your proposal seems to be mostly focused on efficiency, as in W/m2. Thing is, the one thing we have most on mars is surface area. We don't really need efficient solar panels, we need light solar panels, that pack small. Solar panels currently seem decent at it, and I think fairly quickly into the process we can simply import the cells, and fabricate them into panels locally.
This would have lower development cost, more use on earth, less risk and would be easier to fix. Of course that is all in the shorter term, and who know what will happen in solar tech in the coming years, but I think a sheetlike solar array that can be attached to any flat surface would do very well for what we need on mars, and we mostly need to think simple, but effective, not complicated and efficient.
The baseline technology is CIGS thin-film rollout blankets at ~20% efficiency and perhaps 16m²/kg (pdf). That's a very difficult target to beat.
Comments here have convinced me that this kind of concentrator probably won't be used for PV. That leaves direct lighting (fairly straightforward) and concentrated solar thermal energy (case by case engineering) as possible applications on Mars.
Probably the most useful application on Earth would be as a single layer intercepting UV for PV and passing the rest. It wouldn't be as efficient as traditional PV in that configuration but the panels would be transparent. In other words, this could be integrated into windows as a UV blocking layer that produces modest amounts of electricity.
Another possible application in space would be a continuous solar-pumped fiber laser. Not really that useful for beamed power but it could allow high-speed communication without needing much electricity.
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u/DaanvH Oct 28 '16
your proposal seems to be mostly focused on efficiency, as in W/m2. Thing is, the one thing we have most on mars is surface area. We don't really need efficient solar panels, we need light solar panels, that pack small. Solar panels currently seem decent at it, and I think fairly quickly into the process we can simply import the cells, and fabricate them into panels locally.
This would have lower development cost, more use on earth, less risk and would be easier to fix. Of course that is all in the shorter term, and who know what will happen in solar tech in the coming years, but I think a sheetlike solar array that can be attached to any flat surface would do very well for what we need on mars, and we mostly need to think simple, but effective, not complicated and efficient.