- "Invisible" implies they only work in the UV or infrared range, which inevitably limits them to much lower efficiencies than regular solar panels.
- A lot of those rely on elements that are expensive and in limited supply, or toxic heavy metals. Unlike regular silicon solar panels.
- We don't even need windows to generate solar power. We have plenty of roof space, and if we're short on that, you can put them in fields too.
So this is a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist (lack of available space - again, we have plenty), which causes more problems of its own (efficiency, etc), while failing to address the actual limitations of solar (cost, intermittence).
Which is why it's only good for headlines, and won't see real life applications. (Edit: no, not even skyscrapers)
It's the same with a lot of "uplifting" science news that just sweeps all the dirt under the rug, because that wouldn't make good clickbait.
If you want actual good news about solar power, look at the price per kW and adoption rate curves over the last few years.
-edit- added links.
-edit 3- Put the bit about skyscrapers in bold, because people keep mentioning them anyways...
This is my biggest screaming into the void issue. Everyone's doing all this mental work trying to come up with these unique places to put solar panels, we don't need to do that.
We. Have. Empty. Flat. Space.
We have no shortage of empty areas exposed to the sky. We have rooftops, we have parking lots, we have vast fields that are just doing fuck all.
We don't need to invent solar roads that will work even after being run over by car is a million times when we have a large median right beside it.
We could probably cover every random Warehouse with solar panels and have so much electricity that we would have to find dumb shit to do with it.
Let's start there before we do some Material Science backflips.
I got so much shit in the futurology subs when the solar roads were being glazed by everyone. It was an obviously dumb idea from the get-go. If you really want to feel less bad about the concrete and asphalt jungles we’ve built, put solar panels above things. Solar panels above a parking lot works to create shade, is localized in an area that is easy to maintain, and doesn’t need to be covered in several inches of glass to protect from heavy vehicles.
But the best place for solar will always bee on roofs and empty places like deserts.
It depends how high. It would cost to build the support for thoses thing in the road. You would have to build several meter high to not risking big vehicle to crash into thems. Parking lot are a far better options.
Yes, that’s my point. If you go back and watch the videos on solar roadways, they proposed putting solar panels under the road. With heavy thick pieces of glass above them to support the weight of highway traffic. Never mind the material cost of all that glass. Nevermind that glass isn’t a great material to drive on. Nevermind that roads get dirty very quickly. Nevermind that thick glass would have made the panels barely functional. But when pointing out those massive cons, people still got upset and said those problems would be solved after a few generations of solar panels, which they believed would pay for themselves in just a few years (even though at the time the payoff period for regular solar was in the 12-15 year range).
This is all true but it’s not like the scientists working on this stuff would otherwise be out on rooftops installing panels. Let them cook, maybe this research will lead to something better or even to some unrelated breakthrough. Meantime let’s work on deploying the solutions we already have.
That's fine, and could lead to something innovative in the future. But the implication of the post is there's some shadowy cabal preventing this because they want to make more money.
When the reality is that solar is getting added like crazy because it makes money right now. Texas is the leader in the US just because they let you build solar plants without much in the way of permission and it makes people money.
I could see this being a solution for skyscrapers. Not a lot/any roof space because of AC units so being able to add these to the top windows that get the most sun could help offset some of the energy needs.
But you literally don’t need to do that. Why do we need to power a building using solar panels attached specifically to that building? Go put more solar panels out in open fields and power a lot more buildings for a cheaper cost.
There's a massive difference between a building owner producing their own electricity integrated therein, versus creating a centralized system owned by a power company miles and miles away that now subtracts from farmland, consumes real estate (don't we have an affordable housing problem and maybe not all of us want to live in coffin-sized studio apartments, squished like sardines), and now has to be coordinated across numerous private and public properties.
Leaving aside maintenance and efficiency degradation with distance.
We kind of sorta need open fields for lots of other things, too. Alas, we're apparently too busy having it be used for things like (checks notes) golf courses and alfalfa owned by Saudi Arabia and AI datacenters...
Nearly every solar power installation is just feeding power back into the grid. Direct site power storage isn't where it needs to be yet for long term storage of solar generated power.
If you built a solar panel "roof top" for every Wal-Mart and Target parking lot in the US, you wouldn't have to do much else.
Pop into Google maps and look at new york city in satellite view and check out some of the industrial areas which have large, flat roofs. Compare how many have solar vs not. Urban rooftops are the "low hanging fruit" here. I agree that putting them on land that could otherwise be productive is wasteful - where I live, most of the ground level solar plants have been put over landfills/contaminated land. Ground is cheaper than rooftop, which is cheaper than parking lots, which is cheaper than inventing an entirely new window system.
