The ability to have energy generation from roof tiles is so damn cool!!! The solarpunk future is becoming more true every day, and I’m all for it!
Tell me they’re not shiny enough to melt vinyl siding and I’m sold.
It’s a waste of money. Most of the tiles will be in shade. PV panels are better and easily replaced if damaged by weather.
And roof installations for panels are expensive to put in and take out, and need to be taken out to replace roof shingles/tiles under them.
This tech might end up being the best of both worlds for roof panels because they have the potential to remove the frame from the equation.
or, you know, you can just put them somewhere else and use cables to transport electricity to the house, like it was done the last 100 years.
On my way to buy a plot of land to save on energy bills 🚄
fun fact: buying a plot of land and building solar panels there is cheaper than building solar panels on the roof, if you do it large-scale. like 1 MW each. even though you use extra land area. the reason is mostly how costly it is to climb on roofs and do construction work there.
Yeah, but they aren’t doing that very fast. So gotta buy my own.
Have you ever been on a hot roof in summer? At least this puts that necessary but otherwise unused surface area to use.
Instructions unclear, bulldozed public spaces to build a parking lot with a solar roof over it.
Will try again with nearby farmland.
Still a great piece of tech. I think decentralizing power generation is better for both land use and for the individual.
These panels will be nice for areas with strict architectural laws
20% is what standard photovoltaics were doing a decade ago. I cannot wait until these are standard on all roofs in a few decades.
Edit: Yes I know the title is misleading, I’m saying these colored roof tiles are performing on par with the setup many Americans installed 10 years ago at the height if the subsidies.
It’s 95% of regular panels, so it’s 5% worse.
I would go with regular panels in that case, unless they are shaped like tiles and can provide better coverage of the roof. 5% efficiency drop but 15% coverage increase could be worth it. But I expect install costs would be quite a bit higher
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Imagine this + electric cars working as grid storage.
Wouldn’t you want them all to be black to maximize effectiveness? Damn marketing. In the not too distant future daily talk shows will have segments on which colours are fashionable this year for solar panels.
But why? It’s not about heat absorbtion but photon collection
I’m no solar panel expert, just using common sense. If it is not heat conversion then I’m whistling in the wind. Black absorbs more heat, more quickly, but if it is not about heat, just light, then ignore this.
Energy at certain wavelengths hits the solar cell and migrates electrons in a flat plane. Thin wires grab those electrons to make current. Heat actually reduces the efficiency.
Solar panels that absord heat exist, those panels are used to heat water. For PV you want to capture photons that kick electrons from the valence band into the conduction band of the material to get an electric current. Basically the inverse of an LED, you turn light directly into electricity. Any heat here is wasted energy. The PV cells are optimised for specific frequency bands and in those bands they don’t reflect well. If you want to capture visible light the panels are appearing relatively dark.
Check out why Einstein got his Nobel Price. That’s the fundamental mechanism behind solar panels. It has nothing to do with the absorbtion of heat. If you use solar to heat water, that’s a different type of solar collector
Actually, photovoltaic solar panels work more efficiently when cold, heat makes them less efficient. I’ve read.
Sometimes historic buildings have a strict code to follow, this might help to modernize them while keeping the historic aesthetic.
I’d rather they get back to those transparent panels that suddenly vanished from the university page and all articles went poof.
That’s a really cool idea. Natural lighting + power generation
I was hoping for it to be manageable on a greenhouse, though they hadn’t published any specs on light quality after it passed through them, so no idea if it would have been good for the plants.
We say african american solar panels now 😤
