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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

While this is a very interesting and ingenious development, what's needed for greater deployment are lower costs per unit of energy. Increasing efficiency will reduce the cost of land, but land isn't typically a huge factor in solar deployments. In this NREL analysis, land acquisition gets put into "Other Soft Costs" along with permitting, inspection, interconnection, sales tax, engineering, procurement, construction, developer overhead, and net profit:

https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy17osti/68925.pdf

And that broad category is ~25% of costs.

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If you could multiply the efficiency of a given solar cell by 4, all else being equal, you would also reduce the manufacturing cost by 75%.

From other comments, I am guessing this result doesn't give anything like that but one should keep in mind greater efficiency certainly could give great payoffs.

And installation costs, which are enormous.

We shouldn't discourage progress just because it doesn't fit exactly into todays model of the world.

I certainly didn't mean to discourage this at all!

But I think it's important to point out that even though people often disparage solar photovoltaic for having low "efficiency," that metric is not an impediment to its broad deployment or great utility to us.

Sure it is. Lower efficiency means you need more panels, larger panels, and more support infrastructure. It limits where it can be deployed and makes it less competitive.

And the need for more/larger panels and support structures will only be a win if overall, the costs decrease.

The cost is what makes the decision for deployment, not the efficiency. Perhaps this efficiency makes 2-axis tracking economical enough to justify, and then it gets deployed, but in the end the efficiency wasn't as important as the improved costs.

I'm no expert, but if the panels now generate additional energy/money that offsets the cost of adding these nano-tubes, doesn't that mean you can meet your power needs with less hardware, or generate extra money to sell back to the grid? It seems like what matters is whether these nanotubes generate more value than they cost.

To use a Computer Science paradigm. Performance (Efficiency) is not the end goal, but performance (efficiency) acts like currencies so that you can 'buy' other things from it.

Yes, and since installation of home solar panels is a small fraction of the total installation cost, reducing the overall size of the project could save money even if the panels themselves are a lot more expensive. https://earthtechling.com/solar-panel-cost/ estimates they are only 15% of the total cost of a home solar power system.

Not really. The difference in the land cost is effectively negligible. At this point (and it has been this way for many years), the limit in solar deployments is cost of panels and storage limitations.

There are vast chunks of empty land in AZ, NV, NM, TX, CA that could easily fit enough solar panels (each) to power all of the US. The issue is cost of panels and no base load supply.

Isn't this pretty different for utility-style solar installations versus the rest? For the former, land cost is clearly a variable. But especially for home PV, it seems like land cost is fixed.

There are multiple models (markets) even in today's world, and they have different needs and constraints. When you have lots of space but not a lot of money, you probably optimize for least money per unit of energy. When you have money but limited space (skyscraper rooftop, spacecraft), you might want the most energy per unit of area. And there are times when you need a secondary non-grid solution for redundant backup, so reliability matters more than other factors.

Different technologies with different pros/cons could be best for different markets.

I'd expect most of the costs scales linearly with the number of panels: land, installation, maintenance, interconnect, so this should translate pretty directly to cost savings.

Welp, seems like a 4x improvement in efficiency would result in a lower cost per unit of energy.

Not all applications involve land.

Fixed size applications like rooftop would see a multiplier.

And before that, we'll see this used for satellites - if there's not too much of a weight penalty.

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