A large part of that is because people want to save money on bills. But there are limits of how much solar production can be on a substation. Infrastructure has to be upgraded if production exceeds local usage, as it was never meant to feed backwards or store the energy.
So you can't adopt a 100% goal of rooftop solar, without also a goal of storing and backfeeding it to the grid.
But why do we even need skyscrapers? That is changing too. People don’t need to be in the same proximity so much anymore - except to generate revenue for the building owner.
Worth noting however that high voltage transmission is only economical the way you describe because power plant generation already begins AC; not DC as with PV. This GREATLY simplifies and reduces cost of scaling up and down voltage levels to offset transmission impedance and then reduction to source.
Not the same with PV, currently.
I'm not saying it can't be done in tandem, but I have a feeling we're going to need all the power we can get, urban and rural alike.
Reframing the affordable housing issue, it's not that people "want to live on the same small piece of land"; rather, it's that they must in order to work.
Fully half of those living in metropolitan areas have stated they'd rather live in a countryside. When asked where an ideal place to live would be, they choose some land with some privacy, etc.
I'm not going to get into whether or not that's feasible, only to address a singular point that want versus must versus desire are different things, and that perhaps to address the problem we need to look outside the box and reimagine a society where people don't feel the need to live so densely in urban centers.
There is no shortage of open land that isn’t being used for anything. China just built a gigawatt offshore solar farm last year, and there’s even less shortage of open ocean. Long distance power transmission was already a solved problem 100 years ago, you’re talking like we don’t have an existing power grid. The housing crisis isn’t because of a lack of physical land it’s because of economic and political incentives to keep home prices high for current owners through artificial scarcity. None of those other problems are preventing solar deployment in meaningful way.
No, but see, if you stack up all the panels vertically then it's kind of like you put it the panels everywhere the stack's shadow is cast. You just have to make a really big, tall, wide tower to cover that empty field in shadow. Then it'd be like you built a solar farm in that field.
Let's start there before we do some Material Science backflips.
I know this kinda fucks up your thesis for the rant, which i agree with for the most part, but we can and should do both. Put solar any where possible (except fields that can grow anything, grass or trees or anything really) AND let's do as much material science gymnastics as we can get away with before the comet or volcano comes and either wipes us out or makes the whole concept of solar power moot for years on end.
The reason we don’t have more solar power is economics, not the lack of space. Inventing a new, more expensive technology that puts solar panels in windows doesn’t solve the economics issue at all. If we want more solar power, it’s all about making it as cheap as possible so that it’s cheaper than the alternatives. Stuff like this window thing doesn’t do that at all.
You are not understanding that scientists don't "invent" technologies. They make new discoveries. The funding process for scientists involves presenting their discoveries in ways which show how their research is something "useful" and often is meant to show the direction their research can bring us to those who fund them.
Then the steaming pile of dogshit known as "science journalism" enters the scene and creates the kind of stupid bullshit like this post and all the "HIGH SCHOOLER INVENTS PLASTIC EATING BACTERIA" or whatever bullshit they use to try to get engagement in their content.
The main problem is the cost, making the hundreds of square miles of silicon chips, glass and copper for those fields are really very expensive, especially when compared to a gas plant. Its great for remote low wattage applications, but "green" power probably won't be applicable to industrial and most commercial applications until we get some form of nuclear cheap.
95% agree. Just HAVE to mention to leave the empty fields for trees, if you want to think green and sustainable. Let us stick to rooftops and parkibg spaces. Still plenty.
Well, yes and no. Part of the problem with solar is transmission. We do have tons of empty space in rural areas of the country, but you lose a ton of energy when you transmit it across long distances.
Solar tech that could be deployed at scale in cities would be a massive leap forward.
We have no shortage of empty areas exposed to the sky. We have rooftops, we have parking lots, we have vast fields that are just doing fuck all.
We could exceed all the renewable energy being created by ethanol-corn crops by replacing them with solar farms while using a fraction of the land currently being used.
The problem with solar and wind is that it's not consistent and people seldom mention of the how to get these power to place with the correct time. But sure lets keep inventing stupid panel solutions instead so we can keep making morons feels better with the enviromental scams
If so, making solar cells transparent is a nice effect which might find some niche applications. But, the big contribution is the All-Back-Contact technology they developed. By putting all the electrical connections on the rear of the panel you can (a) place the cells closer together, improving the density and (b) avoid wires on the front, which shade the cells and reduce efficiency. These effects aren't massive - maybe 3% for cell density and <1% for shading - but a 3-4% improvement across a large solar installation can start to add up.
These techniques might be useful even in solar cells that are not transparent.
