top | item 45507424

(no title)

LamaOfRuin | 4 months ago

Yeah. 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.

discuss

order

rcxdude|4 months ago

Concentrated PV is pretty dead, the cost and complexity of the tracking is not at all worth it for the theoretical increase in efficiency.

hinkley|4 months ago

The 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|4 months ago

There 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.