Faysight t1_j1efui3 wrote on December 23, 2022 at 6:25 PM

Reply to comment by sake22 in Paper-Thin Solar Makes Any Surface Photovoltaic Unroll this solar carpet onto a roof—or any other surface that sees sunlight by tonymmorley

Needing more space isn't necessarily a problem if it's cheaper... or even just easier to transport/deploy or has a longer useful life. But the word "cloth" doesn't say any of those things to me except maybe deployment.

sake22 t1_j1epgp5 wrote on December 23, 2022 at 7:31 PM

Hi, English is not my first language... if you could just explain to me the ''cloth'' thing, if it isn't problem for you, I can't make sense of it.

Why space matters and why is that pretty big problem? For example: a house owner wants to install on his roof some solar system. Let's say when researching he finds final two best systems (first and second). His roof is 20m2. With the first system installed, it can produce 740 watts, while the second system can produce 4280 watts, both in perfect conditions, of course. But the owner uses much more energy during the day.

Now, I see their system working well in villages- for those places space that that system takes is not problem, but not in towns or cities. They have to make better efficiency, at the moment it is just small. I applaud them for creating this light tech, but it just takes too much space, while people are year by year using more energy.

Faysight t1_j1fr9tf wrote on December 24, 2022 at 12:12 AM

I guess it varies by location. Per capita electricity usage has been falling in the west for decades, and surface parking lots, roads, parks, playgrounds, and even some farmer's fields have proven happy places for solar panels if only they could be built cheaply enough to break even quickly (...without extraordinary subsidies). Maybe in the developing world there are fewer and less-suitable places, but I do notice that cloth tents work on all sorts of terrain with very little preparation... if such solar cloth were a few cents per yard and lasted a few years then I bet we'd see it all over the place in short order.