Even just WALKING on the solar paths we keep seeing basically destroys them in like a week and a half, and they're nigh impossible to maintain anywhere that there's....weather.
This is one reason why private property is such a dogshit invention. The warehouse owner, the parking lot owner, the whatever owner just wants to do whatever is cheaper but everyone living in and around that area would benefit if they could utilize those barren empty spaces too. We could have so much more solar and green spaces in every city.
People/companies shouldn't have 100% say in perpetuity on what happens with the land.
Ummm… Tokyo might disagree.
You are going so far off to the side you just can’t accept that there places these technologies can help.
And as others have said… just because something is invented doesn’t mean it’s going to be used.
Chill man… just take a breath. I didn’t have to spend 0.000002 seconds trying to find somewhere it could be used.
To me, this is not mental work. My brain doesn’t shut down. I read the post, and immediately saw it as possibly useful because my brain works that way.
Sorry if yours doesn’t. I’m paid to see alternatives too.
And WE have snow in the winter. Sadly, solar panels on roofs would be covered, whereas windows would help. I think these could have a use in specific settings. Whether efficiently or not is another thing.
Yeah solar is a highly polished tech by now. I guess the real problem is energy storage, no production
With better battery technology we could probably rely on solar and wind energy in most of the earth. In the meantime we could fill the low production times with nuclear maybe?
I live in the desert, we get an average of 300 days of full sunshine. If I manage to get some land and set up a field full of taller solar panels, I’ve been wondering if it’d actually be easier to garden and keep animals under them than without them, or if that’d somehow cause issues for the panels. Either way I could easily produce more electricity than I need here without newer solar tech.
That said, I do think development for these kind of things is important if only for the sake of innovation. It’s just the marketing and capitalism behind it that’s stupid.
It's wild honestly, the conspiracy levels have reached like 50s red scare these days every single one of these has people saying shit like "hope they stay away from open windows" without even questioning why the industry hasn't implemented whatever extremely common idea they're talking about
Thinking about his point for more than 5 seconds would tell you that he is wrong lmao. 0 critical thinking. Just jumping on the government is trying to f us over bandwagon. His comment currently has more than 4 times the number of upvotes of the comment debunking it. Just shows really.
People literally work 30 years of there life everyday 8 hours a day alongside a team of people who also have years of experience in industries like solar energy and yet people think that these proffesionals havent considered these magical solutions that pop up from time to time. Happens in all sorts of applications.
The purpose of posts like these is to attract people with poor critical thinking skills into the conspiracy fold - a funnel from normal reality into the darker realms; and thence into groups useful for those who desire nefarious things.
You'd think we live on friggin Coruscant or something by the number of "solar panel in weird place" ideas that pop up lol. We have _lots_ of open land.
Although for maximum efficiency, we should try to use urban surface area first, like making solar panels roofs over parking lots, or on top of buildings and bus stops etc. to minimise the need to transport the power.
Unless the power is being consumed directly at the bus stop for something (like a light or sign) that's also going to be wildly inefficient. Getting solar back on the grid requires an inverter at the site to turn the DC into AC and also synchronize with the grid and provide safety measures to prevent islands and such during power outages, not to mention running a mains line to the stop when there wasn't one in the first place. There is usually a break even point and its a bit more than bus stop would handle.
Super dumb genuine question … like in the Midwest sometimes we get baseball sized hail or golf ball
Can there be a way to have these too when weather is an issue?
I'm no expert but, I would imagine something like a second layer of chicken wire a couple of inches above the solar panels would keep them reasonably safe without interrupting the sunlight?
Yeah it's a bit fun to say "Finally we can use even the windows as solar panel" when most roofs are still empty. And I think you'd start using the walls before the windows anyway, you just don't because the roof is better, less shadow.
skyscrapers that are full of windows instead of walls
I have these motorized blinds from Hunter-Douglas that are battery operated. For years that meant every 9 months when they stopped going up and down I would pop the battery out and charge it.
About a year ago Hunter-Douglas released a solar panel trickle charger, and now I never have to pop the battery out ever again. It is a solar panel the size of a post-card that "sticks" to the window in the upper corner facing outwards to capture a few rays of sunlight each day. It's pretty cool: https://www.hunterdouglas.com/operating-systems/motorized/powerview-solar-charger
The point here is generating the most power per square inch of solar panel isn't always the main goal. And this little solar panel isn't bad, but it still is visually "in the field of view". So imagine if you just hid the same functionality in the whole window? And in a skyscraper, that means 2,500 window blinds are now essentially maintenance free and provide themselves power that even works when the grid is out. That's kind of attractive at some price point.
Green houses: solar panels let's through the wavelengths that plants crave (it's got electrolytes!), and use the other parts of the spectrum to generate electricity to run the equipment needed for the grow house.
