Photovoltaic Solar Panels (1905)

For storage, there are many other ways to store energy and that too is driven by cost. Dumping heat into salts, basalt, etc. are all attractive propositions from a material cost point of view. Converting heat back into energy is somewhat inefficient however. But these systems are great for providing long term energy storage for e.g. heating systems needed in the winter.

Of course, winters in Nevada are pretty short and warm. I visited Las Vegas in the middle of the winter once. It was very warm. Reno is a bit colder but also has short winters.

We don't need low-tech options. We have all that tech that we can use right now. Instead, the non-viability of all low-tech options is exactly what led us into this grave global warming situation we are.

However, when I last did the calculations, passive CSP is much better at hot water generation for industrial applications - leather/textile factories need a lot of hot water or steam. CSP can at least cheaply pre-heat if not fully heat or boil the water.

Once you start storing lower temp heat, not intended to generate electricity, then its totally abstracted from the input, you just use grid electricity which can be solar, wind, nuclear or industrial waste heat and locate them anywhere, not just desert locations.

But more importantly, there are no real geopolitical or environmental problems with lithium. It's abundant and recyclable. We're using it because the alternatives are so bad for the environment. Literally killing people, plus animals and ecosystems.

I don't think it would take many drones to eliminate this, though. Birds don't like coming near drones and when you have a huge tower with oversight of the region you need to protect, finding the birds well before they combust seems tractable.

The question revolves more around whether they are actually recycled.

From the article: >Silicon cells can only be recycled by a combination of thermal, chemical, and metallurgical steps. That is an expensive process with an impact on the environment. Although you can find statements claiming that around 10% of solar panels are “recycled", they are more likely to be “downcycled”. The modules are shredded, and the resulting material is used as a filler material in asphalt and cement industries.

PS. OTOH I wasn't aware that Si based panels might have lead in them, too (even though much less?) as per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32283432

According to the article, the best iteration of Cove's invention achieved 5% solar-to-electricity conversion using an antimony alloy. Modern silicon solar panels achieve over 20% solar-to-electricity conversion using silicon. Silicon is non-toxic and is more than a million times as abundant in the Earth's crust as antimony [1]. Silicon solar cells do not contain toxic compounds. Modules made with silicon cells may contain toxic compounds if they were older ones manufactured (pre-RoHS) with lead based solder or glass frit containing lead, but the same issue would apply to antimony based solar modules; the cell material is not related to the soldering technology. Every other criticism of silicon given in the article (mining, complex machines, global supply chains, fossil fuels used upstream) would equally apply to a hypothetical antimony-based solar industry of comparable scale.

Low Tech Magazine is a great source for introducing modern audiences to old forgotten technologies. But it has apparently run short of forgotten technologies that may actually be better and has fallen into a rut of exaggerating contemporary-technology drawbacks and minimizing the problems of old technologies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...

However, a major area of advancement on the horizon is multi-junction panels. These stack different semiconductors which each harness different wavelengths of light to harness more of the sun's relatively wide band of light.

I'm not sure exactly what junction chemistries we'll see in these going forward, but I'm sure the industry will be trying out just about every configuration we can manufacture.

If you photoshopped the man out, you wouldn't also add the wire and tape.

Look at the reflection of the man in the solar panels. The reflection is great - far better than what I would expect from 1905 technology. Also, the caption of that photo says it "contains Mr. Cove", so the photographer included a picture of a human in the picture.

I suppose the original may have included a human, but not that human.

This is pretty much a solved problem.