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The future of solar doesn't track the sun
- peepeepoopoo120 2y ago[flagged]
- rini17 2y agoWhen panels are cheap what about vertical mounting? Less susceptible to hail and snow. And maybe placed north-south, to maximize production in morning and evening when it's needed most.
- jamescrowley 2y agoyou also appear to get efficiency gains as vertical panels don’t get as hot - https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/11/10/researchers-shed-light-on-mysterious-higher-energy-yields-in-vertical-pv-systems/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/11/10/researchers-shed-ligh...
- gorbypark 2y agoI’ve seen some YouTube videos of people making solar fences with bi-facial panels. If I recall correctly on the one I was watching, they were going for morning and evening production and faced them east/west. One side would get the morning light then the other the evening light.
- danielheath 2y agoIt’s mentioned in the article that sunlight from near the horizon passes through a lot more atmosphere, which attenuates the light so much that you might as well not bother with the panels.
- mapt 2y agoThat depends on your latitude, how dear land is, and how close to breakeven your application is. For a lot of applications, panels are so goddamn cheap now and breakeven happens so fast that "Just buy twice as many panels" is the best solution to any problem that doesn't involve land area. Winter production in a snowy/leafy climate at a latitude tilt, though, is the exception to the rule; Production is so impaired without regular maintenance that twice as many panels is not very helpful. But set those panels vertical, at a range of orientations, and snow/leaves stop being an issue, you get sizable exposure with the sun low on the horizon, the maintenance requirement goes away, and you get an appreciable amount of power earlier in the morning and later in the afternoon, you just don't get quite as much at noon.
- jillesvangurp 2y agoThe article seems to be mostly about grid scale solar. Of course an increasing amount is private or domestic solar installed on e.g. building roofs or wherever there is space. When cost drops low enough, any surface with any exposure to sunlight is in scope for installing solar on if it can yield more energy than the cost of installing solar on it. It stops being about what is the most efficient and starts being about if the surface is good enough to provide a decent return on investment. Maximizing that ROI is complex but it boils down to getting more value out of the installation than goes in. Solar doesn't even have to be in panel form. Some office buildings now have windows that double for solar generation. A thin transparent coating does the job. There are roof tiles that double as solar panels. Aptera makes electric cars with integrated solar panels. These are curved glass panels that are manufactured to fit the profile of the roof and hood. It's also possible to print organic solar cells directly on plastic rolls. No glass involved. Or panels. Those are less efficient but you can integrate them on all sorts of surfaces. A lot of that stuff is still emerging technology. But especially organic solar printed on plastic rolls could end up being very cheap to produce. And very light.
- mapt 2y agoGrid scale solar benefits from bifacial cells in a vertical orientation just as much as home scale solar - it dramatically improves winter production and extends the production of the spring/fall day a few hours earlier and a few hours later.
- mg794613 2y agoNot only does it increase overall production, currently one of our biggest challenanges is transport and distribution, and having some of that power in the of-hours instead has more benefits than power total alone.
- Veserv 2y agoDomestic solar is a rapidly decreasing fraction of total solar deployments [1]. Not because it is not growing exponentially, but because grid-scale is much more exponential with no signs of that changing. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42591918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42591918
- adammarples 2y agoNorth South is exactly opposite of what you need, the sun is never north
- dylan604 2y agowhat if you're in the southern hemisphere?
- adammarples 2y agoGenuinely didn't even consider this XD
- Someone 2y agoThen, you’re a statistical outlier that can be ignored in the analysis :-) (Only about 12% of all humans live in the southern hemisphere)
- Dylan16807 2y agoThen North South is still the opposite of what you need.
- kgermino 2y agoI’m pretty sure they mean that the width of the panel is north-south so faces are due east or west
- gpm 2y agoI'm pretty sure by north-south they are talking about the direction the panel lies in, i.e. the faces point east/west. But even under your interpretation, you aren't always right. If you're far-ish north of the equator you want south facing panels (and the reverse) and if the cells are cheap enough it makes sense for those panels to be bifacial, with one side permanently facing away from the sun, to get a bit of extra energy from ambient light. Especially in winter when there is less sun (so energy is at a premium), and highly reflective snow resulting in a lot of ambient light.
- rjsw 2y agoBalcony Solar is a thing, most of the panels will be vertical in that use case.
