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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

Unless this is also cheaper than traditional panels it will probably limited to niche markets. There is plenty of space to put solar panels already.

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I live on solar power and would definitely pay a premium for fewer solar panels that produce the same amount of power. There's a tropical storm coming through and I just had to pull them all down. I'm going to have to put them all back on Saturday.

Plus having the space back would be nice.

On the flip side, I think if they can make slightly more expensive panels with technologies like perovskites, but they are significantly more efficient, they will gain a lot of market share.

The solar panels themselves have become an minor portion of the cost of an install. At this point, the land area and labor install costs have become massive. If you can counter this with panels that are 25% more efficient than current commercialized panels and only 20% more expensive, you need to pay for much less area and labor to install and maintain them. Could be a huge win overall.

Manufactured products only get cheaper by scaling and improving the manufacturing process. You should know this because it's the reason why silicon photovoltaics have gotten cheaper after starting at some rather eye watering prices. Land is a finite resource with an extremely complex system of regulations, laws, ownership, uses and speculation built up over 10,000 years of history and any conversion of land for one purpose necessarily excludes it for many other purposes so there is massive competition over prime real-estate and many un-intended future consequences resulting from development.

Not worrying about land use when it comes to power generation is very, very much like not worrying about carbon emissions when it comes to power generation/transport/manufacturing "The atmosphere is enormous! Why should we worry about emissions when our current demand for power and transport is so tiny?"

If we covered the land we currently use to grow ethanol with panels we would be mostly done with the generation part of the energy transformation. Prime real estate is valuable, but there is a lot of nonprime space.

Panels have a limited lifetime. If in the future we figure that land becomes more valuable for some reason we can still replace them.

From the article: “the researchers believe their approach will continue to reduce the cost of solar and also make it the most sustainable form of renewable energy.”

And also from the article: "We believe that, over time, this approach could enable the photovoltaic devices to achieve far greater efficiencies, exceeding 45%"

So that's a lot more than the current solar panels.

Several other components of solar investment cost, beside land cost, scale with nr of panels. (Installation work, scaffolding, transport logistics, wiring, etc)

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