Comment by ElevenLathe
1 year ago
If the materials are cheap enough, we might be able to build them into other stuff that was going to use labor anyway (shingles, asphalt, siding, etc). No idea what the economics of this look like though, and electricians (a pretty expensive form of labor) will need to be involved no matter what, but at least theoretically cheaper cells can also deal with labor costs.
>> other stuff that was going to use labor anyway (shingles, asphalt, siding, etc)
No. None of that ever works. Everyone has the "good idea" of cramming PV into some other product thinking that doing so will somehow reduce labor. It never does. Solar shingles are typical. They sound great but in reality require hundreds or thousands of electrical connections all spread over the moving flexible surface that is a wooden roof. You will be chasing electrical gremlins the moment the temperature shifts. And fixing any of those gremlins will involve penetrating the waterproofing, the core function of any roof. It is far easier to build and maintain a normal roof and then mount dedicated panels atop. The same too with siding. Want solar walls? Build normal walls and hang solar panels on them.
It is like building a computer into a desk. It seems like a great idea that will save space and keep your office tidy. There are lots of youtube videos about such builds. In reality, it is expensive on day one and extremely inconvenient to maintain in the long run. Nobody ever does it twice.
Part of why it doesn't work, though, is that PV is too expensive.
If it's cheap enough, you can tolerate failures and poor illumination of the panels for things like fence panels or whatever.
I do agree you need big panels to not have excessive labor from connections.
>> If it's cheap enough, you can tolerate failures
But you just can't. When you are using lots of tiny things all connected through each other then you have less tolerance for faults, not more. One bad connector can mean that an entire run of shingles is dark. So even a 1% fault rate, if you have a few hundred connections in each run of shingles, means that basically nothing is connected. Or think of a long fence. One broken bit can mean the entire fence after that break is no longer connected. You're just setting yourself up for a long day of checking connectivity only to have the fence shift again.
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PEV in metal roofing seems more workable.
Attaching to the roof requires screwing fasteners through the metal in fairly arbitrary positions based on the underlying framing. It’s not going to be easy to have electric connections.
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Like solar fences: https://next2sun.com/en/solar-fence/
Solar panels are already cheaper than wood, which is amazing.
It’s not cheaper than wood. It’s cheaper than certain specific kinds of wood used in specific applications.
A 2x4 stud is like $3, for example. Decorative cedar is quite a bit more expensive.
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Where are PV panels cheaper than wood? A 4x8 sheet of plywood runs about 40$ in north America, and roughly double that in Europe. I don't see PV panels anywhere near that price.
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Ya, that's my take too. Continuing R&D on alternatives like perovskite might open up new use cases. Like using transparent solar cells as windows. It's worth investigating.
Bonus, it keeps scientists employed, maintaining our capacity.
I think future designs of panels might be designed in such a way an electrician isn't required. All foolproof plug'n'play connectors and designed in such a way you cannot plug them in in an unsafe way.
You don't call an electrician every time you plug in a hairdryer, and a hairdryer is typically higher voltages and currents than a single panel.
Higher voltage than a single panel, but a string of panels easily hits hundreds of volts. Even worse they can be hard to make safe, since as long as the sun is shining they are generating energy and roof installers don't like working at night.
You can avoid this by using microinverters, but they're a pretty substantial premium on each panel and an added point of failure.
There is lot of tech around solar panels that is being effectively obsoleted by the plummeting costs of the panels themselves. Why bother trying to squeeze out the last few percentage from each panel when it's so much cheaper to just install a couple more panels to make up the difference? This is the big difference between countries like the US where solar installs are still expensive at $3-$6/watt and countries like Australia where home solar installs are under $1/watt.