- Calwestjobs 2y ago(not sarcasm) Yes ! Triple price of PV panels to buy "ceramic glass print" PV panel with eye pleasing pattern / stealthy photo on it and you can have facade or fence made from PV panels, there is drop in generated power from 10-50 % depended on pattern, color used. Price per panel not price per install ! ! ! And subtract need to buy materials used for that purpose before.
- turtlebits 2y agoYep, but you're severely limited in terrain types. Unless you need the "fence" cover, I can't see it being worth it due the efficiency loss.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- weinzierl 2y agoWe researched this thoroughly in the early 2000s and came to pretty much the same conclusion even back then. For us the main problem was the reliability of the mover. If enough panels face the wrong direction for long enough it is worse than facing the sun in a good enough fixed position all the time. Our angle was to use a simple motor that runs with constant speed and use a special patented gear (called VIAX) to turn that simple movement into a sun following motion. The bet was that a still simple mechanical gear would be more reliable than complicated electronics. In the end none of our simulations made us confident any moving solution wouldn't eat the profits. EDIT: For anyone interested, here is the patent. I think it is a really nice idea. https://patents.google.com/patent/EP0114240A1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/EP0114240A1/en
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Gibbon1 2y agoI saw some guy in Britain that replaced his old fence with one made of solar panels because the cost difference between that and traditional was nil.
- thechao 2y agoI have a fence that gets absolutely blasted with High Grade Texas Sunlight. It shortens the fence’s effective life by years — this idea is brilliant. Now I just gotta price out 80 sq m of solar panels. EDIT: The fence gets at least 4 hours of direct sun in the winter; up to 7 in the summer. I can easily install 10KW of panels. I don’t have any way to store the power. I suppose I could build a giant Tesla coil and zap the neighbor’s dog?
- cake-rusk 2y agoYou can push excess power into the grid. It will reduce / reverse your electricity bill. Look into local regulations.
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- xphos 2y agoOne cool observation of an grid wide advantage is that single axis really normalize the power curve per panel. There are many reasons way more consistent production would be better. I am curious if just having more fixed panels normalize production at scale
- tappaseater 2y agoI'm probably not thinking this through, so go easy, but why wouldn't tracked panels also produce a normalized power curve? My assumption behind the question is that they follow the same track as Sol every day, which doesn't vary at least year-to-year.
- xphos 2y agoNo i am viewing from there graphs of power over the day not over the year. Untracked panel production has a sharp peak at noon and that rises and falls pretty sharply before and after that. Maxing/stable between 10am - 2pm Single Axis flattened that curve up very heavily so you were producing at or close peak production for much longer. 8am - 4 pm The double axis seemed to just get slightly high magintude in power compared to the single axis which is good but definitely marginal. The question would be is if you have an array of fixed panels can you fixed them in a way that flattens out the peak production but provides a more level and less peeking production for the grid as a whole. This is really important because its much harder to turn off/disconnect solar than other forms of power. The grid has to be sure it doesn't overcharge or undercharge the grid. If you do either you'll deviate from the target 60Hz (US) you can damage a switching and transformer infrastructure. A less peeky supply is more predictable generally speaking and gives you more time to react to changes in the grid. The per cost question would benefit from answer this because it might make sense to install more panels in a fixed position that is not maximally optimal at an individual level but is maximal for the overall grid health. That investiment in deployment is worth it to make now because you'll never want to change it afterwards.
- GaggiX 2y agoI think this has been common knowledge for a while now.
- PicassoCTs 2y agoSo, a sloped half cone is ideal if you have the space?
- Simulacra 2y agoI thought this might be an article about a solar updraft tower, which also doesn't track the sun, or require solar panels.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 2y agoLooking at the graphs, the tracking arrays may have the added benefit of generating power in the mornings and evenings. If everyone builds non-tracking arrays, power during peak will become almost worthless if solar is a big part of overall generation capacity, so the economics might change even with panels being cheap. Of course, just building 2x as many permanently tilted panels might also work. Edit: the article actually addresses this: "[fixed setups] can pack 250% more installed power into the same space when compared to a single-axis array" - so even if only the power in the morning/evening has value, there is little reason to install tracking ones.
- leoedin 2y agoYeah - you can’t talk about renewable energy generation without also considering when it is generated. Then future price of energy will be incredibly time dependent. Finding a way to generate at a different time than everyone else - whether by east/west panels or time shifting with batteries or building a different kind of renewable generation is where all the big profits will be.
