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Silicon plus perovskite solar reaches 34 percent efficiency
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2024
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All these news about in-development technologies in the renewable energy sector are causing real fatigue for me. This would be great news if it was commercialy viable, but it isn't. It never is. If all the news about amazing new battery technologies were viable, we'd have 10x the capacity by now with cells that have zero fire risk and last 10 million cycles. But it's always laboratory conditions.
Gonna be honest, I kinda stopped paying attention to news like this, it's a flood of theoretical advancements. I care about it when I can buy it.
That being said, obviosuly the state-of-the-art technology has made significant advancements in the last 10 years, but it's been incremental (it always is) and nowhere near the numbers that are thrown around in reports and articles like this.
Adding on to what GreyEyedGhost said, since the year 2000 the price of solar power (per watt) has fallen by more than 50x. Because of this huge drop in price the installed solar capacity has been doubling every 3 years. That means that in the time since 2020 we've built more solar capacity than we did in the previous 20 years combined.
If that's not good enough then idk. Imagine holding any other technology to that standard. The model T came out almost 100 years ago for an inflation adjusted price of $27,000 and with an MPG of 7.5. ICE cars today are better in a lot of other ways but they are not 50x cheaper and they are not 50x more fuel efficient than that.
You guys really seem to have a hard time to understand my point, so that's on me. Clearly I didn't explain it very well. First, look at my reply to GreyEyedGhost. Let me reemphasize from that post: I have never said or intended to imply that there were no advances made in the last 20 or 30 years. I have no idea why you keep bringing up long term (price) developments at all. It wasn't even about price at all, please go back and read my comment again.
Let's address your points: Of course stuff has gotten cheaper, as that's how "scale of production" works. That's how the price AND the "doubling of installed capacity every 3 years" were achieved. Nothing about that is a technological breakthrough, it's just production capacity you need for this.
Of course there were improvements in technology (solar efficiency, battery density and others, wind "stuff", ...). But none of those were anywhere near those claims that you read in these pseudo-news. It's a percent here or there. Look at the nice graph on Wikipedia. See how those lines go up very very little per year? Yet in the article that sparked this thread, it's a whopping 10%! Unfortunately, the cells fall apart when they get warm. No idea how a solar panel would ever get warm. But hey, let's make another headline claiming amazing gains, can't ever have enough of those!