I just skimmed the IEEE paper (peer-reviewed, solid journal); The usage of ‘slash costs’ in the title is entire sensational. The tech gave a SLIGHT increase in efficiency (which is good news - marginal improvements are still very good and can be game-changing if scaled up), but there is no cost/benefit analysis in the paper regarding the additional costs of lenses and whether the increased PV efficiency would offset those costs at scale.
frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
Honestly, we don’t need the technology to get any better than it is. It’s nice, but not necessary. Labor costs of deployment are the biggest limiting factor.
albbi@piefed.ca 4 days ago
Wouldn't better efficiency lead to less physical requirements which leads to lower labour costs?
frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
My numbers were wrong:
www.nrel.gov/solar/…/solar-installed-system-cost
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.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 4 days ago
Yeah, community solar parks are really the best because they remove a whole lot of these soft costs.
These soft costs include:
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 a 100 households.
vollkorntomate@infosec.pub 4 days ago
If you get efficiency gains of up to 50% (factor 1.5) with the same deployment costs, this should nonetheless make it more cost-effective.