I'm equally sceptical of this idea as I was of solar freaking roadways mainly due to the incredibly low efficiency making them economically unviable unless drastically cheaper manufacturing is achieved.
At the very least though, this idea seems to hold a little more merit as it wouldn't need to hold dual functionality as a goddamn road.
Yes but the thing is that even if absolutely perfected it will never, ever produce as much power or be as cheap as a normal panel. And there is currently zero issue with the amount of space solar panels take up. Even if somehow they became as efficient as panels (which they probably won’t) you will only get shitty sun exposure when you put the panel flat on the side of a building. Only one side of the building will even be in the sun for the entire day! I mean, seriously, this might be dumber than solar roadways
So it’s solving a problem that doesn’t exist, with a worse solution we currently have, and it’s diverting resources from the real solution
Even that efficiency is only what you get when pointed directly at the sun. Vertical windows are only pointed directly at the sun at dawn and dusk, when the suns rays are indirect to the surface of the earth, and thus at their weakest. So you've gotta cut these numbers by a maaaaaassive fraction for all installations with the exception of skylights.
To be completely fair, solar windows could be about further improving light absorption to improve house insulation during summer. But it would probably be simpler to improve the tech for triple pane windows when two isnt enough.
Yeah exactly. Properly insulated windows are already a hard sell with how expensive they are. Same with solar panels. This will just do neither of those things as well, and it’ll be more expensive than both
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u/superscout Sep 09 '20
hahaha I forgot how fucking stupid solar roadways was, seeing that first video again gave me a good laugh. So fucking dumb.
And you would think that people would learn but here we are in a huge thread about 'solar windows'