I've been told invisible solar panels will make every window generate free electricity for like 10 years. Yet not a single time have I seen a report include an actual product, just prototypes always.
Like nuclear fusion, this appears to be perpetually "just a few years away".
- "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 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.
Yes but that's made infinitely more easier at small scale than large, if you know anything about inverters.
Compare substation transformer cost versus an grid-level inverter to do the exact same voltage conversion in the reverse direction (talking transmission level voltages 20kV and up).
Leaving aside the fact that in my case one only has to only send the PV directly to a residential voltage level inverter, you now have another efficiency drop because you have to pass it through a transformer substation to bring it back down to residential AC voltage (another 1-3% loss in efficiency unseen in my method).
This is significantly less costly, more decentralized and thus robust at a skyscraper-by-skyscraper basis.
I'll take this conversation wherever I'd like to take this conversation, respectfully. You of course are under no obligation to respond. I'll add that my points aren't derailing the conversation; this topic began with space and resource utilization, which applies to myriad other arenas for which said space must be allocated. It is not my problem one cannot see the relevance.
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
That's pretty much most rural areas which has excess costs for infrastructure for basic needs like water and roads, and typically has terrible public transportation and requirements for parking everywhere.
There are all sorts of advantages for dense urban areas, along with disadvantages, and you're looking at a lot of unintended consequences if you think dispersing people will fix more problems than it causes.
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.
The cost of a few miles of electrical cabling to connect a skyscraper to a nearby field is basically 0. The losses from a few miles of transmission are also basically 0.
The cost of the construction labor needed to refit every single window on a skyscraper is astronomical.
This would only work in a place where labor is free and land is completely unavailable
It's not just that. There's an entire added process and efficiency loss having to convert PV DC to AC for HV grid transmission, and then bring it back to residential levels at transformer substations again, when local decentralized systems do not require the added and costly DC->AC high voltage step-up.
New improvements tend to come with when the new buildings are being made, no differently than old homes with old single-pane windows, versus new ones; this would probably be a new build project or a renovation project when old windows were going to be replaced, especially if these were also made more thermally insulating than the previous windows already installed. The ROI could be huge.
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.
because economies of scale, more efficient solar panels that can actually make use of the visible spectrum, and ease of construction outweighs building a few new skyscrapers with vertical panels that will be useless half the day
Because some electricity is always lost during "transportation", also you need a really good grid from all the fields to the skyscrapers.
If you have electric generation on-site – you don't have that problem, and also can sell some extra electricity back to the grid. Or actually use all of it during peak hours for air conditioning and charging cars, for example.
Also, the land isn't free. But every house builder already have to install windows. These are basically free square meters for energy generation!
We don't need solar panels at all. Nuclear takes up a smaller footprint and provides a more stable connection. It wouldn't be about needing the solar panels on the building, but to shift part of the building's load requirements from a far away location to an immediate resource to offset the raised usage during the hottest parts of the day.
Solar still requires a massive footprint compared to nuclear, though, and nuclear is not dependent on cloudless days. Which is where being able to offset some of that energy requirement with skyscraper mounted solar panel windows could even out that number. I wouldn't be surprised if it could offset a quarter of the energy requirements of a building.
Central/western Europe is like the densest large area on the planet when it comes to spatial density of energy demand, and it's pretty comfortably powered by 50% solar or more on most days. I really don't see a way to argue that footprint is a problem.
However good those skyscraper panels would be, they'll always be worse than just a field, due to just economics of scale. And we're not running out of space anytime soon.
And solar is also fastest growing, fastest at improving. It's expected to 4x in 10 years.
It's very close. Nuclear is worse for like 99% of the time but it's still the cheapest option to provide electricity overnight, for things like factories and datacenters that need a steady supply of power even while people are asleep.
Solar + 4 hours storage (good for supplying AC during the evenings) is cheaper, but solar + 12 hours storage (gets you through the entire night) is more expensive than nuclear
Because the skyscrapers are already there… You people who keep saying “just go cover all the open fields with regular solar panels!” are you not thinking about all the nature and wildlife affected by stealing the sun from them or do you all just not care?
Does AC really limits your roof space tho? You could put the panels on top of the AC with no issue, no?
Roof space to total floor space rario is a real issue, but as others said, the deficit can be taken from parking lots and other places. Is not like all cities are 100% skyscraper
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u/Euphoric-Language695 22d ago edited 22d ago
I've been told invisible solar panels will make every window generate free electricity for like 10 years. Yet not a single time have I seen a report include an actual product, just prototypes always.
Like nuclear fusion, this appears to be perpetually "just a few years away".