The economic efficiency of the panels is function of how many square meters they take, how expensive those square meters are, how costly it is to maintain and service the setup, how long they last, and how expensive it is to buy and install them, etc. It's not just about the watt/square meter.

Less moving parts means less complexity, less things that can break, and overall lower cost. 10% more power at 2x the cost is a net negative.

So, 20% more cost for 10% more power could be worth it even outside of space constrained applications.

Most smaller or behind the meter systems such as carports or rooftop mount solar use fixed tilt, and fixed tilt is also used in certain types of terrain or where costs for tracking are prohibitive.

Horizontal Single-Axis Solar Tracker’s are normally aligned north south, but shifting slightly off axis from pure north vs south can increase output in the morning or evening.

Tilted Single-Axis Solar Tracker’s are closer to the performance of dual Axis trackers, but have a similar question do you pick a tilt angle to maximize annual, summer, or winter output.

The repositioning of panels to capture more morning and evening light is a real thing. At the theoretical extreme it can make the PV output a square wave.

But, that actually makes the duck curve worse, since the duck curve is about the gradient of that switchover.

But the duck curve has never really been an actual problem so it's kind of academic. And if it was we have solutions to it.

To simplify if nuclear/geothermal or whatever was 10c/kWh if sold 24/7 but if wholesale prices are 1c for 8 hours a day then base load generation needs to make up 8x9c = 72c over the other 16 hours. Now prices would hypothetically jump from 10c for those 16 hours to 14.5c for those 16 hours.

It should still be a net savings for the average consumer, but if your business model is based on cheap electricity at 10am to 4am that might flip to 10am to 4pm.

I hadn’t thought of it until just now, but that should flatten the duck curve.

Another way to flatten the duck curve is to buy smaller inverters and more panels.

Unsure if this is what they're going for, but my initial question to myself was "Where does this make sense?" for the same reason you've highlighted.

The other thing is that solar concentrators burn the cells out quicker, it isn't magic free energy. Spending a significant amount more money just to squeeze out more power from the cells doesn't make sense for all applications.

I think they went under back when Tesla was false-advertising their roof prices to suppress competition in the market, but I’d love to be proven wrong.

  > solar concentrators burn the cells out quicker

Concentrators are actively trying to put more of the suns energy (an thus UV degradation) on the cells than can be achieved by simply aiming the cell at the sun. It greatly depends on the type of cell being used, with many technologies having a shorter lifespan than polycrystalline and monocrystalline cells, but they don't last forever out in the sun. A panel boxed up in a warehouse isn't likely to have discernible cell degradation in 10 years. A panel flat on a roof having off-axis light will degrade more, one on a solar tracker will degrade more still, with the benefit of more power per unit time during that shortened lifespan. Add in concentrators and it will degrade more still. Much like anything else. I'm getting no sun indoors, get more standing in my yard, get even more standing near water where it reflects back at me and get sunburn (degradation) quicker in that environment.

Obviously it makes sense to aim the panels at the sun, and having a method to seasonally adjust the tilt can be done for very cheap. It can be made to last the life of the panels without repair, and it isn't an outrageous loss of performance if it was forgotten for a few weeks. Active sun trackers can potentially cost more than the panel itself, even more so when factoring in installation and setup. If it fails aiming to one extreme, there will be a substantial loss in power even compared to a panel with a fixed mount. That failure is likely to happen more than a couple times in the life of the panel, unless you replace parts before failure (even more cost), or add concentrators (more cost) to increase output and decrease panel life (more cost yet again). Unless there is a specific reason for all of that cost and complexity, such as space constraints or other factors, then it is cheaper to just lay out more panels. If a new technology comes out where they can stop UV degradation without a large impact on power output, or weight, or cost, then I'll be interested. For my use case I'd rather reduce my energy usage and lay panels in the sun with seasonal cleaning and adjustment.

I also opted to just add more panels. There is a finite amount of sunlight hitting my roof, the only advantage to tilting the panels are easier cleaning and passage. If I could tilt a single large panel at x degrees then I could absorb cos(x) more sunlight but the thing would stand up above my roof to a height of sin(x)*roofLength and would blow over in the wind.

Surely if you're comparing against fixed solar panels, then it would be more than 10%? For tracked solar panels, costlier installation and maintenance would be traded off with efficiency of the prismatic optics and degradation of materials. Economies of scale might favor the optics if it's cheap enough to manufacture (less components, cheap materials etc.)

> Economies of scale might favor the optics if it's cheap enough...

- Quite true. But note that the article describes the inventor of the new optical system as "assistant professor in astronautics and spacecraft engineering". That certainly suggests cost-insensitive, performance-critical applications - such as cubesats.

So unless they find a different lighter material with which they can create the same kind of lens, it probably won’t be suitable for many kinds of roofs.

That's much lighter than the tiles they replaced.

If so that certainly increases the utility in a domestic setting at least.

However, a bigger problem or question to me is what wavelengths can carry useful amounts of energy and be kept in a narrow beam to have high transmission and conversion efficiency from source to collector. Everything from microwaves up to visible light is going to be quite susceptible to atmospheric moisture. Even microwave and infrared communication links can suffer with rain, clouds, or fog.

If you can get down to radio frequencies, I don't know whether a narrow beam is really possible. I've seen some hints at the development of rasers (coherent, stimluated emission like lasers and masers but down into "radio" frequencies). But I am not a physicist and do not really understand how such an emission would behave. Could a useful amount of energy be targeted on a "small" receiving antenna without leaking out to other accidental recipients...?

Also, for power levels useful to the utility grid, any beam alignment or scattering errors would mean extremely lethal and destructive energy going off-target. Straight down from space, you might delineate a concentric safety exclusion zone around and above a ground station. If beaming horizontally, wouldn't you have to exclude a large wedge of ground and a huge conical section of airspace both before and after the ground site?