[HN Gopher] Panel with photovoltaic material layered on silicon ... ___________________________________________________________________ Panel with photovoltaic material layered on silicon hits 33% efficiencies Author : mfiguiere Score : 79 points Date : 2023-07-07 18:06 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (arstechnica.com) (TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com) | throwawaymaths wrote: | We should all take a moment and appreciate that plants are pegged | to (IIRC) 10-15% theoretical max efficiency, and that's just in | photocapture, it's even worse when you factor in chemical | inefficies in storage and conversion of sugars back to usable atp | (which it must do to use the energy) | nightfly wrote: | Plants also are able to make more of themselves from dirt out | of pennies worth of matterial | ben_w wrote: | Mostly they make themselves out of air, which is even better. | | The dirt has necessary trace elements, but the carbon? That's | all from CO2. | [deleted] | throwawaymaths wrote: | Oh man you've never cared for trees/plants have you. Some | of em (most often the ones you "want") are total crybabies | over those "trace elements". | | You can't have DNA without phosphorus, for example, and | many plants can't make nitrogen from air. Don't get me | started on magnesium (needed for chlorophyll) | chewbacha wrote: | I understand what you mean but the vast majority of their | structure is carbon based and that comes from gaseous | CO2. Can't survive without the dirt but can't get big | without CO2 | TaylorAlexander wrote: | I want to suggest re-reading their comment. "mostly they | make themselves from air" and "dirt has necessary trace | elements" are both 100% factually correct. The word | "necessary" covers what you are saying in your comment. | There's no need to suggest they haven't raised plants | when what they said is literally correct. | sbierwagen wrote: | https://nutrients.ifas.ufl.edu/nutrient_pages/bsfpages/Es | sen... element %, dry wt. | oxygen 45 carbon 44 hydrogen | 6.3 nitrogen 1.3 silicon 1.2 | potassium 0.9 calcium 0.25 | phosphorus 0.16 magnesium 0.16 sulfur | 0.15 chlorine 0.15 aluminum 0.11 | sodium 0.03 iron 0.009 | manganese 0.006 zinc 0.003 boron | 0.001 copper 0.0005 molybdenum | 0.0001 | | Just CHON is 96.6% of plant mass. Adding silicon, | potassium and calcium brings it up to 98.95% | kccqzy wrote: | What's your point? If I only allow you to eat C, H, O, N | and their compounds, will you survive? | goldenkey wrote: | In the same vein, most of our energy comes from oxygen, not | the food we eat :-) | | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6379287/ | detourdog wrote: | Yikes sounds like decomposition. | londons_explore wrote: | It's kinda surprising that plant efficiency is so low, | considering the absolutely massive number of plants and the | hundreds of millions of years of competitive evolution to | collect as much energy from sunlight as possible. | api wrote: | Other limiting resources dominate over energy availability | for plants. | nightfly wrote: | I think they just don't have any need/pressure to be more | efficient than that | londons_explore wrote: | If you can collect more carbon, you can grow faster, | letting you put big leaves to collect more light and | overshadow and kill all the plants below you. | | Being a plant is, locally, a winner-takes-all market. | londons_explore wrote: | > plants are pegged to (IIRC) 10-15% theoretical max efficiency | | I suspect this is soon to change.... With CO2 levels around 280 | ppm, the biggest challenge for many plants is finding a carbon | atom - in fact, many plants grow just as fast under just 10% | brightness sunlight. | | Now that CO2 is up at 420 ppm, it's far easier to find carbon, | so now the evolutionary race will be on to collect more | sunlight and grow faster. And plants have done this before, ~20 | million years ago, so somewhere there are probably some | recessive genes just waiting for their moment to shine again, | and natural selection will make them spread like wildfire. | ink_13 wrote: | "Soon" on an evolutionary scale could still mean hundreds if | not thousands of years. | | For example, wood is a great food resource for fungi, but it | took millions of years for wood-eating fungi to evolve after | wood. | c_crank wrote: | It's good news for maize. That's a very carbon hungry crop. | c2h5oh wrote: | If it was just CO2 levels going up then maybe. The problem is | that temperatures are going up too, so gas solubility is | going down. This means that C4 or CAM photosynthesis plants | might get an edge over C3 on a larger