This is very exciting! My understanding[1] is that silicon panels have largely hit their max efficiency, and further improvements will come from using new materials. Perovskite panels are the next up coming down the research pipeline, so it's very cool to hear those are moving out of the research phase and actually hitting production. I expect perovskite-based panels will have years of efficiency gains, just like silicon did, as we continue to explore even more efficient new materials. Great stuff!
[1] Mostly from listening to the Skeptic's Guide podcast, which frequently covers green energy research.
As someone who worked on advanced solar in the 2008-2014 timeframe and later did a PhD in photonic materials, I have learned to heed the old adage "Never bet against silicon".
The cost of silicon solar modules is projected to drop below 10cents/Watt this year and will keep dropping. The major cost of solar is now the installation and grid interconnect. Since these cells have serious problems with lifetime (years at best vs decades for silicon), all indications are that they will be much more expensive at the system level.
In my opinion the major barrier to solar adoption is not efficiency but integrated operation. For instance, my roof has enough area to support a 20kW system, but the utility will only let me put up a 4kW array due because they can't accept the extra energy and stay profitable. This business model problem is not related to efficiency but the result of resistance to distributed energy strategies from utilities who can't understand how to avoid bankruptcy and move away from a centralized power plant based grid.
> the utility will only let me put up a 4kW array due because they can't accept the extra energy and stay profitable.
Transmission congestion might be a more important issue than profitability:
"Avoiding the congestion is essential for a competitive electricity market and is one of the toughest problems of its design." [1]
The course of Damien Ernst [2] gives an excellent overview of all the challenges related to decentralized electricity markets.
Prices per panel may be dropping but that’s didn’t stop a major panel installer to quote me over $100k for 18kW system with two Tesla batteries. (The installer was not Tesla).
How can one take advantage of cheap panels and have quality work done on the roof?
The 4Kw limit should be on the infeed and not the solar panel capacity.
You could put 10Kw worth of panels up just limit the output to 4Kw. Now you have a more stable 4Kw feed.
Is it or is it becoming profitable to have more power on the roof, but dedicated to local use? What local use? Local battery? Bitcoin mining? Aluminum plant (jk)?
Do you have suggestions for the utilities on how to move away from a centralized grid, avoiding bankruptcy and also providing the same level of reliability as the last few decades?
The only supply side outage that comes to my mind is the Texas cold snap messing with the gas plants.
To me it seems hard to justify use of perovskite panels (outside of niche use cases where high-efficiency is important like space exploration) when they use so many toxic materials (and silicon panels have no such problems and are dirt cheap). Just building more silicon panels seems like a better plan.
Yeah, that's 100% a problem worth calling out and fixing. But we really do need efficiency gains in solar panels, and silicon is maxed out. Figuring out how to make perovskite more workable is absolutely worth the effort, and commercializing it is a crucial step for that.
Am I wrong in assuming that a 20% efficiency increase in a 25% efficient cell means 5% more energy gained (25*1.2), so a total of 30% efficiency, in relation to the 100% of solar energy which reach the cells?
How much does this efficiency affect levelised battery-backed electricity cost? And how much of the final price is installation, storage, land cost, maintenance and all these other overheads.
My impression is that when the sun shineth, raw solar is almost too cheap to meter... But everything else costs money.
> the only clean sources of energy are nuclear and water
> Solar panels are generally pretty toxic to the environment
Nuclear waste is famously clean and Three Gorges Dam has caused the Earth to alter its rotation.
Lunch is not free and never will be free. Part of the problem is pretending that it is or that my one true solution will solve all the problems of the world.
The relevant point is that the waste from renewables is dominated by mundane things like glass, plastic, aluminum, and steel.
This means it's pertinent to ask: is the quantity of waste from renewables important compared to the quantity of these produced by society in general?
And the answer is "no". So the problem of dealing with such waste has to be dealt with anyway by society; the waste of renewable energy sources just increments the problem slightly.
This is different from nuclear energy, which introduces an entirely new kind of waste not produced by society in general.
Hydroelectricity causes pollution. Flooding a piece of land causes more conversion of metallic mercury to organic methylmercury.
> Increased methylmercury concentrations in water and fish have been detected after flooding of soils associated with reservoir creation (e.g. for hydroelectric power generation)
Yeah, lead is never good news because there is no level of exposure that isn't considered unhealthy. To quote the above wiki page:
> hybrid perovskites are very unstable and easily degrade to rather soluble compounds [...], which significantly increases their potential bioavailability and hazard for human health
Even if we're super careful about how we install and interact with substances like these ourselves, once we put it in our living environment it's going to come back to us the long way around through the food chain.
From the main wiki article on lead [0]:
> Lead has no confirmed biological role, and there is no confirmed safe level of lead exposure.
I know these have theoretically higher efficiencies at the cost of longevity, but I am curious if there is anything else that makes them desirable. Are they cheaper to make?
Having lead really sours my take on them. Everything from production to deployment to recycling gets worse.
It is described as being "tin-using" which means there could still be lead. Towards the end of the article it even states that a competing panel uses tin-lead which can be described as "tin-using".
Fixed installations don't need more efficiency. We have plenty of room as is. The price per watt is more relevant and even that has become trivial, as installation costs trump panel cost. We mostly need more panels installed everywhere.
