Comment by morphle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by morphle | Hacker News Reader

Efficiency as measured in the lab is the wrong metric for solar panels.

If you want to buy solar panels, you go for the Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE). It looks at the cost of electricity of the entire system over its lifetime. It takes interest on loans, cost of panels, inverters, installation cost, labour cost, insurance and the geographic location into account.

It turns out that in most cases a lower efficiency panel built cheaply is better, for example a bifacial panel upright on the ground instead of on a roof (lower labour cost) wins. Even old inefficient second hand panels can outperform a high efficiency solar panel over its lifetime.

We build $0,04 single chip solar cell MPPT inverters (72-122 per solar panel) that for various reasons yield 30% more electricity while also lowering manufacturing (less glass, smaller panels, cheaper inverters with higher efficiency, thinner wires) and installation cost.

We expect solar electricity cost to keep dropping far below 1 cent per kWh. Eventually we'll grow solar panels (for example from captured CO2) over the next decades with nanotech manufactoring methodes (atom by atom) until they will be virtually free, like plants. In this light, the Oxford efficiency metric for future solar panels might be bypassed by other cheaper systems that are less efficient.

You are correct of course. The main point of research like this is to drive development of panels forward. That helps to drive the cost of the panel down as well.

A similar argument can be made for almost any good, over the lifetime of the good, within an application category, second hand will often be better. However, in general, it is still useful better technology, so that newer models can be more efficient, which eventually trickle down to older models becoming more efficient.

You are referring to Wright’s Law [1].

For more than four decades, the price of solar panels declined by 20% with each doubling of global cumulative capacity[2], but you should check that with many more data sources, especially reputable or scientific sources.

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

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/learning-curve

But these kinds of things come down in price over time. This is just basic research, not commercialized. Another important metric is how much physical space is needed by the panels and higher efficiency means less space.

There’s never a single metric that you can use to decide “better” - it depends on the needs of the project.

All these kinds of solar cell systems come down in price over time, not just this Oxford PV research when (and if) it goes into mass production.

I agree that there is no single metric to decide "better". But in most cases properly calculated LCOE, the cost of a kWh over the lifetime of the solar panel system is the single metric that matters. Because why pay more for electricity?

Only in special projects, like solar panels in space, cost is not the most important metric.

From what I’ve read, panels are sometimes only a quarter of the price of a residential solar installation. In that case, if the panel cost twice the price for only 25% more power, it might be worth it.

Indeed.

For example utility scale solar can be less than 30% the cost of a residential solar installation, but also adds profit margins, interest rates and distribution costs to a residential customer.

In the later Ringworld books Larry Niven introduced solar 'panels' sprayed onto any surface and wirelessly broadcasting power. The DIY installation costs would now be almost zero.

What’s the cost of domestic installation on a new house? I was looking at some builders adding a roof the other day, putting panels on at the same time wouldn’t add much in labour.

It is cheaper, especially if you build the modules into the roof, as you then don't need the roof materials. It still suffers a little from being specialist, and so more expensive regardless of material costs.

But it’s a tiny amount, the work isn’t that specialist or hard to learn, the scaffolding is already in place. One or two days labor at most?

The cost of domestic installation on a new house varies wildly worldwide. In the USA labour and permitting cost dominate, rooftop solar installation costs are almost double what they are in Australia or the Netherlands, where they have the highest percentage of rooftop solar installation.

Well, for example if your roof isn’t big enough to generate power for the building, you don’t have a choice but to use more efficient panels to minimize your grid energy dependence.

If you’re willing to put multiple MPPTs on a panel, then I imagine the benefits of higher efficiency multilayer panels are actually amplified a bit. You can spend a bit more on the panel, but you need fewer panels for the same capacity, and panels are getting cheap enough that the balance of the system (mounting, wires between panels, etc) are quite significant.

Who is the “we” that builds these tiny MPPTs? I’m curious.

