Re:Inverted perovskite solar cell breaks 25% efficiency record
by jacquesm on Saturday November 18, 2023 @07:38PM
(#38326858)
'at this point in time'.
This is now a mature market and mature markets are governed by economics unless you manage to make a massive step forwards. So if that x% improvement comes with an increase in total cost over installed life > x% it's a non-starter.
Re:Inverted perovskite solar cell breaks 25% efficiency record
by godelski on Sunday November 19, 2023 @01:00AM
(#38329586)
Solar is a mature market, sure, but that doesn't mean every technology related to solar is mature
Re:Inverted perovskite solar cell breaks 25% efficiency record
by jacquesm on Sunday November 19, 2023 @06:12AM
(#38331542)
That's fair but it does mean that those new technologies - especially if they aim to replace other technologies - will be tested on that parameter. And the difference would have to be large enough for a party to take the risk to go to manufacturing and then for other parties to take the risk to buy the product.
Re:Inverted perovskite solar cell breaks 25% efficiency record
by godelski on Sunday November 19, 2023 @06:20AM
(#38331590)
Sort term? No. Long term? Sure. If you're only planning for the next 5 minutes you're not going to make it very far. It's not like these people aren't well aware of all this. That's in fact the motivation behind the research. No one researches things that are useless, only things that seem useless to people who don't know. Again, this is a university researcher, they're kinda just doing their job... I don't know why this is even a contestable thing...
Re:Inverted perovskite solar cell breaks 25% efficiency record
by jacquesm on Sunday November 19, 2023 @12:46PM
(#38335346)
Because that's how the typical arrival of improvements in solar power are usually hailed. I see announcements like these to the tune of one every couple of weeks and they rarely make it to production and if they do they end up as niche rather than mainstream. But some of them do make it. In the meantime, the steady drip of cost reduction due to economies of scale make silicon based solar panels harder and harder to compete with for new technologies, not unlike what we've seen with other semiconductors.
Re:Inverted perovskite solar cell breaks 25% efficiency record
by godelski on Sunday November 19, 2023 @01:50PM
(#38336265)
Yeah, again, university. That's typically at least a few years from production if not a full decade. The context matters.
But if we're complaining about the hyping of science, then I'm with you. I haven't been shy about my feelings, as someone finishing my PhD, about academia on here.
What? This doesn't make any sense. How do we invent new things if economics is all that matters? There's a whole process. You prove a thing is possible (literally the thing happening, nothing else), then move onto making the thing reliably reproducible to demonstrate, THEN optimizing for being cheap. It can fail at any point here (and there are more between tbh). This is a really long process. An example might be NASA's TRL scale.
I mean yeah, it is university press and they hype it up, but I'm pretty sure a big reason for that is because comments like this. Being shitty at something is the first step to being kinda sorta good at that thing. Context matters a lot and the context here is: done by researchers, university research, journal publication. This is not Apple coming out and saying they invented something that's going to be on the market in a few months. This is someone at Apple's research lab being like "Hey, that thing we've been researching? I reached a milestone, we shouldn't call it quits yet."