- yummypaint 2y agoDemand isn't fixed in time either, though. Industrial processes that presently run at night to use cheap power will switch to daytime when it makes sense to do so. Summer mid-day also has the highest electricity demand all year in many places due to air conditioning, so arguably solar is addressing one of the biggest stress points.
- ericd 2y agoNot an expert, but my understanding is that the challenge there is that a big cost in industrial production is the initial capital outlay for the equipment, and oftentimes to pay that back reasonably, you need to run the equipment nonstop. Also, some processes are challenging to stop/start.
- hinkley 2y ago
- nbadg 2y agoCompelling analysis. But if hail damage is the primary concern, tracking seems like an X/Y solution. What about eg anti hail netting that can be rolled out when the weather forecast predicts hail? It seems to me like a middle ground might be automated deployment of hail protection, which by definition has lower aero loading than what amounts to a big semiconductor sail.
- dylan604 2y agoanti-hail netting? you must not be from somewhere that receives a lot of hail. hail punches through solid coverings at the right size. if it's not the right size, then it's not that damaging. netting? ha! thanks for the funny visual so early in the morning.
- jfengel 2y agoSorry, I don't get the joke. Nets can be pretty strong. Is it because there's a lot of hail at sizes big enough to do damage but too small for a net to catch without deep shadows?
- quesera 2y agoI think a hail net would be feasible for some cases. Golf balls break solid coverings too (and windows, car roofs, etc), but we have nets for them. You want high tensile strength and some level of flexibility/elasticity to absorb the hailstone energy over a greater-than-zero distance. Or to shatter the hailstone well above the solar panel. Probably too light-blocking to leave up continuously, and maybe awkward and failure-prone to deploy automatically. So insurance is probably more cost-effective for most installations.
- medoc 2y agoAnti-hail netting is definitely a thing (protecting cars or fruit trees), for the reasons you state. Even big hailstones are rather slower than fast golf balls.
- 2y ago
- scotty79 2y agoI really like that how it's possible to put bifacial panels vertically along north-south direction to get solar power off peak. It should reduce cost of installation (it's basically multiple rows of fences), snow removal and cleaning. Washing down panels from dust could probably be automated too and if you build them up a bit higher you could have a meadow underneath or even a field of something. Hail should also be probably less of a concern. You need more land of course but it's still awesome.
- tmjdev 2y agoI always see articles about the decreasing cost of solar, but where are these costs collected from? Is it just not available at a consumer level? Maybe I missed the sources in the article somewhat...
- turtlebits 2y agoThere are lots of consumer facing companies selling panels. You'll need to buy in bulk (generally a pallet), but you can easily get them for $0.30 / watt.
- Retric 2y agoThe article fees disingenuous, flat panels collect the maximum sunlight from a given area of land and require fewer panels than the arrangement shown. Angling them helps the rain wash them and reduces the amount of mounting brackets unless you’re laying panels flat on the ground. Similarly total KW over the day isn’t why tracking mounts are so common instead it’s the increased value of electricity in the mornings and evenings so the actual economic benefits != total kWh. However, the bit where it’s talking about increasing the angle means creating gaps between panels or the shadowing is going to offset any gains while also requiring far more panels and more land at which point you might as just angle the panels based on latitude.
- Calwestjobs 2y agoeverything is addressed in that article. actually this is "bad kind of article", because there is so much information in there / "everything covered". that it is almost impossible to have comments about it lol.
- Retric 2y agoIt’s really not. Literally laying them flat on minimally cleared land would win the simulation. Fewer panels, fewer acres, less mounting hardware, less labor, more power. Real world conditions not included in the analysis, such as wholesale electricity prices over a day and land not being flat, drives a lot of these choices.
- wyldfire 2y agoThe graphs show huge price drops over the last ten years. I wonder, how different does the price look for residential solar panel installations? Presumably the labor will start to dominate the cost if it doesn't already?
- ahartmetz 2y agoLabor does dominate. Panels are dirt cheap and inverters, while they haven't come down in price that much, seem to still cost less than half of the price of the panels per watt.