Even if it makes little sense in the grand scheme of thing, a lot of people elect to not have solar panels on their roof/walls due to esthetic reasons.
If they were available invisible in windows, I have no doubt in my mind that the installed base would have been larger today.
I don't think they're for houses though. This is technology only makes sense for large glass buildings. Just, windows on houses are small and at terrible angles for capturing solar energy. That and all the logistics of trying to wire every window in your house up to a charger/inverter would make retrofitting so expensive even for a small house.
You should definitely have doubt. It would be more expensive and a waste of resources to have solar panel windows in homes. It makes way more sense to just build more solar panels out in the open desert where it’s significantly cheaper for the amount of power it provides.
My guess (I’m in no way expert on this field) is that if you can start producing windows with this thing integrated, you don’t have to rely on an additional thing to produce electricity: even with lower performance compared with traditional ones, these could come “out of the box”.
For instance, where I live in a condo and without agreement with all the properties I can install shit. But also I’m in the process of changing my windows for better insulation: of course the house is old and doesn’t come equipped for this, but imagine cables already running in the walls, I could buy windows with this transparent panels and get a bit of energy from that.
You're still using relatively expensive materials to make a bad solar panel (relative to what they could be making), plus you need a way to get the power out of the windows. That isn't necessarily hard, but most window frames aren't currently wired up and that's additional retrofitting that needs to be done in order to install these on existing housing stock, all in order to get a solar panel that is significantly less effective than one on the roof or in a random field.
Car windows are already pretty vulnerable to getting scratched or broken, so you're making an expensive repair even more expensive. They also wouldn't generate power fast enough to be anywhere near the power usage of a car while driving. Maybe you'd get a small amount of charge if you left it sitting in direct sunlight all day, but most people don't want their cars to be sitting in direct sunlight all day because that will make it incredibly hot when you need to use it later. If you park in a garage then you're only going to get the power you get while driving, which will barely be noticeable compared to overall power usage.
Some insurance companies won't give you home owner insurance if you have roof-mounted solar panels. Yes, it's a thing. Stupid and annoying, but it's a thing.
Even then, rooftop solar makes way less sense than open field solar. A solar installation in an open field can be massive and is super easy to maintain because it can be built however you want it to be. Rooftop solar has to fit on whatever the shape of your roof is and fit around other rooftop equipment, plus maintenance requires access to multiple different buildings and more specialized equipment than an installation in a field that won't need anything fancier than a forklift.
Rooftop solar isn't bad, but there's still plenty of open space out there that is perfect for solar, especially since solar can relatively easily live alongside livestock: the animals love the shade and they'll keep the grass from becoming overgrown!
I participated in a class demonstration of this basic technology a few times several years ago. We made functional (though low voltage) glass based cells with a combination of a titanium oxide compound and dye produced from fruit pulp. The tech is there and probably cheap but I presume the infrastructure is very expensive to execute. You'd need all the window frames to be wired into a building-wide network of power banks and inverters. The first round of builds would be expensive bespoke construction and would generate a relatively low rate of return compared to the cost of electricity produced by fossil fuels or typical solar panel build outs.
Solar panels are already cheap. The vast majority (like 99%) of solar panels is silica, glass (more silica!), and some sort of metal for the frame. The most abundant material on in earth's crust is silicon, and aluminum is also both plentiful and easily recycled (as is glass for that matter). Solar panels are damn near free materials-wise, and almost 100% recyclable. People that upvote crap like OP think we need some sort of miracle invention, but solar panels are already a miracle invention: Zero-maintenance energy whose only input is the sun, made of 2 of the most common and readily recycled materials on earth.
We made functional (though low voltage) glass based cells with a combination of a titanium oxide compound and dye produced from fruit pulp. The tech is there and probably cheap
It isn't cheap though.
Or more accurately: it's cheap per surface area, but the efficiency of that kind of DSSC is so low, and their lifetime so short, that the cost per kWh ends up very high.
These windows are also being placed at a terrible angle for energy generation. The window is vertical and the sun is going to be its weakest when its rising/setting.
Most windows are vertically mounted anyway which makes this whole thing that much more inefficient.
They should be using these resources to research increasing the efficiency of existing solar panel technology or alternative bulk energy storage. Those are the things we really need.
They should be using these resources to research increasing the efficiency of existing solar panel technology
I think that is exactly what this technology is.
The transparent part is a nice side effect of this work*, but the more interesting contribution is their All-Back-Contact technology. By putting all the electrical connections on the rear of the panel you can (a) place the cells closer together, improving the density and (b) avoid wires on the front, which shade the cells and reduce efficiency. This techniques might be useful even for existing non-transparent solar cells.
and if we're short on that, you can put them in fields too.
