cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/24690127

Solar energy experts in Germany are putting sun-catching cells under the magnifying glass with astounding results, according to multiple reports.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems team is perfecting the use of lenses to concentrate sunlight onto solar panels, reducing size and costs while increasing performance, Interesting Engineering and PV Magazine reported.

The "technology has the potential to contribute to the energy transition, facilitating the shift toward more sustainable and renewable energy sources by combining minimal carbon footprint and energy demand with low levelized cost of electricity," the researchers wrote in a study published by the IEEE Journal of Photovoltaics.

The sun-catcher is called a micro-concentrating photovoltaic, or CPV, cell. The lens makes it different from standard solar panels that convert sunlight to energy with average efficiency rates around 20%, per MarketWatch. Fraunhofer's improved CPV cell has an astounding 36% rate in ideal conditions and is made with lower-cost parts. It cuts semiconductor materials "by a factor of 1,300 and reduces module areas by 30% compared to current state-of-the-art CPV systems," per IE.

I am not a scientist so please correct me if I am off base, but did it really take them this long to attempt to focus light onto PV cells using a fresnel lens?

My hobby as a 15 year old was buying broken projectors to harvest the fresnel lenses in the lamp on top. They could focus sunlight so powerfully that you could burn shit. I didn't do that, surprisingly. I was like Marge Simpson, I just thought they were neat.

My numbers were wrong:

Solar Installed System Cost Analysis | Solar Market Research & Analysis | NREL

(www.nrel.gov)

Hardware costs (module, inverters, etc.) are about half the price of the installed residential cost. The rest is "soft costs", and labor is included in it, but it's a pretty small fraction of it. The "other" soft costs are the big thing--stuff like permitting and planning and sales taxes. Better efficiency might somewhat lower it, but not a lot.

Notice that when things get to utility-scale, those soft costs shrink a lot. The best way to do solar is in large fields of racks, and it isn't even close. The solution to this is community solar, where you and your neighbors go in on a field. Some states ban this, and that should change.

I think the point is that you can replace one big solar panel with one big lens and a small solar panel. The footprint on the roof is the same, but the implication is a big glass lens is cheaper than a big solar panel.

Yeah, community solar parks are really the best because they remove a whole lot of these soft costs.

These soft costs include:

• bureaucracy (you need 1 permit instead of 100 permits),
• nobody needs to climb on a roof,
• shipping many panels at once to the installation site is much more efficient than only shipping 5-8 modules at a time

additionally, any kind of fixed-cost complexity is spread over a bigger field.

i.e., you should add circuit breakers to make sure the solar panels don't feed into the grid when the energy prices are already negative. adding that breaker has a fixed and constant price. adding one breaker to a large park is more efficient than adding 100 breakers into just as many households.

Grid forming will just mean the keep running the house when the power goes off, it's not safe for them to be pushing power when it's disappeared, that has been set by regulation in many countries.

I'm not sure what to think about the Fraunhofer institute in general. They have made some nice discoveries/inventions in the past, such as audio compression algorithms and such. That is why i hyped them for a bit.

But they really disappointed me with their writings on solar panels in the past few years.

They said that the efficiency of solar panels today is too low to deploy them widely in practice, which is simply not true. They tried pushing Perovskite solar cells for no reason.

I'm not sure what to think about this article's idea. On one hand, adding lenses to solar parks makes them significantly more complicated and therefore expensive to build. Also, if the parks have complicated physical forms, they're more susceptible to wind, and that could damage them.

On the other hand, yes, adding lenses means you need fewer actual solar panels for the same amount of energy harvested.

I'll therefore put it in the category of inconclusive inventions, together with the idea of adding a motor to the solar panels so they can track the sun. That would also make the solar panels more efficient, but also more complicated and more prone to mechanical failure.

I'd like to know what they're going to do about the heating issue. Concentrating solar radiation carries with it an increased heat load. And heat reduces solar PV efficiency. I'm already losing about 30% in summer when the panels heat up.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/24690127

Solar energy experts in Germany are putting sun-catching cells under the magnifying glass with astounding results, according to multiple reports.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems team is perfecting the use of lenses to concentrate sunlight onto solar panels, reducing size and costs while increasing performance, Interesting Engineering and PV Magazine reported.

The "technology has the potential to contribute to the energy transition, facilitating the shift toward more sustainable and renewable energy sources by combining minimal carbon footprint and energy demand with low levelized cost of electricity," the researchers wrote in a study published by the IEEE Journal of Photovoltaics.

The sun-catcher is called a micro-concentrating photovoltaic, or CPV, cell. The lens makes it different from standard solar panels that convert sunlight to energy with average efficiency rates around 20%, per MarketWatch. Fraunhofer's improved CPV cell has an astounding 36% rate in ideal conditions and is made with lower-cost parts. It cuts semiconductor materials "by a factor of 1,300 and reduces module areas by 30% compared to current state-of-the-art CPV systems," per IE.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/24690127

Solar energy experts in Germany are putting sun-catching cells under the magnifying glass with astounding results, according to multiple reports.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems team is perfecting the use of lenses to concentrate sunlight onto solar panels, reducing size and costs while increasing performance, Interesting Engineering and PV Magazine reported.

