Comment by mlyle
1 year ago
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.
Most of what you say was anticipated by the comment you replied to:
> > I do agree you need big panels to not have excessive labor from connections.
> You're just setting yourself up for a long day of checking connectivity only to have the fence shift again.
If only we had ways to make long runs of wiring relatively reliable.
My point is: there's second order effects: expensive panels need to have as high of a capacity factor as possible; high capacity factor constrains installations and increases other costs. If you cut 2/3rds of the cost of the panel away, other costs decrease, too, and more types of installation become reasonable.
There are also non-linearities. Obviously there are some regions in in the cheapness/efficiency/durability space that vastly increase the practical ability to deploy these things. If we had 99% efficient panels that cost pennies per square meter, and last for years, then lots more applications could potentially open up. A 50% cheaper panel may not unlock that now, but it brings us closer.
Even if we never get to any of these thresholds, its worth a shot. Cleaning up the energy sector needs to be all-hands-on-deck and people researching this stuff doesn't preclude policy changes (subsidies, federal job guarantee/new CCC, etc.) to address the labor angle.