I feel like if you have to water cool a solar panel you are expending a lot of electricity on pumps and a lot of money on maintaining those pumps at scale.
Didn't even consider darker colors and the heat rising angle either.
At grid scale, there's not really a feasible way to cool the panels without impacting the bottom line of the production.
When I was in school, the average panel would convert about 40% of solar energy into electrical energy, the math I did suggested that panels would need to hit about 80-85% efficient before they would be truly viable anything north of the northern Texas border, and those areas tend to get too hot.
It was around that time that Germany put 400B into solar panels, and so I ran the same numbers and it appeared that the projects stood to return approximately 125B over the 20 years (average output for optimal time). That meant they were going to be the cautionary tale.
I feel like if you have to water cool a solar panel you are expending a lot of electricity on pumps and a lot of money on maintaining those pumps at scale.
Didn't even consider darker colors and the heat rising angle either.
Yikes.
At grid scale, there's not really a feasible way to cool the panels without impacting the bottom line of the production.
When I was in school, the average panel would convert about 40% of solar energy into electrical energy, the math I did suggested that panels would need to hit about 80-85% efficient before they would be truly viable anything north of the northern Texas border, and those areas tend to get too hot.
It was around that time that Germany put 400B into solar panels, and so I ran the same numbers and it appeared that the projects stood to return approximately 125B over the 20 years (average output for optimal time). That meant they were going to be the cautionary tale.