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A comment on Oxford commercializes its 20% more powerful solar panels in the US. Parent comment

Re:Oxford commercializes its 20% more powerful solar panels ... by pjc50 on Friday September 06, 2024 @08:48AM (#41465666)
The panels are so cheap that it's not worth fiddling with optics. The economics works better with as little glass as possible, just enough to protect the cells. This also killed tracking solar, which being a mechanical device has maintenance overheads.

There's not as much mileage in panel upgrades as you might expect. It's not Moore's law, it's much slower, and surprisingly the rated life of inverters tends to be shorter than that of panels. Once panels are installed they're going to be left alone as much as possible (because that costs money) for twenty or more years.

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Re:Oxford commercializes its 20% more powerful solar panels ... by pfdietz on Friday September 06, 2024 @09:30AM (#41466024)
> This also killed tracking solar

A great deal of the utility-scale solar in the US uses 1-axis tracking.

https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/utility_scale_solar_...

"Projects using single-axis tracking have consistently exceeded fixed-tilt installations since 2015, and dominated again in 2022, with 94% of all new capacity using tracking -- the greatest ever."

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Re:Oxford commercializes its 20% more powerful solar panels ... by DoctorOetker on Friday September 06, 2024 @08:59AM (#41465761)
The panels are so cheap that the optics shouldn't be compared to other costs like the price of panels but to the price of inverters and installation, maintenance,...

Look at the price for upgrading the solar farm over time, N times the price of solar panels may still dwarf the cost of the optics.

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