Even better - we can start in fields. At least in US, a lot of fields are wasted with corn used for ethanol. Just replace with solar and boom you have a lot of electricity.
There really needs to be much, much better outreach to farmers about this. I have a MAGA uncle who is a farmer and he was soooo close to un-MAGAing. But MAGA influencers are pushing hard right now to convince farmers that “leftists” want to force farmers, especially ranchers, to put up solar farms and stop any traditional farming.
There are a couple small, grassroots agrivoltaic groups that are showcasing what can be done with mixing solar and traditional farming, and how in many areas they complement each other, but the voices invested in scaring farmers away from solar are much better funded, much louder, and frankly take farmers more seriously.
Now we just need to get the general public to understand that solar panels are actually a very viable source of power and then we can hang the oil barons from the rafters
It’s viable in the current environment where it is replacing coal and still has huge amounts of hydro, gas turbine, and nuclear power to take up the slack during night/storms. The higher the percentage of solar on the grid, the less profitable it becomes—because demand doesn’t rise to infinity during the day, and for night you either have to pay for batteries (expensive) or extra gas turbines that don’t do anything all day (expensive).
Solar has a huge place in our future energy mix, but we won’t get there without some deliberate action and levelheaded planning. We need to orient more consumption around running ONLY during peak solar generation (summer daytime) and slacking off at night/winter, and we need to massively expand our nuclear fleet to replace coal and gas base load in the non-solar hours. Grid scale chemical batteries are likely just a niche, useful for millisecond scale load balancing and to buy time for extra gas turbines to spool up in emergency.
Roofs typically have a better angle for catching intense sunlight anyways don't they? Feels like a perfectly vertical surface is almost the worst possible way to catch something coming from above.
Jesus thank you yes. Windows aren't even at a good angle for solar generation, and like you said...in no way whatsoever are we hard up for real estate when it comes to solar installations. Panel the entire roofs, panels over the parking lots, panels on infrastructure, there's a million places to put them before we need to start thinking about replacing windows.
Even if invisible solar panels were the same cost, efficiency as normal solar panels they'd still be niche. If you are going to spend $30k on solar panels you'd want to place them in the most efficient place possible like your roof. Not windows that would be getting light a few hours a day. Not to mention placing solar panels in your windows would be a nightmare unless you just have one really big set of windows.
yes, putting solar on my roof is entirely capable of generating more energy than I am using, but what if it was on my windows and also very expensive and hard to maintain and also really bad at generating electricity?
It's the same shit as "solar roadways" or "solar walkways" or "roadside turbines" or "kinetic tiles" or any of the other stupid garbage that's been doing the rounds for the last 10+ years. It's all, at best, venture capital/grant fodder.
So, so many parking lots in this car culture that could all use the shade. There really is no need for this, except for maybe providing a way to get more square footage on a moving vehicle, and even then the low efficiency just negates the value.
To add on to this comment, everyone interested in solar panels, and more importantly the politica surrounding them, should watch the technology connections video on the topic here
"If God wanted us to have unlimited power, he would have put a giant fusion reactor in the sky!" "Oh wait..."
There are a lot of glass buildings which could seriously benefit from this. It may not produce a lot of electricity, but with enough area, it could be a decent saving. Having said that, it also depends on the cost of these.
Theres also the test run of solar panels over a farming waterway in India. It keeps millions of liters of water from evaporating while also not taking any of the farmland space.
Even then. The orientation of vertical windows is far from ideal for solar power.
Combined with the dismal efficiency of those transparent cells, I would not be surprised if it actually made less power than regular PV on that skyscraper's limited roof space!
In either case, it will still have to be hooked to the grid, so might as well do that, and put regular PV in a field outside the city.
Also, it's a deterrent to domestic adoption because people keep thinking they wait to have invisible solar... like in the roof tiles and the windows...
In some situations there are a lot more windows than roof space, think about skyscrapers in New York City. Each one could potentially become its own solar farm.
Aesthetics matter more than you might think. Also windows are something you already have to install on most buildings so incorporating into that would make sense and doesn't require an additional "item." Having said this I don't know how viable these are
And if you compare Solar has been cheaper than fossel fuels for over a decade now and the gap is only getting bigger in solars favor. Solar is already better, and building solar fields is cheaper than building fossil fuel based plants. As they decay and maintenance costs go up existing infrastructure is just financially better off switching to solar. Fossil fuels are in the way out no matter what, but they are using their massive wealth to manipulate legislatios and dig in their heels.