"We" is my small 20 year old Metamorph Research Institute and our spinoff companies Morphle Inc and Fiberhood Coöperation. Apologies, my websites are down and I still need to publish the science papers on the tiny MPPT chips and microcontrollers. We also design the largest chips [1] and I build Enernet microgrids [2] based on our chips.

We are chip designers and made a 1 dollar cent 64 bit 8 core microprocessor with MPPT and bidirectional buck/boost flyback inverters built-in. This nanoinverter can take the <0.5V of a single solar cell and convert it to (for example) 6V. Because these nanoinverters are networked over the DC conducters to each other, they can aggregate their output voltage to 48V, 110V or much higher so the conductors become much thinner. With all the power transistors, opamps, capacitors and diodes integrated into the chip you save more than $50 on discreet component MPPT and microinverters per panel while also boosting the MPPT per cell thus mitigating almost all shading losses.

The same chip can also charge/discharge (lithium and other) batteries. You can get 20 times more cycling charges out of Li-ion this way but you also save on the charging inverters. A single nano-inverter chip can take the output of one or more solar cells and charge li-ion cell, saving you half the number of nano-inverter chip in a total system.

I still need $50K investment to start the mass production of the new model 180nm chips, that will drop the manufacturing cost to 1 cent. Sadly Ycombinator won't fund me as they dislike single founders and dislike funding hardware startups.If you know anyone who can help us with sales or funding please send me an email.

A competitor already manufactors solar panels with microinverters for strings of cells (6-8 per panel) but their panels cost so much more that it is not worth it. Our nanoinvertors are two orders of magnitude cheaper.

[1] https://vimeo.com/731037615

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Merik-Voswinkel/publica...

Do you have a spec sheet for your MPPT chip that you can share? The white paper and video presentation that you linked appear to be completely unrelated.

I am writing the datasheet for the reconfigurable MPPT bidirectional buck/boost flyback invertor microcontroller SoC chips as we speak [1]. Do you have an email I can send it to?

The older white paper is very much related, it describes the large power router chips, the MPPT nano-invertor microcontroller chips for individual solar cells are just a recent adddition to our system of line chips.

The video presentation is about the wafer scale integration, a million core giant version of the same microprocessor as the tiny MPPT chips, so they are very much related.

[1] Morphle MNI003 datasheet:

input voltage: 0.01V-6.01V (solar cell or battery input)

output voltage: 0.6V-12V (aggregated or single output)

can power up from solar cell or battery, 0,02W

External inductor (30-100 μH) needed.

Builtin 8 opamps, 4 power mosfets, 3 capacitors, 3 diodes

Forms a programmable reconfigurable MPPT inverter or a Li-ion (all 6 chemistries) battery charger and discharger.

180 Mhz 64 Bit Microprocessor made from 8 bit ALU slices. Can be configured at runtime as 8 x 8b it, 4 x 16 bit, 2 x 32 bit and 1 x 64 bit processors. Microcode processor executes X86-64, ArmV8, Risc-V instructions and Python and Squeak bytecodes natively.

4K OTP memory

16K SRAM

SPI interface to external flash

one-wire network over power input and output wire two-wire 10baseT ethernet to wire all inverters into networks up to 10240 microcontrollers

networked MNI003 chips can aggregate output voltages up to 240V DC

Thanks; I'm working on products in this area and not especially satisfied by the parts available. Especially as Analog seems to be abandoning their micro-MPPT IC product line. My email is jacob at jbaylessconsulting dot ca.

One of the common issues with solar micro-MPPT is EMI emissions. Have you tested for compliance with emitted radio-frequency noise standards?

Yes and no. If you run the inverters or network at 100Khz up to 1 Mhz you get much different EMI than if you run them at 1 Khz. The inductor and ADC also play a role. We will know this only after we mass produce the chip, my test chips and prototypes (with RP2040 and Padauk PMS150) have similar but not the same EMI emissions.

