I just thought I would share some different solar projects I think are interesting.
Terracotta Solar:
“Designed to be indistinguishable by the naked eye from regular terracotta roof tiles, “Invisible Solar” tiles are made to improve the energy efficiency of heritage buildings without compromising their historic appearance. They make each tile out of a non-toxic and recyclable polymeric compound they themselves developed, and the tiles allow for sunlight to pass into a hidden bank of photovoltaic cells without the human eye being able to tell they are translusent.” | Good News Network
Apartment Balcony DIY Solar
If you have a sunny apartment balcony and have ever been interested in solar, there are many options; including some designed to look like privacy walls. It is supposed to be as easy as strapping on and connecting the panels, then plugging the system into your outdoor wall socket.
“In the best case scenario, a 600 W balcony panel pays for itself after just a few years,” said Hermann Dinkler, an energy expert at the German technical inspection association TÜV. With a shade-free southern orientation, an optimal inclination angle of 35 degrees without shade and 2,000 kWh of electricity consumption per year, a typical 600 W system pays for itself after about five years, according to German institute HTW Berlin. - PV Magazine
To find out if solar would work for your apartment balcony, make sure to do the calculations(such as with a solar panel calculator), ensure you have an outdoor socket, and check the rules of your building.
Solar Glass Bricks
These ones (amusingly) do remind me of the 1980s glass brick wall fad, but these are made to used to replace windows or other glass in office blocks, buildings and even bus stops. The inventors at Build Solar think they look better than solar panels and take up less space, so could be an eco-friendly alternative to current building materials.
Adding Solar to More Devices
The company Ambient Photonics showcased a bifacial solar cell. It can harvest from both the front and back simultaneously, and aims to charge small electronic devices; such as remote controls. It is supposed to work even in low-light, including indoors.
Its flexible and thin design means it could work in many different device types.
Funnily, the tech is reminding a surprising amount of people of the solar-powered calculators that used to be everywhere.
I never understood why this wasn’t more common already. Most calculators I’ve run into are solar powered; but I’ve almost never seen tv remotes, timers, thermometers/humidity meters, or other similar devices with solar cells powering them.
Why not? Seems like an obvious solution…
My TV remote is solar, oddly enough. Samsung.
I think the easy guess would be cost.
I can’t see how it would be cost prohibitive to put a solar cell in a remote that comes with a tv worth several hundred dollars, but not in a 10$ calculator.
I think it’s reliability that’s more important to the remote engineer. A couple batteries are reliable and cheap.
TV is usually watched with dim light
That’s fair.
I still think some capacitors or a rechargeable coin cell + a solar cell to keep either one charged would be better.
Consider that calculators are ideal because they stay out on a flat surface and are only used in lit rooms, instead of buried in the couch cushion or used in the dark during movie night.
A remote would also have to have energy storage, and you’d have to remember to leave it out to charge.
Good question, with a simple engineering answer: often times the energy cost of creating these solar panels and installing them into devices is considerably higher than the amount of energy those devices could possibly except after many decades of constant use. The point in time at which the solar energy collected by the device matches the energy cost to create and install the device might actually be longer than the life of the solar panel or the device itself. So adding solar to every last little thing will actually cost a lot more money for consumers while causing more harm to the environment.
That is not to say that solar is always bad, in fact solar is incredibly good when used at industrial scales, especially in power stations, and on the rooftops of factories, parking lots, shopping centers, data centers, and warehouses.
We see too often on the news stories about how some amazing invention might help solve global warming, but this is often just propaganda. The oil and car companies want you to think buying more technology from these tech companies (which are often their own subsidiary companies) will solve the problem. But really it is just another way of profiting off of people, tricking them into buying their stuff rather than reducing consumption, reusing, and recycling, and without those companies doing any of the hard work on the energy transition themselves.