area. | ChatGTP wrote: | We'd have to assume that due to the greenhouse effect , the | earth was also hotter then ? | timmg wrote: | Even without any genetic adaptations (probably?) the world is | "greening" due to increased CO2: | https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide- | fer... | mehdix wrote: | It'd be in user's best interest but not corporation's best | interest. | syntaxing wrote: | Does 33% efficiency means it can generate 3.3kW per m^2?! | philipkglass wrote: | 330 watts. Sunlight is about 1000 watts per square meter at | noon on a clear day. | hesdeadjim wrote: | Anyone know what the state of the art is/will be for panel | lifetimes? Efficiency is great, but I'd sacrifice some if it | meant 50+ year lifetimes of 85%+ peak output. | greenthrow wrote: | They essentially last 50+ years now, and have always, barring | damage. State of the art panels today warranty 90%+ output | after 25 years. So they probably aren't far off what you're | asking for at 50. They keep getting better and cheaper every | year. | jeffbee wrote: | NREL's latest data is summarized here: | | https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy22osti/81172.pdf#page=5 | | Some types of panels have increased capacity after being in | the field for years. Degradation is not a significant | economic concern at this stage of the process. | abdullahkhalids wrote: | I see degradation numbers between -0.1%/year and | -1.1%/year. | | This translates to about | | * 0.999^25 = 97.5% to 0.989^25 = 75.8% output after 25 | years. | | * 0.999^50 = 95% to 0.989^50 = 57.5% output after 50 years. | Retric wrote: | Data I've see doesn't show output dropping continuously | at a constant rate. Also some panels did show modest | improvement for a few years. | londons_explore wrote: | > modest improvement for a few years. | | Many regions of the world are getting dryer. You might | just be seeing a global warming side effect as there is | less cloud cover. | londons_explore wrote: | It would be good to break the figures down between: | | * The actual silicon is degrading | | * The cover glass is getting | dirty/frosted/delaminating/optical adhesive is no longer | clear | | * Electrical failure of a whole cell - for example it is | cracked, yet the panel still appears to work due to the | bypass diodes removing a whole cell from the circuit. | | Sure - from the users point of view it doesn't matter, | but from an engineering point of view, the cause of | failure gives some clues how to prevent it. | philipkglass wrote: | This is true for panels on the market now, and most of those | produced in the past. The 33% tandem systems reported on by | Ars Technica see severe efficiency degradation after just a | few hundred hours of full-power operation, so that's | something that needs to be solved before perovskite-on- | silicon tandem systems enter mass production. | larsiusprime wrote: | What about hail damage? That's the main concern holding me | back, but is this something already being addressed? | abdullahkhalids wrote: | You can always put more/stronger glass on top to protect | them more. | | But I would bet it is cheaper to buy insurance for such | infrequent events. | jackmott42 wrote: | Consumer panels on homes have hail protection since | forever. | ben_w wrote: | That sounds like you want armoured panels; As I understand | it, the degradation being discussed here is from the light | itself. | greenthrow wrote: | Most panel warranties cover hail up to like 1" diameter. | So, pretty sizable. Beyond that, you need insurance. | goldenkey wrote: | Is it possible to put some translucent protective material | that doesn't block the frequencies the panels absorb? | jackmott42 wrote: | yes, they use this new tech called glass. | epolanski wrote: | I have worked as a solar scientist researcher for some time, | have coauthored 3 papers in Michael Graetzel[1]'s laboratory | and I have some experience in both Graetzel cells and | perovskite solutions like the one mentioned in this article. | | Long story short: scientific researchers, especially those in | well funded laboratories are incentivized by the wrong metrics | (in all fields, not unique to solar) and in this field the only | metric that matters is efficiency. It doesn't matter if your | cell decays by 50% in a day, it reached some great potential in | a new way, here's the way for a high impact publication. | | Want to work on the other problem though? Lifetime, resiliency? | Cheap and affordable and non-toxic materials? | | Good luck getting proper funding and exposure. Why? Because | scientific papers are a closed mafia, where a set