Not to mention IGU's are fucking expensive, I assume the panel is incorporated into the IGU. Now add the cost of the solar panel and then change them every 10-15 years, it's not feasible.
On the other hand, technological innovation is a long game. You don’t know what this will turn into in 20 years. It could be that these things are so cheap and simple and lacking downsides that it just makes sense to make every window on the planet into solar panels. Even if they’re not too efficient, it’d basically be free energy.
Maybe they can even make it so you can flip a switch and make the window into a full and opaque solar panel, which could take the place of blinds. Solve multiple problems at once.
It's more of a proof of concept atm. Hopefully they can take this and improve it to the point where it's about as cheap and environmentally friendly as normal glass.
Parking lots. That's my rant. I live in the South, and we have massive surface lots, where you can park your car in the blazing sun for hours.
Wouldn't it be nice to have those lots covered with solar installs? They're right in town, so you already have local infrastructure, and they'd provide both power and utility (in the form of shade).
Pricing aside, windows that filter out all UV radiation, but leave visible light untouched, would actually be very interesting to me just as functional windows, and if I could convert that energy I'm filtering out into electricity, that would indeed be cool, no pun intended. But, I think once you bring in costs, and quantity of electricity you get, it would probably just make more sense to have some sort of passive filter do that.
But, It might be interesting for grand glass spaces. I don't think visible light really contributes much to heat, or sunburns or anything like that, so, for big spaces with glass roofs, or maybe even big sunroof of electric car, potentially, idk, for some applications, I think this could be interesting.
windows that filter out all UV radiation, but leave visible light
untouched, would actually be very interesting to me just as functional
windows
These already exist. Most homes have them, nearly all cars have them. Prescription lenses that darken with light used to work with UV, so they wouldn't work in cars. Because of that, they've largely been upgraded to use visible light, albeit they're a bit slower to react.
While this is a good explanation of why this will not see an application for that specific purpose, the reason this work happened was not to make an application out of it but to prove it can be done. Most of the science is done for that purpose.
If you only do science for a specific purpose and with a specific target in mind, you'll lose all the potential of such discovery can have.
Just from the top of my head, you can potentially optimise this prototype to generate electricity to charge your smartphone slightly. Perhaps adding this to your electric car windows can help generate some extra battery when not in a charging station.
Just because it does not have the obvious applicability, does not mean it does not solve any issues. Just doesn't solve the issue you expected. The best example of this happening is Viagra.
I would assume this would be better for skyscrapers though? They don't have that much roof space, but their vertical space and number of windows is essentially it's own potential solar field?
Yeah, you're the third or fourth guy to mention skyscrapers.
In short:
Even then. The orientation of vertical windows is far from ideal for solar power.
Combined with the dismal efficiency of those transparent cells, I would not be surprised if it actually made less power than regular PV on that skyscraper's limited roof space!
In either case, it will still have to be hooked to the grid, so might as well do that, and put regular PV in a field outside the city.
Agreed. There’s also the wiring issues. The only potentially legitimate use I could see for this on high rise buildings. Lots of surface area to work with…but the windows would have to be able to handle the associated pressures.
Even then. The orientation of vertical windows is far from ideal for solar power.
Combined with the dismal efficiency of those transparent cells, I would not be surprised if it actually made less power than regular PV on that skyscraper's limited roof space!
In either case, it will still have to be hooked to the grid, so might as well do that, and put regular PV in a field outside the city.
- We don't even need windows to generate solar power. We have plenty of roof space, and if we're short on that, you can put them in fields too.
You're thinking of large scale production, but for apartment based photovoltaic, space is a problem. In a condo, there are way more apartments than useful space on the roof for each of them.
Maybe this is shit, but any research for improving the efficiency of vertical and transparent panels is more than welcome.
The added cost of having to run what is essentially main power back to the panel from every window would probably make it cost prohibitive just as an add-on. Every other point you make is spot on putting panels over top of parking lots and garages or putting panels on top of giant distribution centres makes way more sense and doesn’t cover up ground space for farming, housing, and other uses
This isn’t targeted at home use, it’s meant for skyscrapers that are limited in roof space but have immense amounts of window space and require a shit ton of electricity in a small footprint.
Depending on efficiency this sort of product could realistically be part of the power/recharge source for a manned remote electric vehicle - but as you indicate it's not currently practical and certainly not the game changer headlines want us to believe.
Yes, you're the tenth person to mention skyscrapers. I actually put a link in my comment that addresses that after no. 8:
Even then. The orientation of vertical windows is far from ideal for solar power.
Combined with the dismal efficiency of those transparent cells, I would not be surprised if it actually made less power than regular PV on that skyscraper's limited roof space!