>The 72-cell panels, comprised of Oxford PV’s proprietary perovskite-on-silicon solar cells, can produce up to 20% more energy than a standard silicon panel. They will be used in a utility-scale installation
>Oxford PV has been developing and working to commercialise this technology since 2014, with a recent module efficiency record of 26.9%.
Found on the internet: The average efficiency of domestic solar panels is between 18% and 24%. So let's assume 20%.
20% more powerful then means a 24% efficiency.
According to Wikipedia: As of 2024, the world record for solar cell efficiency is 47.6%, set in May 2022 by Fraunhofer ISE, with a III-V four-junction concentrating photovoltaic (CPV) cell.
Does 24% efficient mean that 76% of the suns radiation is being either reflected or turned into heat (or something else)? To ask another way, if panels were 100% efficient (I know this is not possible), what would that be like?
Captured solar energy always eventually gets turned back into heat. The solar panel might temporarily convert it to another form, but eventually, it'll be turned back to waste heat after all is said and done. So the net for energy absorption is basically if the solar panel was a very dark, highly absorptive color. Which, of course, much of the earth is already covered in, such as the roofs that many solar panels already sit on.
If the panels were 100% efficient, the heat would just move around and none of the energy would be radiated back to space, so it would be similar to a Vantablack level of absorption of energy.
The panels are dark, so I guess that 76% is mostly converted to heat. So you may ask what is the contribution to global heating. I've read that enough panels to power society would only subtract 0.1% from Earth's albedo.
Readit News
[1] Mostly from listening to the Skeptic's Guide podcast, which frequently covers green energy research.
The cost of silicon solar modules is projected to drop below 10cents/Watt this year and will keep dropping. The major cost of solar is now the installation and grid interconnect. Since these cells have serious problems with lifetime (years at best vs decades for silicon), all indications are that they will be much more expensive at the system level.
In my opinion the major barrier to solar adoption is not efficiency but integrated operation. For instance, my roof has enough area to support a 20kW system, but the utility will only let me put up a 4kW array due because they can't accept the extra energy and stay profitable. This business model problem is not related to efficiency but the result of resistance to distributed energy strategies from utilities who can't understand how to avoid bankruptcy and move away from a centralized power plant based grid.
Transmission congestion might be a more important issue than profitability: "Avoiding the congestion is essential for a competitive electricity market and is one of the toughest problems of its design." [1]
The course of Damien Ernst [2] gives an excellent overview of all the challenges related to decentralized electricity markets.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_congestion
[2]: https://damien-ernst.be/teaching/elec0018-1-energy-markets/
How can one take advantage of cheap panels and have quality work done on the roof?
The only supply side outage that comes to my mind is the Texas cold snap messing with the gas plants.
My impression is that when the sun shineth, raw solar is almost too cheap to meter... But everything else costs money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perovskite_solar_cell
N.b the long section on lead toxicity concerns.
Solar panels are generally pretty toxic to the environment. Even the silicon panels contain lead.
There's a pretty dark side to renewables that not many want to see.
https://www.wired.com/story/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die...
> Solar panels are generally pretty toxic to the environment
Nuclear waste is famously clean and Three Gorges Dam has caused the Earth to alter its rotation.
Lunch is not free and never will be free. Part of the problem is pretending that it is or that my one true solution will solve all the problems of the world.
This means it's pertinent to ask: is the quantity of waste from renewables important compared to the quantity of these produced by society in general?
And the answer is "no". So the problem of dealing with such waste has to be dealt with anyway by society; the waste of renewable energy sources just increments the problem slightly.
This is different from nuclear energy, which introduces an entirely new kind of waste not produced by society in general.
> Increased methylmercury concentrations in water and fish have been detected after flooding of soils associated with reservoir creation (e.g. for hydroelectric power generation)
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methylmercury#Environmental_so...
> hybrid perovskites are very unstable and easily degrade to rather soluble compounds [...], which significantly increases their potential bioavailability and hazard for human health
Even if we're super careful about how we install and interact with substances like these ourselves, once we put it in our living environment it's going to come back to us the long way around through the food chain.
From the main wiki article on lead [0]:
> Lead has no confirmed biological role, and there is no confirmed safe level of lead exposure.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead#Biological_effects
Brass has lead in it. That's a lot of doorknobs, faucets, and zippers touched every day.
Having lead really sours my take on them. Everything from production to deployment to recycling gets worse.
https://www.internationaltin.org/oxford-pv-moving-toward-nex...
If the panels were 20% more efficient, you'd want 1 -1/1.20 = 16.7% less of them.
>The 72-cell panels, comprised of Oxford PV’s proprietary perovskite-on-silicon solar cells, can produce up to 20% more energy than a standard silicon panel. They will be used in a utility-scale installation
>Oxford PV has been developing and working to commercialise this technology since 2014, with a recent module efficiency record of 26.9%.
20% more powerful then means a 24% efficiency.
According to Wikipedia: As of 2024, the world record for solar cell efficiency is 47.6%, set in May 2022 by Fraunhofer ISE, with a III-V four-junction concentrating photovoltaic (CPV) cell.
To me, this means that the new cells are 4% more efficient.
To their marketing team it means that they are 20% more powerful.
Edit: Got it, the marketing team is accurate.
If the panels were 100% efficient, the heat would just move around and none of the energy would be radiated back to space, so it would be similar to a Vantablack level of absorption of energy.