- We could package the chip, for example wrap it entirely with the metal inductor. That works as a faraday cage and block the emissions. But will this raise the price?

- You put the chip between the solar cell and the (flat) wires. That works as a faraday cage and block the emissions. Will the solar panel maker do this?

- You could have solar cells without the panel, think fo a CD size solar cell encased in plastic just as a CD is a metal foil encased in plastic. Now you can wrap the chip and block the emissions. You can hang the cell from the wires (in a tree or on the distribution wire like christmas lights)

I forgot to mention a single chip has three inverters in it for three solar cells or batteries or a combination of two cells and one battery.

There are 6 ADC's on board.

The 8 bit cores are very much like the I/O processors of the RP2040 Raspberry Pico chip

> We are chip designers and made a 1 dollar cent 64 bit 8 core microprocessor with MPPT and bidirectional buck/boost flyback inverters built-in.

Attaching an MCU to an inverter isn’t exactly new technology. It’s not clear why you need a bidirectional buck/boost for solar, let alone an 8-core 64-bit MCU on every cell.

Do you have any technology that couldn’t be replicated by another chip designer company by combining their IP blocks and sending it through their fab queue?

The problem with a “1 cent” chip (or $0.04 or a dollar depending on which comment I read) is that it’s a negligible part of the overall cost. The price of the packaging, magnetics, testing, and integration into the panel will eclipse that by orders of magnitude. If a single-founder company could do it with only $50K investment, then any of the big players could have done it years ago unless you’re in possession of some patents that can’t be worked around.

The above claims of producing “30% more” energy also don’t hold up, given that it would require current systems to be less than 77% efficient (a number that was surpassed long ago)

>Attaching an MCU to an inverter isn’t exactly new technology

No, its nothing special. Texas Instruments, Analog Devices and many others sell such chips for decades for several dollars each. What makes our chips (Microcontroller SoC) special is the $0,01 price and the high speed network between them so you can aggregate/balance/coordinate the inverter output voltage and the fully programmable inverter with all components in the chip except the inductor (a small coil).

The bidirectional buck/boost is to charge/discharge battery cells individually, for solar cells we just need a unidirectional boost inverter.

>8-core 64-bit MCU Sorry for the confusion, I could not edit my mistake. It is an single core 64 bit processor (ARM, X-86, Risc-V, bytecode and microcode) but reconfigurable to 8x8bit (for I/O processors like the RP2040 Raspberry pico), 4x16bit or 2x32bit or combinations like 4x8bit plus 1x32bit). The reconfiguration of the 8 bit slices is done with our special kind of FPGA fabric that we call Morphle Logic [1]

>Do you have any technology that couldn’t be replicated?

Only special physics knowledge. Our software. But nothing that they could not reverse engineer in a few weeks.

>then any of the big players could have done it years ago

Yes they could and they have. Their designs are pretty bad though, especially the microcontroller parts. And they just charge way too much for them. The Chinese companies that make the panels have not yet cloned their chips.

>a negligible part of the overall cost. The price of the packaging, magnetics, testing

Wrong. Our package is the cheapest with just two or 6 solder balls on the bare die, no package no pins. Testing, magnetics are no factor.

>and integration into the panel will eclipse that No, the chips are in the place where the solar cell wires attach to each other already, the silicon sliver of material makes the standard wireing slightly cheaper.

>claims of producing “30% more” energy also don’t hold up

This is rounded estimated number from several science papers about maximum MPPT yield improvements and separately from wiring cells in parallel. Its certainly not my claim, to calculate this number scientifically you have to do this for every individual cell and panel on every different geographic location.

[1] https://github.com/fiberhood/MorphleLogic/blob/main/README_M...

Land, and space in general, also costs money. Higher efficiency cells get more energy per unit area. So the effect on LCOE depends on how big that factor is.

Indeed. LCOE means taking all cost factors into account, not just efficiency or land cost.

Rarely does a LCOE calculation cover all these costs, so the published numbers are still hard to compare.

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