Japan unveils first solar super-panel | Hacker News Reader

Japan unveils first solar super-panel

japanenergyevent.com

79 pointselsewhen42 comments

This article is a bad rewrite of this one from a month ago:

https://www.ecoticias.com/en/japan-super-solar-panel/12474/

> Scientists in Japan have been discussing the possibility of using a material called perovskite for solar panels

> The perovskite tandem cell has a theoretical efficiency limit of 43 per cent, while the silicon-based cell has a theoretical efficiency limit of 29 percent. It is speculated that these solar panels will be able to produce 20 gigawatts of electricity by 2040

> Under Section 0 of Japan’s revised energy plan, the Ministry of Industry prioritises the use of perovskite solar cells over the less efficient silicon-based solar cells of yore.

> Japanese company, Sekisui Chemical Co., with the help of the Japanese government, is now working towards developing advanced perovskite solar cells for circulation in the global market in the 2030s.

Thank you, I couldn't make heads or tails of that press release

I like solar, but this is a press release with almost zero details. Not a product with an efficiency rating and price tag.

Perovskites: non-silicon based semiconductors, in theory much cheaper for solar panels, in practice have lifetime issues.

It's a sales writeup:

"Japan unveils world’s first solar super-panel: More powerful than 20 nuclear reactors"

How can a "super-panel" be more powerful than twenty nuclear reactors? By letting salespeople write stuff, it seems.

Perovskite cells still don't make much sense for the majority of applications (and I suspect they never will): they're expensive, generally use toxic materials, and degrade much more quickly than silicon panels. Silicon panels are cheap, non-toxic, and long-lasting and plenty efficient enough for 90% of use cases.

Agreed, thought if we could get silicon + perovskite working well with stable perovskite that combined efficiency might be worthwhile.

Oxford PV say they have some that work ok being put into commercial use on a small scale - https://www.oxfordpv.com/news/20-more-powerful-tandem-solar-...

Only 20? Why not 50? 100? These are rookie numbers. As long as you're just making shit up, I want a solar panel more powerful than 9000 nuclear reactors.

I want one over 9000 nuclear reactors!

There’s no unveiling right? This is just an announcement that they’ll build perovskite solar cells and sell them in 2030s.

> Supported by the government, Sekisui Chemical Co. is now developing advanced PSC modules for their future application to a broad market in the 2030s.

Additionally, if they currently target the 2030s, there absolutely no guarantee that they will ever sell them. The technology is in the research phase and as such may well turn out to be not a viable product.

An awful headline, but interesting to hear about a perovskite push. I’m not deep into the solar world, but they always seemed like something with potential from the limited reading I’ve done.

Besides the words "Japan" and "solar", the headline has nothing at all to do with the content of the article or technical reality, and sounds more like the beginning of an anime story arc. Like someone prompted an AI with "every headline should have a power level over 9000".

>Renewable energy in Japan will receive a *seismic shift*

Maybe not the best analogy for the most earthquake-prone country in the world?

It would suck to build a massive solar panel array only for it to break after an earthquake. Hopefully they are seismic proofed like many buildings there.

Solar PV arrays are not really contiguous structures like buildings. A major earthquake could certainly cause some damage, but the fundamental design of the arrays makes them much less sensitive to seismic activity than any building.

Yes maybe something along the lines of "Japan will receive a giant monster of a solar panel".

Sharing this episode without vouching for its accuracy.

   How Record Breaking Perovskites Are Here NOW [2024-12-17]
   Undecided with Matt Ferrell
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEgkTnkNhRs

(I feel like Matt Ferrell does solid reporting and analysis, but I'm still undecided. Any one know otherwise?)

My noob takeaway, from Ferrell and others, is that solar cells will continue to improve (per cost-learning curve) for the foreseeable future. It's no longer the bottleneck.

We now need to focus on the current bottlenecks. Like policy, building codes, installation costs, inverters, coercing utilities and their regulators into accelerating grid improvements (to accommodate new generation, storage, and customers), etc.

Lastly, per Jenny Chase (Bloomberg NEF), we urgently need to double down on renewable competitors to solar, like wind and advanced geothermal. To keep those tech stacks in the running (cost of capital, ROI). So they remain commercially available for use cases not addressed by solar. Lest they be left behind and therefore more likely to stay on fossil carbon.

> At the center of this strategy is Japan’s position as the second-largest iodine producer in the world, a necessary ingredient in the manufacturing of perovskite solar cells.

Perovskites are a type of crystalline material, [most common are] methylammonium lead iodide perovskite (MAPbI3).. researchers have found that gaseous iodine produced by MAPbI3 make them inherently unstable.. and may not be a fixable issue.

[2017] https://www.asianscientist.com/2017/01/tech/stability-iodine...

The article's title, in particular use of the word "first," isn't supported by the content. The title suggests a change or improvement in the technical status quo ante, but the article itself only describes a quantitative scaling up of existing technology, which is Perovskite panels, nothing new. No change is presented, only its scale of deployment.

In my experience, no matter how many panels you install, Solar can cover power consumption 30-40% of its max capacity. Winter, night, bad weather will eat the rest. To go beyond the 30-40% you will need energy store or alternative sources.

This is still great but not a 100% solution.

Most people who care about independence should be concerned with having a system that can run in island mode but at least 90% of systems installed today are grid tied and cannot function as an island

I care about indepedence, but I also care about scale.

It makes absolutely zero sense for me, a homeowner in New Mexico, to have my own storage facilities capable of getting me through a winter heating season (using air-source heat pumps). It makes much more sense for the storage to be centralized, scaled and managed, while my own PV array contributes to it during the summer time.