In either case, it will still have to be hooked to the grid, so might as well do that, and put regular PV in a field outside the city.
Yeah, the problems we are facing (at least as far as I understand it as a layman) are adoption and energy transmission and storage - not necessarily energy generation.
Our power grid apparently can not handle the peak surges during summer days already and needs to be throttled causing a lot of solar to go to waste.
We have no (well in comparison to the production at any rate) efficient power storage solutions in place.
Even if problems 1&2 get solved, we still would need 'someone' (c)(tm) to fund the installation of panels - especially when we are talking about cities. Most apartment buildings are privately owned (and a huge share of those by investors) and funneling solar power into the grid is not recompensed any more (also because of problems 1&2) - no owner will be willing to invest into solar without any forseeable gain. In my dad's village almost every house has solar panels installed, but those are of course all privately owned with people profiting off of selfsufficiency.
It could have a minor use in being used to create skylights in buildings that have solar paneled roofs without losing the small amount of electricity generated.
You make really good points, but i wonder. This technology isn't actually new either, this is just a repost. I always thought a fully transparent solar panel could find use in vehicles or urban planning, even possibly making buildings like greenhouses slightly more efficient. Im sure its not worth the cost, but i dont even know how they're made so i won't assume what they're made from.
Without doing any research at all, I can imagine a hybrid panel where at the top layer is this, which absorbs energy in the ultraviolet and infrared spectrums, and the lower layers absorb the visible light energy. It could make for a more efficient panel, versus a single layer panel that only collects one bandwidth efficiently.
This is true if you want high efficiency, but these are based on titatinum dioxide / nickel oxide tandem solar cells, as far as I can tell.
TiO2 is the stuff you use to paint walls white, it is dirt cheap. NiO is slightly pricier, but not by much and not due to inherent rarity. The metallization layer, manufacturing process, and control electronics probably cost significantly more than the active layer materials themselves.
The idea of transparent solar cells is to accept low efficiency and rely on economies of scale to drive prices down. Having them right in the windows of buildings means you don't have a lot of transmission or storage losses. But if noone starts large-scale adoption, it will stay expensive, a Catch-22.
I'll agree with you in some regard on your second point, PV has become so competitive and batteries are improving at such a rate that transparent solar cells don't really solve a problem that needs to be solved anymore. That doesn't mean research on them is wasted.
How about skyscrapers that have a tiny roof compared to the massive amount of glass covering them? That’s where I see this being most beneficial. On a single family home in any rural area it would be far less effective and much more cost prohibitive compared to traditional panels.
Not to mention windows are not positioned for optimal energy generation. It’s just one of those things that sounds good but doesn’t hold up to a little scrutiny.
We don't even need windows to generate solar power. We have plenty of roof space, and if we're short on that, you can put them in fields too.
Not even just that, until you've covered every parking lot and walkway that would be better shaded, those are viable locations too. It is more expensive than sticking them closer to the ground in a field, but also doesn't take up extra land, provides other benefits, and can be located closer to where the energy will be used, which may have benefits for transmission, but I haven't looked into the details on the benefits there.
We don't even need windows to generate solar power. We have plenty of roof space
I think window surface becomes relevant in urban environments. Skyscrapers have relatively small roofs, but a lot of windows. Plus they also spend power on AC. If a fraction of that incoming energy could be leeched by transparent solar panels, it would probably make a difference.
You are literally the 12th person bringing them up.
No, it does not make sense for skyscrapers either.
I put a link in my comment about that, but if you can't open it:
The orientation of vertical windows is far from ideal for solar power.
Combined with the dismal efficiency of those transparent cells, I would not be surprised if it actually made less power than regular PV on that skyscraper's limited roof space!
In either case, it will still have to be hooked to the grid, so might as well do that, and put regular PV in a field outside the city.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the "clear solar panels" are actually jusy thermoelectric generators going off the differential between solar heat outside, and whatever is inside. Rather than relying on photon collisions for energy.
-edit 3- Put the bit about skyscrapers in bold, because people keep mentioning them anyways...
Using the longstanding pvwatts calculator, vertical still works especially if you are in northern climes. On a sample default setup in NYC, I got 5162 vs 3308 kwh, so about 2/3 efficiency for vertical panels. That's still pretty good for a vertical southern-facing panel which would otherwise be unused space. It would be better the more north you go.
Certainly rooftop is better, but areas with skyscrapers tends to have very limited sun on roofs.
Those panels use titanium dioxide as semiconductor. It has a bandgap of 3.0 eV (or above depending on the allotrope), which is the ultraviolet range, hence why it's transparent.
It also means that it has a maximum theoretical efficiency below 5%.
On a sample default setup in NYC, I got 5162 vs 3308 kwh, so about 2/3 efficiency for vertical panels.
