The issue here in NL is with the power grid, not the price of the panels. The installing of them is already one of the most expensive parts of getting panels since you need to build scafolding for most houses.
this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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That is Fraunhofer who are the people most responsible for developing MP3
They need changes in laws too. Instead of chewing up open space and farmland I'd rather see more urban areas used like parking lots and industrial sites.
Yeah, Don't put the solar farms in meadows, or on mountains. put them on warehouse roofs, over highways, over parking lots, on government buildings, etc etc.
Roughly 50% of germany is used as farmland. On 60% of the farmland crops to feed livestock are grown. On 20% of it crops for energyproduction (biofuel, biogas). If you take for example rapeseeds, used for biodiesel, you would harvest around 50 times as much energy with a pv-plant on the same area. You would need to install pv on 5-6% of the farmland to produce enough electric energy for all of germany for a year. Granted you also can provide the grid for it and enoguh storage.
Not only that, but livestock can still graze under panels, on grass that often grows just as well with a little shade.
Surely the grass would grow better with more son(?)
Not always. Wide open fields get baked dry mid summer in a lot of local climates.
Yup, my grass does best under my trampoline.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10938951
This is 36% MODULE efficiency with expensive cooling. 30% actual year long efficiency without it. Requires dual axis tracking. Seems heavy as its very tall/deep.
Headline of cost reduction is very unlikely. Especially on a per acre/fairly large area basis. Dual axis tracking requires more spacing than fixed orientation rows, and loses benefits under cloudy conditions. While power at 7am and 5pm is more valuable when competing against high penetration solar, batteries are now more competitive than tracking, and can serve edge of day and night power needs. Tracking solar tends not to be built anymore, due to low cost of panels. The cooling infrastructure is also not as useful as it is on rooftops because the heat capture has useful benefits for homes.
It is also unclear how this has advantage over parabolic mirror.
Agri PV is a real use case, where more free land means more land use, even if most of it gets more shade, except around noon.
Solar panels as fences is what is needed.
Kinda works if you use bifacial panels.
Bifacial panels as a fence provides 3% extra yield but 30% extra revenue
https://www.gridcog.com/blog/solar-fence-vs-ground-mount-solar
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It's viable as edge of day high power boost in east/west direction, and simply any extra power that is cheap and easy to install, that adds privacy or keeps the controlled beings inside.
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"The lens makes it different from standard solar panels that convert sunlight to energy with average efficiency rates around 20%, per MarketWatch. Fraunhofer's improved CPV cell has an astounding 36% rate in ideal conditions"
Why would I want to compare one panel's average efficiency to another panels efficiency in ideal conditions?
Marketing. Fresnel lenses are not going to do well with diffuse light.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding but wouldn't diffuse light be what it's going to be best at? While it'd be worse on a sunny day when there is an optimal single direction for the light to come in?
It's the opposite of a light house fresnel lens - instead of scattering the light source evenly out, it'll capture diffuse incoming rays from random directions better and concentrate it on the photovoltaic cell? However it would be at the cost of being able to capture direct sunlight efficiently as only some of the lens would ever be in the best position to capture the direct rays?
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Banned in North America in 3... 2...
Oh don't worry, I'm sure the capitalist system will manage to fuck it up somehow.
"If we allow german solar panels into america it will destroy our good hard working american businesses. Tarriffs on german solar panels of 69%!"
The only thing slowing down the transition from fossil fuels to renewables is the same impediment it has always been: oil money protecting itself.
US Government - not on my watch....
I'm not sure what to think about the Fraunhofer institute in general. They have made some nice discoveries/inventions in the past, such as audio compression algorithms and such. That is why i hyped them for a bit.
But they really disappointed me with their writings on solar panels in the past few years.
They said that the efficiency of solar panels today is too low to deploy them widely in practice, which is simply not true. They tried pushing Perovskite solar cells for no reason.
I'm not sure what to think about this article's idea. On one hand, adding lenses to solar parks makes them significantly more complicated and therefore expensive to build. Also, if the parks have complicated physical forms, they're more susceptible to wind, and that could damage them.
On the other hand, yes, adding lenses means you need fewer actual solar panels for the same amount of energy harvested.
I'll therefore put it in the category of inconclusive inventions, together with the idea of adding a motor to the solar panels so they can track the sun. That would also make the solar panels more efficient, but also more complicated and more prone to mechanical failure.
