Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

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>> other stuff that was going to use labor anyway (shingles, asphalt, siding, etc)

No. None of that ever works. Everyone has the "good idea" of cramming PV into some other product thinking that doing so will somehow reduce labor. It never does. Solar shingles are typical. They sound great but in reality require hundreds or thousands of electrical connections all spread over the moving flexible surface that is a wooden roof. You will be chasing electrical gremlins the moment the temperature shifts. And fixing any of those gremlins will involve penetrating the waterproofing, the core function of any roof. It is far easier to build and maintain a normal roof and then mount dedicated panels atop. The same too with siding. Want solar walls? Build normal walls and hang solar panels on them.

It is like building a computer into a desk. It seems like a great idea that will save space and keep your office tidy. There are lots of youtube videos about such builds. In reality, it is expensive on day one and extremely inconvenient to maintain in the long run. Nobody ever does it twice.

Part of why it doesn't work, though, is that PV is too expensive.

If it's cheap enough, you can tolerate failures and poor illumination of the panels for things like fence panels or whatever.

I do agree you need big panels to not have excessive labor from connections.

>> If it's cheap enough, you can tolerate failures

But you just can't. When you are using lots of tiny things all connected through each other then you have less tolerance for faults, not more. One bad connector can mean that an entire run of shingles is dark. So even a 1% fault rate, if you have a few hundred connections in each run of shingles, means that basically nothing is connected. Or think of a long fence. One broken bit can mean the entire fence after that break is no longer connected. You're just setting yourself up for a long day of checking connectivity only to have the fence shift again.

Most of what you say was anticipated by the comment you replied to:

> > I do agree you need big panels to not have excessive labor from connections.

> You're just setting yourself up for a long day of checking connectivity only to have the fence shift again.

If only we had ways to make long runs of wiring relatively reliable.

My point is: there's second order effects: expensive panels need to have as high of a capacity factor as possible; high capacity factor constrains installations and increases other costs. If you cut 2/3rds of the cost of the panel away, other costs decrease, too, and more types of installation become reasonable.

There are also non-linearities. Obviously there are some regions in in the cheapness/efficiency/durability space that vastly increase the practical ability to deploy these things. If we had 99% efficient panels that cost pennies per square meter, and last for years, then lots more applications could potentially open up. A 50% cheaper panel may not unlock that now, but it brings us closer.

Even if we never get to any of these thresholds, its worth a shot. Cleaning up the energy sector needs to be all-hands-on-deck and people researching this stuff doesn't preclude policy changes (subsidies, federal job guarantee/new CCC, etc.) to address the labor angle.

PEV in metal roofing seems more workable.

Attaching to the roof requires screwing fasteners through the metal in fairly arbitrary positions based on the underlying framing. It’s not going to be easy to have electric connections.

Normally folks only put holes through the lifted up/corrugated sections (so as to minimize the likelihood of leaking) so all the area in-between (the larger flat sections) are where the electronics/solar arrays would go.

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