Transparent Solar

[CarlinAnnArbor]

How windows could power the home and office

 

[ClaireH]

How windows could power the home and office

Thanks for posting an informative video about continued developments of solar power. Amazing stuff. Solar is the way to go for many homeowners and businesses.

New know-how is falling right into place in a timely fashion regarding how to continue harness this amazing energy. The following is something I read earlier and wanted to add it to your informational thread.

"For decades, researchers around the world have searched for ways to use solar power to generate the key reaction for producing hydrogen as a clean energy source -- splitting water molecules to form hydrogen and oxygen. However, such efforts have mostly failed because doing it well was too costly and trying to do it at a low cost led to poor performance."

"Now, researchers from The University of Texas at Austin have found a low-cost way to solve one-half of the equation, using sunlight to efficiently split off oxygen molecules from water. The U.S. National Science Foundation-funded finding, published in Nature Communications, is a step toward greater adoption of hydrogen as a key part of energy infrastructure."

"The key to a breakthrough came through a method of creating electrically conductive paths through a thick silicon dioxide layer that can be performed at low cost and scaled to high manufacturing volumes".

Making clean hydrogen is hard, but researchers have solved a major hurdle

For decades, researchers around the world have searched for ways to use solar power to generate the key reaction for producing hydrogen as a clean energy source…

www.nsf.gov

 

[Bob Blaylock]

How windows could power the home and office

Do you understand that any light that such windows allow to pass through them is light that is not being captured and converted to electricity?

Normal solar panels are very dark, and opaque. They absorb most of the light that hits them. A standard solar panel is about 5½ × 3⅓ feet in size, or about 18⅓ square feet, nearly black, and opaque, and in direct sunlight, produces about 300 to 350 watts of electrical power.

Transparent solar panels, clear enough to be used as windows, would be letting most of the light energy that they could otherwise capture just get away. There simply is no way that such panels will ever produce enough electrical power to be worth fussing with.

This is just a plain stupid idea.