Comments on: MIT’s Crazy 3-D Solar “Tower of Power”

By: EV Wireless Charging Gets $4 Million Funding from DOE

EV Wireless Charging Gets $4 Million Funding from DOE — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 13:22:11 +0000

[…] terms of national energy and environmental policies, when coupled with the adoption of solar power and other forms of renewable energy more EV’s on the road will mean less reliance on fossil […]

By: Zachary Shahan

Zachary Shahan — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 20:14:00 +0000

My guess is that in some locations/applications, the benefits will be useful. But as far as making a dent in other parts of the industry, I’m holding my poker chips.

By: Bob_Wallace

Bob_Wallace — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 02:51:00 +0000

You don’t necessarily get more yield from a particular amount of space.

Stacking panels will increase the amount of shadow behind the stack. You’ll have to install stacks further apart than you would have had to with ‘one level’ panels.

It’s something that people deal with doing multiple rows of ground or flat-roof mounted panels. There’s probably a formula floating around.

You may get more output during the summer months when the Sun is higher, but you’ll get killed in the spring, fall and, especially, winter.

The people who are fronting this idea pretty much jumped the gun. From the linked article…

“A next step is to study a collection of such towers, accounting for the shadows that one tower would cast on others at different times of day. ”

Why would they tout their concept if they hadn’t checked the shadow problem? That’s something that would only take minutes to determine. It’s no big deal to find out how far a shadow extends during the year. As soon as the shadow starts climbing up the further back tower panels start dropping out and killing system performance.

Or you’re stuck with the expense of putting an inverter on every panel. And losing power.

By: RobS

RobS — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 06:18:00 +0000

You don’t get more than if they were laid out on the ground you get slightly less but you get more than if flat panels were laid put in the same footprint, it maximises yield from a particular land or roof space. This seems useless because since their invention solar panels have always been the most expensive part of a system so using multiple panels to see a small increase in yield couldn’t be justified. This is starting to see interest because panels are now falling to $0.80 per watt compared to $10 per watt in 2000. For utility scale systems the land now comprises ~60% of new system costs. With la d now being a larger cost than panels it now makes more sense to squeeze more energy out of the land you have.

By: Bill_Woods

Bill_Woods — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 04:57:00 +0000

“… you have just boosted the overall efficiency of the solar panels by up to 20 times, …”

That doesn’t seem to be correct, from the press release and the abstract. They’re getting more energy per unit of ground area, because they’re stacking multiple panels over it, but I don’t see that they’re getting more per panel. And the towers will be shading the adjacent area, so I don’t see how an array of them would collect more energy than if the same amount of panels were all laid out on the ground.

By: Parth

Parth — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 03:40:00 +0000

“caused thousands of solar power researchers around the globe to smack their heads and wonder why they never thought of that”

Hmm, I’m not so sure about that. From quickly skimming the paper, this isn’t anything innovative in terms of what solar power researchers do (i.e. higher efficiency materials etc.), but rather an interesting approach by architects to maximize space usage using whatever current solar tech is available.

Still, a very cool idea…though I wonder how well they’ll perform in the market. The nice thing about flat panels is that you can simply put them on your roof. I’m not sure if you can put these 3d structures on roofs. Also I might be mistaken, but it doesn’t seem like they took into account that you can’t simply put these structures side to side. You need to leave space between the structures as to maximize the amount of light absorbed and I wonder if that makes the 3d structures redundant when you’re trying to cover large areas.

Nevertheless, glad to see architects getting in the action