of the most | influential scientists (doesn't matter how many scientists the | planet has, the moment you start entering a niche the number of | people is very low) in their field review the submitted papers. | Don't have high efficiency or you're not breaking science? | Forget a high-impact journal. You're back at B-tier, C-tier | papers, but those won't get you funding and status. Not great | for your career. | | So what do you do? You play fool and focus your efforts and | many many millions of euros to get the next perovskite cell | that can reach high 20%s with some twist at least or go for the | 30%+ ones. | | Just to express how sad and toxic the world of scientific | research is (not even mentioning the insane amount of fake data | that gets published every day, the politics, etc): instead of | being a researcher I now prefer being a web developer writing | forms list and tables. | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Gr%C3%A4tzel | casparvitch wrote: | I disagree that science has the wrong incentives. The place | for science is to chase new (e.g.) physics, not build | something useful. | | As a society we have decided that (e.g.) physics should/shall | solve our problems with better technology. But that is not | what pure academic science is about, or what pure academic | scientists care about. | | You want to iteratively improve technologies? Give more | funding to proper engineers, not physicists/chemists, even if | they're sometimes in the 'school of electrical engineering'. | ScoobleDoodle wrote: | Lifetime, resiliency, non-toxic structure are different | dimensions to efficiency and there are likely trade offs | between them. Those all can involve what you call "new | physics" but parent points out only one gets funding: | efficiency. Which parent also points out is suboptimal for | society. | jackmott42 wrote: | Parent claimed only one gets funding, but that is wrong. | Industry, capitalist companies work on the other stuff | all the time. Parent is likely wrong about researchers | not getting funding for that other stuff also, parent | likely had trouble getting funding himself due to bad | attitude and blames it on other factors. | epolanski wrote: | I like how you decided to trash years of my life and | experience and made up a scenario where I'm motivated by | envy or failure (and even faulty of bad attitude) behind | your keyboard because my experience doesn't fit your | views. | | If you've been in this field, I'll gladly listen to your | experience. | philipkglass wrote: | Crystalline silicon cells are already cheap, non-toxic, and | long-lived. So it makes sense that most researchers are | looking for higher efficiency. Back when purified silicon | prices spiked around 2007-2008 there were a lot of efforts | looking into more affordable (if less efficient) thin film | based materials, but those fizzled out as wafered silicon got | cheap again and kept widening the efficiency gap over e.g. | amorphous silicon. | | Since there's also a much bigger solar industry today than in | 2007, you also see more practically-minded research coming | out of corporate centers (e.g. Longi, Oxford PV, GCL System | Integration, and others working on perovskite cells and | perovskite-silicon tandems). Since they care about shipping | working products, they are focused on solving lifetime and | durability issues. Of course since this research can give a | big commercial edge as single junction silicon reaches its | efficiency limits, you'll also only see the really promising | work published after it is patented. | epolanski wrote: | Silicon is far from non-toxic to produce (requires insane | amount of heat and chemicals to be purified) and dispose. | fsh wrote: | Could you list some of these chemicals? A quick google | search only came up with pretty benign standard | industrial chemicals. Disposal is a complete non-issue | since the cells are inert and non-toxic (though recycling | probably makes more sense than dumping them somewhere). | jeffbee wrote: | All these factors are reflected in the price and yet | ordinary silicon PV panels are still dominating the | market. | ZeroGravitas wrote: | I'm the opposite, I'd trade some of the current longevity, for | ever increasing efficiency. | | Some research suggests you should replace all solar panels | every 17 years because the tech will have advanced enough to | make it worthwile. | walrus01 wrote: | There are very reputable manufacturers now that warranty on a | sliding scale over time to be 84% of original STC watt rating | at 25 years. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-07-08 23:00 UTC)