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Solar windows could harvest energy from sun and indoor light (www.ucl.ac.uk)
submitted 2 days ago by to c/science@lemmy.world
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[–] 1 point 9 hours ago (5 children)

I'm not an expert by any means. I think that any of the light that is used to generate electricity heats up the panel though. It has to. It can't just be destroyed. Some of that becomes electrons moving, which I assume counts as heat physically too, since heat is a measure of motion.

Again though, I'm far from an expert. This was just my layman's educated guess.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 hours ago (4 children)

    yeah all of that is energy loss. its why a 100% efficient panel is impossible and really why any electrical device is not 100% efficient. Its do to energy loss as heat.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 hours ago* (3 children)

    Yeah, obviously. It's a part of how it generates electricity though. It's a core part of it absorbing the light. Yes, all heat leaving the system is lost energy, and this is true regardless of the format of energy generation and/or use. But if the PC panel isn't heating up then it isn't working, because absorbing the light makes the molecules more energetic, which is heat, and I think it's part of the process of electricity generation.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

    yeah its just if we can get insanely high efficiencies the heating would be minimal. Honestly I seem to recall someone has a thing that figures out the highest possible efficiency for solar panels and it was below 90%. Theoretically you can redirect heat to. Like there was a thing that transformed light wavelengths to one that allows it to go off to space. Im not sure what happened to that technology but it was for cooling.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 hour ago (1 child)

    Not solar panels, but NightHawkInLight has a bunch of videos on paints that get sub-ambient by radiating heat into space. That's reflecting light though, so it is light that the panel isn't absorbing, but it might be worth the tradeoff if they're producing too much heat. It wouldn't work for vertical windows though, because it requires it to be pointing up. It'd work for skylights and horizontal panels though.

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