this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2023
78 points (97.6% liked)

Technology

34395 readers
453 users here now

This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.


Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.


Rules:

1: All Lemmy rules apply

2: Do not post low effort posts

3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff

4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.

5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)

6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist

7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (3 children)

I am not going to pretend to be smart enough to understand any of it but I think it’s good news?

I would be keen to have solar panels or a solar array on my property but they are so damn expensive.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The theoretical limit we can get out of the sun with panels is 40-45% so we are getting pretty close to that.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Do you know what is theoretically limiting it to 40-45% in the physical process we are using?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

The materials that do the absorption are not effective across the entire wavelength spectrum of the sun. They can only absorb at a certain wavelength range, but the spectrum range of the sun is very wide.

Edit. Also other reasons, like recombination rate where the photon hitting the panel generates an electron-hole pair which is then collected and used for evegy, but electrons and holes tend to want to recombine, after which we cannot use them for evergy. We want this rate to be zero, but it never is, it is a probabilistic process. So even if you can absorb everything, you can't utilise everything you absorb.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

In my very limited understanding there are too many loses between material to endpoint. The old limit used to be 35% before they made new materials so maybe we can improve the potential in future.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Apparently commercially available solar panels are around 20% efficiency.

https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/photovoltaic-energy-factsheet#

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

Yes. It is not 1:1 especially on these test conditions, but currently the truthful seller says the real-world effiency-% is around 15%. So probably with this new technology we can start saying the real-world effiency-% as around 20%, which is significant leap.