds-solar-power-breakthrough.html [treehugger.com]
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OK, that is very cool. Impressive. Need more 7th graders like that.
Big surprise (Score:3)
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Big surprise that structures in volumetric configurations ended up being more efficient at gathering energy... considering plants have known this since they left the seas hundreds of millions of years ago.
Are you suggesting that lichen is not the evolutionary pinnacle of plant evolution? Oh sure, maybe your fancy trees produce more nutrients per unit land area, but AT WHAT COST?
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paper link (Score:5, 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 [rsc.org]. There is also an open-access preprint version at the arXiv [arxiv.org].
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Thanks, I'll add this to the summary.
But much harder to set up (Score:5, Interesting)
Most people use solar panels because they can be comfortably put on rooftops. If someone has enough room for these 3D structures they could just install a Sun tracking system that's even more efficient.
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And, what do your neighbors think about you shading their solar panels?
Re:But much harder to set up (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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A tracker means moving parts, though; this arrangement might be cheaper and more reliable.
Costs more (Score:3, Insightful)
The cost/watt is higher, this is DOA I dare say.
They're simultaneously saying that it's most beneficial for northern/southern areas where daylight is diminished and that it's a more compact arrangement of cells.
Those two don't go together well... Most northern and southern areas have very large open areas due to having low overall population density.
Cost/Watt is all that matters in most areas for solar panels, Watt/weight in the rest. I can't see this being of use except in powering small devices
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Re:Costs more (Score:4, Informative)
The time is ripe for such an innovation, Grossman adds, because solar cells have become less expensive than accompanying support structures, wiring and installation. As the cost of the cells themselves continues to decline more quickly than these other costs, they say, the advantages of 3-D systems will grow accordingly.
“Even 10 years ago, this idea wouldn’t have been economically justified because the modules cost so much,” Grossman says. But now, he adds, “the cost for silicon cells is a fraction of the total cost, a trend that will continue downward in the near future.” Currently, up to 65 percent of the cost of photovoltaic (PV) energy is associated with installation, permission for use of land and other components besides the cells themselves.
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When criticisms based on not reading the article get up-modded, I think that's fair.
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Oh I read the article, I suggest you stop being an ignorant twat.
In an area where space is absolutely not a concern, paying more to reduce the footprint of a system just won't happen.
Now if you'd like to stop being a moron we can move on.
Northern locations (Score:2)
I'll wait for Zero Point Energy.
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Umm, no southern isn't southern US southern is south of the equator. While I'll give it to you that there are less people in the southern hemisphere there still is ~800M people and the land mass is much smaller (less than half), and about 20% of that is Antarctica (which presumably wouldn't be solar accessible anyways because it is in the polar region), so more dense than you'd expect I think. But still less than the northern hemisphere of course and they probably would just tear down some more rainforest r
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Yes, you are a moron.
misleading (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Just goes to show you while Boston has Harvard, MIT and other good schools there are still dumb ideas in the city and in those schools :-) I guess stupidity obeys diffusion too :-)
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By the same example, if I take a photovoltaic panel that measures 100x100x1 centimetres, and I turn it on its side, causing it to capture only, say, 50% as much energy, by their measurement (power produced versus base size) I've just increased my efficiency by 5000x... Even though I just took the panel and turned it on its side.
Yeah, I can see it being useful in some places, but there's nothing revolutionary here. It's just a novel way of mounting the existing panels.
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Sorry, you're right. Neglected to include the second dimension of the rotated panel. It doesn't change my point, though. 50x efficiency by turning the panel on its side. Which is a bit silly.
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Who killed the effecient solar array? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Good...but not enough (Score:2)
This is pretty neat, but a far cry from ever solving our energy crisis.
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You are correct that the earth receives only so much sunlight per square meter. These towers are only absorbing light that would otherwise not hit the roof - it might otherwise go into the street (where solar panels are not practical) or could be shading your neighbor's roof (where solar panels could be practical).
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Run a network of narrow tubes just below the surface of the road, pump water through them to draw off the heat absorbed from the sun to a heat pump of some sort to power a generator.
While I agree you might not want to do that on a major road, nothing to stop you laying it into a car park.
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Energy From Trash! (Score:2)
Illegal because of "solar access" laws (Score:2)
In the place where this would presumably be most useful, where horizontal space is at more of a premium than vertical space, it could well be illegal due to solar access [sunschools.org] laws. Here in Denver, it has led to some odd-looking asymetric second-stories when they are added to existing bungalows -- where, say, the left half of the A-shaped roof has a shallow or near-flat slope and the right half has a steep pitch.
I'm scratching my head here (Score:2)
Is there some interesting physics going on, or is this just taping a bunch of cells vertically to intercept more light at a low incidence angle? Surely,that can't be all there is to it, right?
See next post: Dysfunction In Modern Science? (Score:2)
Am I the only one thinking of the next posting "Dysfunction In Modern Science?" on /. today right after this one?
Or the one a while back about a child who made a TREE with solar leaves that performed better but it turned out he had it all wrong and the media hyped the BS?
