I think one of these solar mirror companies was actually proposing using these as a way to maximise solar farms by having a little bit more light just before sunrise or just after sunset. A back of the envelope calculations showed that in perfect conditions they would hit about 0.0001% of the amount of power required for the solar panels to start working. It would also be at best for like 20 mins a day. And to top it off, it won’t work if it’s cloudy, foggy etc. all the conditions solar usually struggles with.
So where I live it gets dark and cloudy somewhere around end of September and we don’t see any light till maybe early March. This is the time where it is cold AF outside and we need maximum energy for heating our homes. So it is at this time energy is most expensive and cheap solar would really help. But since there is no sun (hence the cold AF part), there is also no solar (hence the expensive energy part). At other times in the year we already get loads of cheap energy from solar and we can easily store up enough to get through the night, so in that time something like 20 mins of extra solar would do basically jack shit. This means getting any money from this would be really hard, who is willing to pay for that little bit of energy, which is only available at times when energy is already cheap.
So it’s broken on both a physics side and also on an economic side. Plus you know the gigantic amounts of downsides. But I think somehow a startup with this idea got like millions of dollars for no reason at all.
Thorry@feddit.org 1 week ago
I think one of these solar mirror companies was actually proposing using these as a way to maximise solar farms by having a little bit more light just before sunrise or just after sunset. A back of the envelope calculations showed that in perfect conditions they would hit about 0.0001% of the amount of power required for the solar panels to start working. It would also be at best for like 20 mins a day. And to top it off, it won’t work if it’s cloudy, foggy etc. all the conditions solar usually struggles with.
So where I live it gets dark and cloudy somewhere around end of September and we don’t see any light till maybe early March. This is the time where it is cold AF outside and we need maximum energy for heating our homes. So it is at this time energy is most expensive and cheap solar would really help. But since there is no sun (hence the cold AF part), there is also no solar (hence the expensive energy part). At other times in the year we already get loads of cheap energy from solar and we can easily store up enough to get through the night, so in that time something like 20 mins of extra solar would do basically jack shit. This means getting any money from this would be really hard, who is willing to pay for that little bit of energy, which is only available at times when energy is already cheap.
So it’s broken on both a physics side and also on an economic side. Plus you know the gigantic amounts of downsides. But I think somehow a startup with this idea got like millions of dollars for no reason at all.