- tzs 2y agoI wonder if you could make a DMD [1] where instead of mirrors the tilting part is tiny solar panels? The panels would only have two positions, but you could install half the DMD devices so that the two positions are south and southeast, and half so they are south and southwest. You could then have half your panels southeast and half south in the morning, all of them south midday, and have southwest and half south afternoon. That would get you at least some tracking and it should be mechanically a lot more reliable than the systems that move large panels. DMDs were designed for use in video projects, where they have to move the mirrors more times in 4 hours of video than a solar array would need to move the panels in 1000 years. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_micromirror_device https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_micromirror_device
- bob1029 2y agoA DMD is a really good thought, but I don't know if the surface area would work out at scale. I think the power handling limit of typical devices is something like 100W/cm^2. The UV from the sun would also degrade these devices faster.
- turtlebits 2y agoToo much complexity and maintenance. Solar panels are dirt cheap, and with fixed mounts, zero maintenance. The rack you mount them on costs more than the panels. The only reason I can see for added complexity is if you're space constrained, and in almost all cases, not cost efficient.
- mchannon 2y agoI've been in solar energy as my primary vocation since the 1990's. I've built solar cars, I've built solar panels, I've installed solar panels, I've designed solar trackers. I know this industry inside and out. I'd never heard of an east-west array before (though I did experiment with one-cell-wide "crinolations" at 60 degree angles, did not find any value to using them but it was a different application where low-angle light wasn't a factor). I'd never thought of such an array on this scale, at this low angle, before. I don't think most of the people reading this article quite understand that this is a completely different kind of array topology to flat-plate fixed-tilt, or tracking-based systems. Do yourself a favor, if you consider yourself intellectually curious, and if you came away from skimming this article thinking there's nothing new under the sun, read it again with a keener eye toward the novelty of it.
- philjohn 2y agoI have an east/west array on my roof, as my house is positioned with the front facing west. In the winter it's outperformed by a south facing array (northern hemisphere) but in the summer the east array gets a ton of sun before midday, and crucially, it's getting a ton of sun when the temperatures are a bit cooler, so it performs very well.
- mrshadowgoose 2y agoI actually use this exact example when encouraging careful attention to paradigms where a fundamental variable is slowly but consistently changing. It's essentially equivalent to a boundary on a phase diagram: Cost/Watt has fallen past a critical threshold, and suddenly this dramatically different approach just makes more sense.
- photochemsyn 2y agoAnother interesting configuration is vertical bifacial panels aligned on North-South axis and interspersed with farming rows. Low-cost panels make it feasible and it doesn't much block agricultural production if the panel rows are spaced far enough apart.
- collinmcnulty 2y agoThank you, I went back and re-read after seeing you comment and I did indeed miss the big point here. I had been concerned that even if PV costs reach near zero, the fixed install costs would still limit future reductions on solar costs. Clearly not!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mr_world 2y agoHow does using these the power from your panels to generate natural gas help solve climate change? Unlimited abundant natural gas sounds awful
- lucb1e 2y agoConsider where that methane / natural gas is coming from. Their homepage says (with the world's most convoluted hyphen-omitting compound adjective, but basically see the last 6 words): > March 2024: Terraform completes the end to end demo, successfully producing fossil carbon free pipeline grade natural gas from sunlight and air. If you take carbon from the air, mix in energy from the sun to turn it into a fuel, then burn the fuel (undoing the reaction), where is the pollution? There's more efficient ways to solve the climate problem than to install ginormous amounts of gas production, like you can run a heat pump instead of creating methane from that energy, but it's a solution that'll please even the old farts (no pun intended)
- Omniusaspirer 2y agoNot seeing the economics for this ever truly working out, CO2 PPM is very low despite our best efforts and the amount of energy required for separation is substantial.
- lucb1e 2y agoThe economics of taking out a loan or insurance for things you can pay out of pocket also don't work out, but there are apparently entire countries routinely buying groceries and appliances on credit I'm not saying this is a logical thing to do (note where I wrote "There's more efficient ways to solve the climate problem"), but I've seen humans making less sensible decisions than this one so, who knows, it might actually happen...