For me, in winter I have a 78 degree perpendicular with the sun-- that is nearly vertical in which case a bunch of staggered 45/-45 degree panels would work and the lower ones would get a lot of sun considering they are supposed to work fin
Orientation is not so important (Score:2)
Oriented or tracking panels produce only around 20-30% more energy than flat horizontal panels, when averaged over a year over most of the USA. This because much of the insolation is diffuse. NREL has maps that show the measurements at http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/old_data/nsrdb/1961-1990/redbook/atlas/ [nrel.gov]
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MIT solar towers (Score:2, Insightful)
It's a stupid concept. If I had been asked to review their paper I would have recommended not publishing it. Here's a link to their abstract:
http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2012/ee/c2ee21170j
"We demonstrate that absorbers and reflectors can be combined in the absence of sun tracking to build three-dimensional photovoltaic (3DPV) structures that can generate measured energy densities (energy per base area, kWh/m2) higher by a factor of 2–20 than stationary flat PV panels for the structure
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You read the part (in the SUMMARY) about where they were comparing collectors of equivalent area, right?
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same base area. I can have a more than 9000x improvement by using a (tiny) pole to install their new contraption!
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The summary accurately says the "same base area", i.e. footprint. This is not the panel area. The GP is underwhelmed with this announcement for good reason. This is not a breakthrough in efficiency in anything except the area required to erect the structure. It doesn't make better use of available light. It just captures more by reaching higher, making adjacent areas less valuable or even useless for further solar installations.
They suggest these towers and other configurations as useful for location
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If you have a fence you probably don't live in an urban area. This is more for installing on an apartment building or other tall structure than in a residential suburb.
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Lots of suburbs in Europe consists of rows of chained houses with fences between the gardens. Free-standing houses are much more expensive ( (think: 500K) than normal houses (200-400K).
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Exactly. It's like claiming skyscrapers are more efficient than single-story buildings. So why aren't all new buildings skyscrapers? Simple: because they cost far more, per square foot of usable floor space, than conventional buildings. Hence, skyscrapers are only used in two places: 1) places where the land cost is enormous due to demand, and 2) places where politicians/leaders want to show off and rig things so that it's economical for someone to build them (e.g. with giant tax breaks or subsidies), w
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Theyre saying part of the increase is the fact that building vertical allows capturing more sunlight in seasons and hours when the sun is closer to the horizon. Normally those hours are colder because less sunlight is making it to the ground, due to the low angle of incidence; this mitigates some of that problem.
Its the sort of thing that seems obvious in retrospect.
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Moreover, they posit that these work well at dawn/dusk. Only the outside cells works good, the rest are in shadow from the outside cell.
Or think of a city highrise landscape. You don't get any direct sun at dawn/dusk if there's something of equal height between you and the sun.
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A tall vertical structure is more subject to damage from extreme winds and flying objects.
Now, if it would automatically collapse flat to the ground when faced with high winds, that might mitigate the issue some.
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Not only that, but the structure for a tall vertical structure has to be much more robust to handle the wind loads, due to the moment that a force at the top of the structure creates on the base. So you end up with a much more expensive structure for a given area of solar panels with this dumb design.
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Yeah and I don't see exactly how this is suppose to scale. If they're tall that means they will block light to the other cells in their shadow.
I mean it's not like they made the cell more efficient. The surface area is the same, just stacked vertically.
This just in: increased surface area increases efficiency!
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Haha. It is the three dimensional aspect i think. A ~2d panel only has a crossectional area proportional to the sin of the incident angle (and the panels are less efficient for oblique light too). Extending into 3D means the panels have approx the same crossectional area regardless of the suns angle in the sky. That said: way too much hardware involved. I have solar on my roof and on a clear day in the winter I get about 40% of the power as a clear day in the summer. But that only needs one panel. Getting 2
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Getting 20X the panels to get that extra 60% of the power doesn't make sense to me. Just put the suckers on the ground with a tilt-able stand.
Exactly.
Or leave them on the roof with a tilt stand [pureenergysolar.com].
Left unsaid in TFA is if these towers rotate to face the sun. Without that, you gain little except their ability to stack panels vertically, housing more panels per square foot. (At more cost). If space were a problem this might make sense, but it doesn't make it cost effective, which TFA itself admits.
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Tilt stands on roofs are used more for people who don't have a sun facing roof though right? I suppose they might also get the angle of the panels closer to normal to the sun on average but you wouldn't be tracking the sun throughout the day right? Are they limited to areas with nice weather? The only panels I see around my area are low set to prevent wind/snow issues in the winter (80kph winds with 1m snow might not be so great for a panel on a tilt).
Re:Duh (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree about shadow effects. More comes into play though since more angles will be approximately normal to the panels more angles of light will still be in an effective region of the panel for collecting. In winter in the non-tropical regions the sun's maximum height can be pretty low in the sky giving you a very oblique angle to fixed panels against a roof (assuming a shallow slope on the roof). Making these suckers stick up means that the crossection exposed to the sun is larger even if the sun is lower in the sky.
That said two problems I see:
1) Roof top intallation will be weight. I have panels on my roof and they are about 100lb per sq yard. Stack twenty together and you'd be looking at 2000lb per sq yard. Not a good thing for the roof.