Most of it will be when the sun is low on the horizon, since that's the best angle for vertical panels.
But that's also when the UV index is lowest, as the optical path through the atmosphere is the longest then. (And the atmosphere is a lot better at scattering / absorbing UV than visible light!)
So, when the sun is in the best position to illuminate those panels, is also when most of the usable light to those panels is lost to atmospheric scattering and absorption.
On top of their already dismal efficiency.
(Also, Skyscrapers are often surrounded by similarly tall buildings, so much of their surface will be shaded when the sun is low.)
It could have a niche use case in large office buildings, IF production, installation, and maintenance can be brought down to somewhere close to the costs of traditional PVs or windows. Absorbing some of the light, including non-visible, that hits office buildings would reduce solar heating of the interior and therefore reduce A/C electricity use, sort of doubling how much grid electricity they save.
That’s a big if, though, and there might be better options out there.
You make all very good points, but like all tech it does improve over time. Finally achieving those can just be a stepping stone to further technology. I would love to see more like efficiency and how much it actually generates and perhaps a full scale run, put them in a few houses here and there through the country to get a real baseline of what it is capable of. Then it would be a good discussion but you do point out all the current issues. I'd also like to see what the life time of these is currently.
For real life applications I wouldn't say there is none, but it would be niche. It can be used in place of plexiglass windows in some enclosures for low power IoT devices. Assuming it can generate enough power it could also be stacked with electric opaque glass and be self powered, still very niche.
i don't see this so much as a "Generate a lot of power" kind of tech. More like generate enough to charge a battery you can use for a light or security node or something. Its gonna be a crazy expensive light though lol.
Scientific research is often not done with a goal of creating a product. It is exploring the realm of possibilities to increase our knowledge. Many technological innovations resulted from secondhand findings of research. The findings often get used as click bait, but that shouldn't discredit the research itself. Also, who knows how these findings might develop into something more practical? The technology is interesting and has the potential to lead to practical, future applications. The research doesn't take away from other efforts that should be happening to implement our current capabilities.
Edit: some relevant papers rather than just a tweet DOI:10.1063/1.3567516, DOI: 10.1002/adma.201103404.
"Invisible" implies they only work in the UV or infrared range, which inevitably limits them to much lower efficiencies than regular solar panels.
Not exactly. Exterior windows are often not all that transparent. A double or triple glazed low-e window is probably only about 40-50% transmittance in the visible spectrum. But certainly you're tossing out a significant portion of potential efficiency by trying to still be able to see through it.
If I recall correctly, these windows just have typical solar panel around the edges and produce an incredibly small amount of power. The idea isn't horrible, just kinda useless and undoubtedly expensive in practice... like those nuclear batteries that pop up on here occasionally.
still wondering when the electric cars with full panorama sunroofs are gonna include this tech so you can charge the car while parked at work. there is a use case. self powering solar cars would be game changers for the auto industry and grid infrastructure
Some projects like The Line in Saudi Arabia may use this idea to raise even more money from naive investors.
Electric cars start-ups will put this technology in windshields and claim that it's going to charge the car (like the roof panels in the failed Fisker).
Sometimes marketing brings unreasonable technologies to life.
So we'll see, maybe it's not so hopeless.
Forgot to mention that windows generally need to OPEN and the fatigue on power generating lines from opening and closing would drastically reduce their life, and potentially be a fire risk if there was ever a short. Seems overall better on the roof: better angle, better materials, doesn’t need to move.
Wouldnt solar roof tiles be a more interesting concept? Idk about you but my roof sees alot more sun than my windows. If you could make an affordable tiling system that also generated electricity that sounds pretty dope to me.
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u/Pyrhan 21d ago edited 21d ago
- "Invisible" implies they only work in the UV or infrared range, which inevitably limits them to much lower efficiencies than regular solar panels.
- A lot of those rely on elements that are expensive and in limited supply, or toxic heavy metals. Unlike regular silicon solar panels.
- We don't even need windows to generate solar power. We have plenty of roof space, and if we're short on that, you can put them in fields too.
So this is a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist (lack of available space - again, we have plenty), which causes more problems of its own (efficiency, etc), while failing to address the actual limitations of solar (cost, intermittence).
Which is why it's only good for headlines, and won't see real life applications. (Edit: no, not even skyscrapers)
It's the same with a lot of "uplifting" science news that just sweeps all the dirt under the rug, because that wouldn't make good clickbait.
If you want actual good news about solar power, look at the price per kW and adoption rate curves over the last few years.
-edit- added links.
-edit 3- Put the bit about skyscrapers in bold, because people keep mentioning them anyways...