NREL is amazing, I had the opportunity to do some work there and was blown away by the place.

If firefighters have to get on your roof, your house is likely toast anyway.

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Nah, come on now, that’s unrealistic. The outlets have to get it from somewhere.

Maybe they should be fiber optic instead of electric… then we could send the light directly from the sun into devices!

Sun-powered blender would probably make even healthier smoothies!

The payback period on solar is pretty long. It’s even worse without subsidies.

What news?

What if we just forget all this science and get energy through our outlets?

Yeah, IMM tech at NREL is something nutty.

What's the theoretical limit?

Only where utilities have idiotic net metering policies right now that let you effectively use your noontime summer production at any time of the year. Resulting in oversupplies if electricity during daylight hours.

Sensible policies that paid people differing amounts depending on what time of day electricity was released to the grid SHOULD be in place and would favor batteries.

Could be a typo of roof panel

If ever.

Door panels?

What if we don’t aim for the conductive band of electrons? What if there’s another way to harness the incoming energy?

Or what if there’s a way to “prime” the electrons in the cells such that the valence electrons are already at the conductive band, or somehow less than 2eV away?

If this requires a new atom, why not make one?

What if we forget about atoms altogether, and capture energy at the quarks and gluons?

What if we forget about photons, and harness dark energy instead?

Double sun power

Solar works by using the energy of photons to bump electrons from the valence bands up into the conductive band. These bands are separated by what is called the band gap. If the gap is 2 electron volts (eV) wide and the photon has 3 electron volts, the extra energy is “lost”. Photons with less than 2 eV don’t contribute anything. It’s possible to stack multiple layers with different band gaps to more efficiently capture a wider range of photons but there will still be losses due to interfacial physics that I don’t understand. Each layer adds to the cost of the cell as well

lol yep, just like raytheon outsources production of the missile components to china

after the china news yesterday watch the westoids line up to 100% believe the US department of energy

how efficient would it be with 2 Suns?

It will never reach mass market as a triple junction device. These aren’t cost effective to use terrestrially. The reality is we have space to spread out down here, and up in space there’s no elbow room. So triple junctions head to space and we get single junctions - if we’re lucky at 19% efficiency.

Triple junction device.

Let me know when they do this on a single junction…

Batteries are useful to have higher autonomy. What you produced and not used during the day can be used during the night without buying it. Of course it’s useful

Why not look into the solar panels that replace your shingles then?

Edit: Solar Panels not door Panel

https://www.eenewseurope.com/en/record-efficiency-of-26-81-for-large-silicon-solar-cells/

MoonFall 2