2) Ground based panels: you can put the panels on stands that can be adjusted, heck they can be motorized so they can track the sun through the day AND through the seasons. So why exactly would you by ~20X more panels (at about 200 a pop) when a $50 motor per panel (guessing), or an adjustable stand that someone goes out and tilts every month or so can have the same affect?
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I agree about shadow effects. More comes into play though since more angles will be approximately normal to the panels more angles of light will still be in an effective region of the panel for collecting. In winter in the non-tropical regions the sun's maximum height can be pretty low in the sky giving you a very oblique angle to fixed panels against a roof (assuming a shallow slope on the roof). Making these suckers stick up means that the crossection exposed to the sun is larger even if the sun is lower in the sky.
That said two problems I see:
1) Roof top intallation will be weight. I have panels on my roof and they are about 100lb per sq yard. Stack twenty together and you'd be looking at 2000lb per sq yard. Not a good thing for the roof.
2) Ground based panels: you can put the panels on stands that can be adjusted, heck they can be motorized so they can track the sun through the day AND through the seasons. So why exactly would you by ~20X more panels (at about 200 a pop) when a $50 motor per panel (guessing), or an adjustable stand that someone goes out and tilts every month or so can have the same affect?
Those mostly parallel my thoughts when I first read the summary. On closer reflection though, I think the investigators do have a point. The cost of the whole solar system is starting to be dominated by the non-solar-cell components. As the cost of the cells drops, new designs become more attractive. Solar panel tracking involves more than just the addition of a motor - bearings, hinges, power, maintenance, etc. are all issues that you eliminate if you don't do sun tracking for example.
If you can mass produ
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Where I live, land costs 1000 euro per square meter (without the house) in the city with all the infrastructure on it. This is what makes the setup attractive to about 9 million people in densely populated land.
I'm not even talking about Shanghai, or Beijing, where footprint is the main issue. This would be a big help there.
Customers a-plenty for this one.
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Neat idea. You'd still need to be able to tilt up and down too to account for the suns position changing with the seasons but that is a much more simple solution I think (just get someone out there to give it a nudge every month or so). Ground based solar has it pros and cons: good you can track the sun so get a bunch more power but you are tying up what otherwise might have been useful land (or alternatively have them in the middle of nowhere and have a distribution problem). Rooftop solar is nice because
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Ground based solar has it pros and cons: good you can track the sun so get a bunch more power but you are tying up what otherwise might have been useful land
Hint: parking lots.
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So build roofs over what would otherwise be open land parking lots? Not a bad option I wonder what the net effect would be on a summer day. You'd create shade but you'd also have a black roof overhead that by definition is designed to absorb light. Depending how dense the panels are installed you might have to run lights for your parking garage versus ~ free lighting from the sun in an open parking lot.
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If they're only covering the spaces, and not the lanes, this won't be a problem. The ones I've seen only cover spaces.
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To be nutty green they could feed it into electronic car changing, not conversion of the solar output to AC necessary since the batteries ultimately end up taking DC from the chargers AFAIK. One parking space worth of panels wouldn't be enough to recharge a car but all the spaces in a row could be used. Sort of like a declining feed in tarrif: electric drivers get free power for their car until more and more people drive electric (splitting up the number of spaces worth of panels per electric vehicle) until
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They'd have to convert it to AC anyway; they're not going to make cars with two different charging connectors, one for solar parking spaces and one for the garage. Any charging system has to be able to be hooked up to the mains, which means AC. Plus, a parking lot full of panels probably isn't going to be enough power for a parking lot full of cars under those panels, so it'll have to make up the excess from the grid, and that's on sunny days; the panels are only going to offset that. The big advantage,
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Couldn't it just be the presumably DC "gas pump" part of things and not the box, convert to DC bit? Ie just a wire going into the car like it does now after it has been converted to DC. You'd have the DC part of the system powered both by DC from the panels and DC via the AC/DC converter from the normal way similar to a computer getting fed from a UPS mixed mode as long as the wire going to the box has the right type you're golden.
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This article completely destroyed any respect I had for MIT as an engineering educational institution. A group of 5th-graders could have come up with this dumb design.
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No, they are using *significantly* more cells. Read the article. They're going by the ground footprint.
That is, the area of the earth that is being used by their solar cell array.
Let's say you have a tower ten feet high, covered in solar cells. Which is essentially what they have here. That tower is *obviously* going to have more surface area than just the amount of earth covered up by the base of the tower, since you're coating the sides as well as the top.
Re:Duh (Score:4, Funny)
That is not correct. Re-read the article.
"Re-" read?
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That is not correct. Re-read the article. They are trying to qualify output per area footprint. Per unit solar cell surface area, these designs are bunk. They are just relying on the excuse that cells are cheaper than a tracking system would be.
"Excuse" sounds a bit pejorative. If it is cheaper to stack cells then to use a tracking system, why would one want to do the later?
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But that is a big deal in lots of densely populated areas, such as Chinese cities or The Netherlands or Japan.
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My thought exactly... the wording is similar too. eerie.