Comment on How solar panels generate electricity
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2 days agoIt would make sense.
Thermal concentrator cost is basically fixed: mirrors of a specific quality, tracking mounts, an eye of sauron cooling loop. That tech doesn’t change.
But the bulk of photovoltaic installation cost is the panels. And those get exponentially cheaper.
Actually it does change, from what I read mainly in terms of what substance is used to capture the heat of the sunlight, which in turn has other implications downstream (for example, if you melt salt and the molten salt is used to generate steam, rather than directly generating the steam, not only does the efficieny go up but you can keep on generating power during the night as long as there’s enough heat left in the salt).
Here is paper I found about it.
That’s actually very cool. There’s a lot of talk of molten salt energy storage anyway, and this just integrates it.
Maybe it could be built closer to other renewables or cities, and use a big vat to store heat from other power sources, when needed.
…Still, though.
AFAIK, the (silver?) mirrors on mounted servos are a pretty significant fixed cost.
BartyDeCanter@lemmy.sdf.org 2 days ago
They’ve gotten cheap, in fact, that the panels are sometimes less expensive than the labor and mounting hardware.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Yeah.
At some point mounting them statically becomes the more cost-effective than the sun-tracking mount, I guess.
Redjard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
It’s been static for a while in the large installations I have seen.