5 ms·
There’s a weird thing the contestants in the solar car challenge that Australia has been hosting since forever where they generate more power on haze or partly
by hinkley 1y ago
There’s a weird thing the contestants in the solar car challenge that Australia has been hosting since forever where they generate more power on haze or partly cloudy days than on sunny. I don’t know if they ever sorted out why. Speculation was reflected light off the clouds, but I suspect panel temperature also played a role. And road temperature affects panel temps.
What the UK cannot do is concentrating solar. The efficiency absolutely crashes in diffuse light.
- LamaOfRuin 1y agoYeah. The temperature issue would have been my first guess. Regarding concentrating solar: are people still trying to make that work for commercial generation? I thought this had generally failed to pan out for electricity generation.
- rcxdude 1y agoConcentrated PV is pretty dead, the cost and complexity of the tracking is not at all worth it for the theoretical increase in efficiency.
- hinkley 1y agoThe latest discoveries with double sided panels really puts the last nail in that coffin I believe. There are still plants out there, but I don’t know how many are still operating versus being decommissioned.
- hinkley 1y agoThere are many variations of concentrating solar. There’s the tower, there’s the curved mirror with the tube of oil, and there’s the magnifying glass with a small, exotic solar cell that can handle 10 Suns’ worth of light. None of them work on overcast days because they rely on parallel rays of light.