The "technology has the potential to contribute to the energy transition, facilitating the shift toward more sustainable and renewable energy sources by combining minimal carbon footprint and energy demand with low levelized cost of electricity," the researchers wrote in a study published by the IEEE Journal of Photovoltaics.

The sun-catcher is called a micro-concentrating photovoltaic, or CPV, cell. The lens makes it different from standard solar panels that convert sunlight to energy with average efficiency rates around 20%, per MarketWatch. Fraunhofer's improved CPV cell has an astounding 36% rate in ideal conditions and is made with lower-cost parts. It cuts semiconductor materials "by a factor of 1,300 and reduces module areas by 30% compared to current state-of-the-art CPV systems," per IE.

Adding to what the others wrote, solar cells become less efficient at power conversion (light -> electricity) as the temp of the solar cell materials (semiconductors) increases. So the issues is how to get more photons to the semiconductor without heating it up.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/24690127

Solar energy experts in Germany are putting sun-catching cells under the magnifying glass with astounding results, according to multiple reports.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems team is perfecting the use of lenses to concentrate sunlight onto solar panels, reducing size and costs while increasing performance, Interesting Engineering and PV Magazine reported.

The "technology has the potential to contribute to the energy transition, facilitating the shift toward more sustainable and renewable energy sources by combining minimal carbon footprint and energy demand with low levelized cost of electricity," the researchers wrote in a study published by the IEEE Journal of Photovoltaics.

The sun-catcher is called a micro-concentrating photovoltaic, or CPV, cell. The lens makes it different from standard solar panels that convert sunlight to energy with average efficiency rates around 20%, per MarketWatch. Fraunhofer's improved CPV cell has an astounding 36% rate in ideal conditions and is made with lower-cost parts. It cuts semiconductor materials "by a factor of 1,300 and reduces module areas by 30% compared to current state-of-the-art CPV systems," per IE.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/24690127

Solar energy experts in Germany are putting sun-catching cells under the magnifying glass with astounding results, according to multiple reports.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems team is perfecting the use of lenses to concentrate sunlight onto solar panels, reducing size and costs while increasing performance, Interesting Engineering and PV Magazine reported.

The "technology has the potential to contribute to the energy transition, facilitating the shift toward more sustainable and renewable energy sources by combining minimal carbon footprint and energy demand with low levelized cost of electricity," the researchers wrote in a study published by the IEEE Journal of Photovoltaics.

The sun-catcher is called a micro-concentrating photovoltaic, or CPV, cell. The lens makes it different from standard solar panels that convert sunlight to energy with average efficiency rates around 20%, per MarketWatch. Fraunhofer's improved CPV cell has an astounding 36% rate in ideal conditions and is made with lower-cost parts. It cuts semiconductor materials "by a factor of 1,300 and reduces module areas by 30% compared to current state-of-the-art CPV systems," per IE.

This was my first question too! I thought heat makes them wear out faster.

Hey it's those guys that invented MP3s.

I'm not sure what to think about the Fraunhofer institute in general. They have made some nice discoveries/inventions in the past, such as audio compression algorithms and such. That is why i hyped them for a bit.

But they really disappointed me with their writings on solar panels in the past few years.

They said that the efficiency of solar panels today is too low to deploy them widely in practice, which is simply not true. They tried pushing Perovskite solar cells for no reason.

I'm not sure what to think about this article's idea. On one hand, adding lenses to solar parks makes them significantly more complicated and therefore expensive to build. Also, if the parks have complicated physical forms, they're more susceptible to wind, and that could damage them.

On the other hand, yes, adding lenses means you need fewer actual solar panels for the same amount of energy harvested.

I'll therefore put it in the category of inconclusive inventions, together with the idea of adding a motor to the solar panels so they can track the sun. That would also make the solar panels more efficient, but also more complicated and more prone to mechanical failure.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/24690127

Solar energy experts in Germany are putting sun-catching cells under the magnifying glass with astounding results, according to multiple reports.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems team is perfecting the use of lenses to concentrate sunlight onto solar panels, reducing size and costs while increasing performance, Interesting Engineering and PV Magazine reported.

The "technology has the potential to contribute to the energy transition, facilitating the shift toward more sustainable and renewable energy sources by combining minimal carbon footprint and energy demand with low levelized cost of electricity," the researchers wrote in a study published by the IEEE Journal of Photovoltaics.

The sun-catcher is called a micro-concentrating photovoltaic, or CPV, cell. The lens makes it different from standard solar panels that convert sunlight to energy with average efficiency rates around 20%, per MarketWatch. Fraunhofer's improved CPV cell has an astounding 36% rate in ideal conditions and is made with lower-cost parts. It cuts semiconductor materials "by a factor of 1,300 and reduces module areas by 30% compared to current state-of-the-art CPV systems," per IE.

well, adding lenses kinda requires motorizing the panels to track the sun, right? otherwise the "hot spot" is going to move around across the day/year

is there a way to shape the lens to mitigate this?

well, adding lenses kinda requires motorizing the panels to track the sun, right? otherwise the "hot spot" is going to move around across the day/year

is there a way to shape the lens to mitigate this?

It does. Also seems weird nobody thought of a magnifying glass before.

But its also the beauty in science. Now somebody else thought about it, and they might work harder to fix the next problem: Heat.

If that gets better now, solar panels will increase in output even more. There are so many technologies going into one product, and each field have its own experts.

I'm excited.