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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

Light Reflection, which is one of the problem with Solar panel installation in cities areas. You could literally beam light into other buildings windows.

I wonder if Organic Solar Cells fix this?

Or some day where we could produce Windows Glasses that absorb some of the UV and turns it into electricity for cheap. I know we have the tech but it seems still to expensive for now.

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In cities, I don't see how light reflection off solar would be worse than the reflection of conventional glass surfaces, which are ubiquitous already and which sometimes cause problems (google "London death ray"). Photovoltaic installations tend to be uniformly oriented, so that concave mirror problems cannot occur.

In the countryside, things are different: you have massive installations close to ground level, often at hillside slopes, and if you happen to drive on a road towards one of those at that special time of day/year when the reflection goes straight into oncoming traffic you are left with staying calm and hoping for the best. Happened to me on an unrestricted stretch of Autobahn, slowing down where everybody else is also blinded would be a very, very bad idea. As I said, stay calm and hope for the best. I could really see a case for building codes to get updated to prevent such things (the position of the sun over the course of the year is perfectly predictable) and maybe even a revival of heliostat installations for sites where this can be an issue.

I don't think light reflection is at all a problem with solar panel installation in city areas. Buildings are already reflective, and mirror surfaces on glass towers have been the fashion for decades. Even if light pollution laws exist, they are only in effect at night, and the usual solution is blinds or curtains rather than blocking the source.

Reflected light is lost energy. As long as a solar panel looks like a mirror, it is not efficient. When you will see a solar panel that is very dark, then it might be efficient. I think this is what the parent poster is referring to.

Solar cells only absorb on specific wavelengths. They also lose efficiency if they get too hot. It actually makes sense to reflect away the wavelengths you can't use to keep the panels cooler.

Solar panels do not look like mirrors. Like the first hit on google images --> https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/wacotrib.com/co...

Not first hit then: https://www.google.com/search?q=solar+panels+in+sun&client=f...:

Are you serious? 1. It depends on the exact search terms used. 2. It is well known that google returns slightly different results depending on various factors such as physical (geo) location of searcher 3. Even your example is shows black panels as the second hit, and an obviously false color image as the first hit.

Hard to admit you were wrong, right?

Only because I am not. Troll.

It's expensive and coloured instead of totally transparent but it indeed exists outside of the lab. They did build a wall out of them in my former campus:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dye-sensitized_solar_cell

https://actu.epfl.ch/news/epfl-s-campus-has-the-world-s-firs...

Non-native English speaker here: Is there a word to describe something which is transparent but alters colour?

Translucent is somewhat close to what you're looking for.

Tinted?

Try dichroic if you don’t mean translucent.

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