I'd like to know what they're going to do about the heating issue. Concentrating solar radiation carries with it an increased heat load. And heat reduces solar PV efficiency. I'm already losing about 30% in summer when the panels heat up.
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What are concentrating photovoltaics? One of the ways to increase the output from the photovoltaic systems is to supply concentrated light onto the PV cells. This can be done by using optical light collectors, such as lenses or mirrors. The PV systems that use concentrated light are called concentrating photovoltaics (CPV). The CPV collect light from a larger area and concentrate it to a smaller area solar cell. This is illustrated in Figure 5.1.
Also, from the article - 33.6% efficiency in real-world conditions:
A 60 cell-lens prototype was studied for a year. In "real-world" conditions, CPVs achieved up to 33.6% efficiency. The 36% mark was posted at 167 degrees Fahrenheit. The prototype showed no signs of degradation, according to IE.
A lighthouse uses the same lens, just with the light coming from the inside. Since this is old knowledge, what is the drawback? Why isn't this widespread?
My completely uninformed guess:
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The lens and assembly costs too much compared to just more solar panels
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The lens/panel combo is so bulky/prone to failure it becomes unreasonable to actually install/use.
Adding to what Eldest_Malk said: They aren't just putting a new type of lens over standard solar cells, they are also designing/fabricating custom cells to work with the lenses. [I'm not a PV expert, but the fact that the IEEE paper focuses so much on the cells and not just the lenses leads me to believe that the lenses can't just be used with whatever standardized solar cells are on the market]
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id guess a lot went into designing a solar cell that could take being heated to 167F without losing efficiency or breaking. I think most common house solar panels have a temperature coefficient listed on their datasheet that measures how much its ability to generate power decreases per every degree above 77F
Tech ingredients did a test with active cooling on standard solar panels and found the energy to cool it was about what was gained by having a cooler panel.
The upshot should be longer life if the panel though, so the conclusion was still a net gain.
They mention standardisations and cost savings in their paper, as well as solving the heat load per cell problem by decreasing cell size. They also mention that there's been a lot of micro-CPV module designs but that they haven't been scaled up. Some quotes below:
Various researchers and developers have been exploring different micro-CPV module designs [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13]. Most approaches have been tested on small prototypes or minimodules, while fewer have been realized with aperture areas (Aap) above 200 and 800 cm2,[...]
By decreasing the sizes of the primary optics and the solar cells, the heat load per cell is minimized. This reduction allows for sufficient heat spreading via the circuit board, enabling the direct assembly of solar cells onto the circuit board on glass.
At Fraunhofer ISE, we have developed a micro-CPV module concept [17], [18], [19], [20], [21], which is based on parallelized manufacturing processes and commercially available components.
The final module features a panel size of 24” × 18”, which is a standard in the microelectronics industry, facilitating machine adaption without necessitating special adjustments.
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Wait for something fucking idiotic like:
"U.S. government to implement 5,000% tax on new solar technology...."
"also, revenue from new tax will be used to build new coal mines staffed by concentration camp inmates 1"
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Solar panels are already quite cheap. What we need is much cheaper grid forming inverters so we can stop destabilizing the grid with solar.
If the cost of panels drops significantly, there would be more capital available to spend on inverters, even if they stay at the current prices, still decreasing the cost of deployment. But yes. 😄
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I thought this has already been done. Guess there's some nuance to it that is above my understanding of it.
Anyhow, advancements in solar are cool in my book.
I am not a scientist so please correct me if I am off base, but did it really take them this long to attempt to focus light onto PV cells using a fresnel lens?
My hobby as a 15 year old was buying broken projectors to harvest the fresnel lenses in the lamp on top. They could focus sunlight so powerfully that you could burn shit. I didn't do that, surprisingly. I was like Marge Simpson, I just thought they were neat.
Adding to what the others wrote, solar cells become less efficient at power conversion (light -> electricity) as the temp of the solar cell materials (semiconductors) increases. So the issues is how to get more photons to the semiconductor without heating it up.
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OK, take that Fresnel lens that you were using to melt pennies and then focus it on a PV cell that is also made of metal. What might be the expected response? The science in this case is making PV cells that can handle the intense heat.
That makes sense. If I understood everyone clearly, it's not the idea to use a fresnel that's new here, it's the fact that we just haven't yet had anything capable of withstanding those temperatures and still allowing for the piezoelectric effect to happen.
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Hey it's those guys that invented MP3s.
It really whips the sun's ass.
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