At scale things look very different. A great deal of nighttime energy use occurs because electricity prices are cheaper at night. Panels to the east of you get sunlight earlier in the day and panels to the west of you get it later in the day. Tracking panels get sunlight across a larger fraction of the day.

Output from panels on a single home are highly correlated seeing large drop offs from an individual cloud, where solar farms across a wide geographic area experience different weather systems. It wouldn’t be cost effective but with absolutely zero storage the US could get 70+% of its electricity from solar. Add wind and hydro to the mix and you can get quite far without grid storage, but adding options lowers costs so there’s an optimal amount of grid storage for any given energy mix.

> A great deal of nighttime energy use occurs because electricity prices are cheaper at night.

Utility companies gave away streetlights, security lights, etc., because they would raise the electricity usage generated at times of lower demand. This minimized the need to spin up and spin down generating plants and let them make money on what would have been otherwise wasted power.

Nighttime lighting doesn't consume all of the excess power generated at night. Utilities have cleverly shifted power consumption loads to later times through TOD pricing for residential and industrial customers.

It's no secret that I'm a big advocate for turning down lights at night. Increasing dependency on solar and batteries would make running electricity-intensive processes and industries cheaper during the daytime and reduce the need for baseload power at night.

> Panels to the east of you get sunlight earlier in the day and panels to the west of you get it later in the day.

I sometimes think about a sci-fi world in which there is a globally interconnected power grid, so solar panels in daylight India can provide power to Spain. And then when the sun shines in Spain, it can generate solar power for California

This model prioritizes generation [0] over storage, by dramatic reliance on transmission systems. That's not inherently a stupid thing to do, but given the reality of global and even national politics, most places are prioritizing storage [1] over generation and limiting transmission goals to national needs.

[0] because India would need to generate not just it's daytime requirements, but also Spain's overnight requirements, and so forth.

[1] because each nation/grid system would need to store significant excess generation to make it through the night/storm systems etc.

the perovskite material is currently impossible to put into service as it degrades instantly when exposed to ambient conditions, and there is no word yet on a perfect hermetic sealing technology to protect it. so this should read as an attempt to leverage the current anti china (market cornered for good,cheap, solar), into a pivot towards something that has been stuck on almost for 15 years now

It is so full of hyperbole but hardly any useful fact!

The "Cold Fusion" vibes are strong with this one.

> This makes traditional silicon-based panels quite impractical in countries that are densely populated, like Japan, when only large spaces can accommodate them.

Bullshit. Japan is full of homes with silicon-based panels on their roofs and they work quite well. See this neighborhood in Ota City/Gunma for example (use satellite view).

https://maps.app.goo.gl/7Xbi28BNuHSuV4wt7

This is a neighborhood full of people who work at the local Subaru factory who IIRC got a special deal on rooftop panels, but rooftop PV is still not unusual in Japan as a whole.

Aspiration for 20 GW of power by 2040, or in 15 years time.

In the period 1980-1990, I repeat in a 50% shorter period commencing forty years ago, France installed 34 GW of nuclear.

All I want is for someone advocating renewables over nuclear to give me a single example of a buildout of available-in-winter power exceeding that target with the forty years of investment available.

Or to agree that we have, fundamentally and quite deliberately, become worse at generating carbon-free energy.

Both wind and solar have deployed faster than nuclear ever did globally.

And that's in Wh terms, you specify capacity but I guess you'd be annoyed if I replied that renewables beat that capacity easily, like China deploying 80GW of wind just last year.

Here's an article looking at per capita increases show that France and Sweden did really well but renewables are accelerating past their records:

https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/solar-wind-nuclear...

The growth of renewables in France (!) over the last five years matches the best periods of nuclear rollout in Japan and the USA.

except nuclear was prevented from growing by governments so let's not talk about how one grows faster than another

It's all part of the problem that has to be solved. You can't pretend that nuclear is better technically and that is the end of the story. As long as governments regulate and as long as people motivate governments to slow-roll more nuclear, nuclear generation will have a serious competitive disadvantage.

That disadvantage will manifest as cost and slow growth, among other objective measures.

It's never succeeded without government backing. Most of the early reactors co-evolved with weapons programmes.

I’d be open to making a prediction (on longbets.org) that in the 2025 to 2034 timeframe, more solar, wind, and batteries get deployed globally than any 10 year period of your choice for nuclear. And if you want to limit that to winter time capacity that’s fine by me.

The current buildout of solar/wind/batteries is definitely faster than anything we ever saw with nuclear.

> we have, fundamentally and quite deliberately, become worse at generating [nuclear] energy

Yes. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

Nuclear has a negative learning curve: it gets more expensive over time. Solar gets (spectacularly) cheaper over time. You might not like it but that's what the built infrastructure and its invoices tell us.

I'm very interested to see if China's current nuclear power generation build out manages to climb onto the cost-learning curve.

> Japan unveils world’s first solar super-panel: More powerful than 20 nuclear reactors

> Under its revised energy plan, the Ministry of Industry now prioritizes PSCs on Section 0 of its plan wherein Japan aims to develop PSC sections generating 20 gigawatts of electricity equivalent to 20 nuclear reactors by fiscal 2040.

Wtf is this headline. Why are journalists doing this shit.

Press release, innit. Ministry of Industry releases press statement, gets almost automatically copy-pasted into various news feeds. Costs basically nothing to publish.

They aren’t. This isn’t a news site, it’s a press release aggregator.

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