- adamcharnock 2y agoI just spent 6 years living off-grid, running 5kw of solar, and 14kWh of storage. I setup a fixed array that I welded together myself. I could certainly see that tracking wasn't worth it even then. However, in the off grid-setting I did discover some nuance. Sometimes you could really do with some power around sunset or sunrise. In the winter, being able to more reliably run my air-source heat pump at sun-up would have been very handy. Or likewise, some extra power to run the AC (which is the same device) in the early evening in the summer would have also been handy. There were plenty of cold mornings when I was keeping an eye on the solar grafana dashboard, waiting for that hockey-stick moment when the sun swung into the right place! I did consider the possibility of setting up an additional east or wast facing array to capture sun at the extremes of the day. Unfortunately that would have required its own MPTT charge controller, and would have just been more complexity in general.
- hx8 2y agoI honestly don't think I would be comfortable off grid without 4x+ that size. Of course, environments vary so significantly that these numbers don't translate well when discussing them without geographic context. My primary concerns would be consecutive cloudy days, and winters with very short days. While my actual heating/cooling needs are more mild than global averages, I think the combination of short daylight hours and increased heating needs makes off-grid solar unviable for climates closer to the poles, especially those not near sea level. I do think relaying on propane or wood for heating might make off grid viable for these locations, but that introduces questions of scalability and increased carbon footprint. There is some argument that burning wood should be considered carbon neutral if the trees are replanted and used as a renewable resource (Carbon is released to the air, and then captured by the next tree in a cycle), but the land intensive approach wouldn't scale to meet the heating needs of a significant portion of the population. Additionally it ignores the carbon required to grow, harvest, process, and transport the trees or the alternative uses the wood might find elsewhere. My point is for others to take their local climate into consideration before thinking that 5kw/14kWh would be enough for them to go off grid.
- sneak 2y ago
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- edent 2y agoWe have an east/west roof with solar on it. It is less efficient than our previous roof which was pure south - but it smooths out the generation and gives us more electricity in the evening. I have some pretty graphs at https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/04/comparing-solar-panel-generation/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/04/comparing-solar-panel-gener...
- csr86 2y agoNature has come up with moving limbs on animals, but none of the trees seem to be tracking the sun. Branches are in fixed positions.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- gpm 2y agoThere are some plants that track the sun, e.g. https://youtu.be/w-adcjH-xyk?si=Pcx4ucVe1oVwbdH4 https://youtu.be/w-adcjH-xyk?si=Pcx4ucVe1oVwbdH4 It's definitely the exception rather than the rule though.
- AngryData 2y agoMany trees don't but lots of smaller plants do tilt their leaves towards then sun and can be seen easily in a timelapse. And also like the other guy posted, sunflowers famously follow the sun.
- cyjackx 2y agoSpamming leaves is probably just the cheapest strategy?
- carpdiem 2y agoI used to work on solar power plants and solar tracking technology back in the late 2000s. Even back then, I remember frequently discussing that "eventually panels will be cheap enough that we'll just wallpaper the world...". It's really nice to see that coming true.
- pfdietz 2y ago"Sunlight at angles below 15 degrees is considered nearly uncapturable due to the effects of the ozone layer scattering sunlight." Surely it is Rayleigh scattering that is important, not scattering off ozone?
- jules 2y agoI don't understand how east-west arrays differ much from just a flat area. At the end of the day, don't they capture all sunlight in some large square? The east-west array only captures a bit differently around the outer edges. Can somebody explain? Is solar panel efficiency that dependent on incidence angle?
- Havoc 2y agoThe panel isn’t a perfectly flat two dimensional structure. So light hitting at an angle isn’t equally effective
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dgfl 2y agoI wonder if you could make deployment / installation even cheaper by making big “rolls” of panels and unfolding them directly on the ground. No ground pillars of any kind. If you built a zigzag pattern into the panel, possibly with some ultra-cheap alternating cylindrical ground support, you could easily deploy them in this East-West configuration. You will have to drive some pillars into the ground to secure them anyway, but it might be much faster and require little labor.
- knitprong 2y ago[dead]
- gargalatas 2y agoTrackers tend to suffer from mechanical failures. Even 15 years ago, there was only one way to make money out of solar panels: Install them and forget them. If you need to waste time and money on the installation then the small profit vanishes really quickly. I really don't know how those companies convienced the investors for trackers.
- silverliver 2y agoThis might be a dumb question but what about _compliant_ joints that expand and contract when warmed up by the sun? You can have any expansion multiplied such that minor changes in length are sufficient to track the sun in a meaningful manner. No mechanical wear and tear and no wasted space.