This approach surely reduces land usage but what is the output per acre?
I’d be really surprised if it’s higher than with tilted modules.
I'm surprised this surprises people... Every electronics hobbyist knows that electronics are cheap as dirt while any kind of box, mount, rail or whatever is BY REALLY FAR the most expensive part of a project, even when buying massivly mass produced cheap Chinese junk.
On the other hand, the incidence for a flat mounted panel beyond 37 degrees of latitude on the winter solstice is greater than 60 degrees, and it's not clear (to me at least) how well the ARC on an average panel will continue working after years of outdoor usage. My guess is reflection is probably a real issue, but not a stopper unless one is already in a marginal situation.
I'm at 54N and my output has been 0 for the past month as we've had a lot of snowfall. My panels are at 20 degrees, so even in the few sunny days we've had it's not been enough to melt the snow. A steeper angle probably would have cleared it a few times.
Usually the beginning of the year has more sun but it's colder, so I'll see what happens then.
[1] For a sufficiently large area so that effects on the edge are negligible.
A tilted solar panel casts a shadow that is bigger than its actual area. Mounting the panel flush to the ground means it casts a shadow exactly equal to its area.
The shadow represents the captured sunlight so the first panel covers more surface area than the second panel, which allows you to reduce the number of panels to cover the same amount of surface area. The entire point of this article is that you can just put the saved costs into buying more solar panels.
Used solar panels are very cheap but usually only the solar panels are replaced and the mounts are kept and fitted with new panels. So for companies that want to use used panels their primary cost is actually in the mounting hardware and not the panels.
presumably that was 15¢ per peak watt but the article doesn't actually say
There is hourly data if you are interested but even Jan 1 the panels produce for ~7-8 hours. The 3 hour around noon it's about 1/2 the output for the day (for Jan 1).
That's a little harsher than reality. You get a very pretty bell curve. I have a flat panel on the roof of my RV and I track the output over time. I'm not 100% how much of the loss in output is because the incidence to the panel is changing, or because the light from the sun is going through more atmosphere. Probably a little of both, but in any case the panel is still plenty useful even when not pointed directly at the sun.
That might not always be a good tradeoff, but maybe at least some of the time it is.
> conventional solar technologies, which typically require five to 10 acres of land per megawatt of capacity. Erthos claims that its mounting scheme requires less than 2.5 acres per megawatt.
It's all about the metric you choose. That's the true issue.
Would you have a forest of tall towers, or one really tall panel covered building, or something in between?