Whatthefark: If I had any Photoshop skills, I'd have him holding Metallica's Black album.

Here you go:

timharrod: Still photographs as darkish gray. Go figure.

I noticed the panel refused to smile in the picture as well.

DarwiOdrade: B.L.Z. Bub: DarwiOdrade: B.L.Z. Bub: MrSteve007: B.L.Z. Bub: Call me when they can be powered at night.

/Starlight power?
//Stellar power?

Actually, on a clear night with a full moon, the 10kw array at my work will output about 50 watts.

/moonlight power!

Uh, guys? You realize that the moon isn't always full, that it goes through phases?

/Not faces (new window)

No - he has no idea - that why he said "on a clear night with a full moon".

durr

'Kay. But I asked for a solar cell that works at night, meaning any night, and that response didn't exactly satisfy that standard.

Yes, well asking for a "solar" cell that works without sunlight isn't particularly intelligent either. Just sayin'

It was more of a rhetorical request, not a literal one. It was meant to make a point.

/Solar power...except the sun doesn't always shine
//Wind power...except the wind doesn't always blow
///I sure hope I don't live to see a time when these "alternatives" are all we have left

89 Stick-Up Kid: THAT PANEL IS A N*****!

The panel is near?

<sub>let's ask Howard Johnson.

not a cricker-croaker.</sub>

B.L.Z. Bub: /Solar power...except the sun doesn't always shine
//Wind power...except the wind doesn't always blow
///I sure hope I don't live to see a time when these "alternatives" are all we have left

Good thing we don't have to use them one at a time, dipshait.

BroVinny: "It's so. . . black! You can hardly make out its shape. . . light just seems to fall into it!"

Must be one of those... rap guy's... solar panels

By the way, reflectance is the ratio of reflected light to that of which actually hits the surface. So a reflectance of 0.3% means that only 0.3% of all light is reflected from the solar cell's surface and that the remaining 99.7% is absorbed.

Did they put that in there for the Fox News crowd? It's real complimactaed and has math and big wurds and stuff.

whatshisname: It's real complimactaed and has math and big wurds and stuff.

Actually, if they really explained what they really mean, it would be plenty complicated and have lots of math. In the context of PV cells, when they list a percent reflectance, what they really mean is "weighted reflectance" which is derived by taking the absolute reflectance for each wavelength above the bandgap, and then integrating those against both the AM 1.5 spectrum and the quantum efficiency curve for silicon. Of course, determining the reflectances for each wavelength involves some tricky math to solve the Maxwell equations. You can do it with a bit of matrix algebra. (new window)

Why'd they have to make the cell black? I'm not gonna lie, it kinda ruins solar power for me.

Once you go black, you absorb more light.

Ogre840: BroVinny: "It's so. . . black! You can hardly make out its shape. . . light just seems to fall into it!"

Must be one of those... rap guy's... solar panels

I like. Big. Panels and I cannot lie!.

cameroncrazy1984: meyerkev: MrSteve007: B.L.Z. Bub: Call me when they can be powered at night.

/Starlight power?
//Stellar power?

Actually, on a clear night with a full moon, the 10kw array at my work will output about 50 watts.

/moonlight power!

As a person who has started work at 4 AM more than once, the moon is surprisingly bright.

/Huzzah for greens mowers without a working headlight.
//That place was dysfunctional in very specific ways that made it a surprisingly nice place to work for a summer.

Did you work for the Caddyshack country club?

No.

Short version was that it was it was a family-owned public course that was in the "Founder's dead, kids and grandkids don't care about the business, they just want the money" phase. So there was no money at all whatsoever (about $2-3 million went in, our budget was $225K), and the superintendents had just given up, because every time they tried to improve anything, they hit the wall of Not Spending Money.

And because we weren't spending money, stuff was just broken. The irrigation was the original 1960's install, which at this point means they don't even sell the parts, and we're basically using spares we stole from other courses when they ripped theirs out. Someone left our rotary mower (push lawnmower) outside the front gate one night, and we used it until it broke, and then spent the rest of the summer without a rotary. Most of the mowers were older than I was, and so about once a week, I'd end up walking back to the barn, and we'd grab the front-end loader and tow the mower back in. It didn't help that the mechanic was spending so much time fixing stuff he never had time for maintenance, so that made things even worse (and there wasn't money for parts, so even if he had had time, it wouldn't have made a difference).

Terrible design didn't help. They built the course on a floodplain and there was a 4' pipe coming in one side, and a 1' pipe going out the other, so we basically lost 2 holes to flooding for the entire months of April and May. None of the sandtraps were built properly, and they were usually placed right in the middle of the fairway drainage, so every time it rained, we spent 3 days pumping out every single sandtrap (one took 3 hours with the big pump) and some of the more annoying wet spots, and then putting the course back together (including rebuilding Every Single Sandtrap which took about 8 hours with 6 people) once it had all dried down.

And the owner was an idiot who would randomly take a bulldozer out on the course and start digging things up without telling us. Basically, combine the pointy-haired boss and CEO from Dilbert into one person, and that's what we were dealing with. He had a spy in the crew who was completely incompetent and didn't take orders that everyone hated, and avoided where possible (To be fair, the spy was probably necessary. 7 years ago, the owner fired every single person on the crew, including the supers, except the spy, because the white guys were making the Mexicans do all the work and getting drunk behind the barn in the afternoons).

But because the supers had just given up, they'd let us out early when it broke 90-95 (Michigan. That's kinda rare), and because it was a golf course, it was kinda expected that a 20 minute job would actually take about 3 hours once the golfers were out. And because no one else was crazy enough to work there, you could get 60 hours easy. (One week, it was the supers, the mechanic, one other guy, and me. One of the other guys got cancer, one got a DUI, one was in a movie, one was on vacation and that was our entire crew (and the owner's spy, but he doesn't count because he's incompetent and doesn't take orders from the supers)).

And since both the superintendents were old private course hands, and private course "Fark it" is public course "The fairways are green in July for the first time in 23 years," it was our own little joke that people would go "Oh, [X], I know that place. That place is awesome. I love that course.", and we'd just start cracking up because we knew how terrible it was.

So you had this assumption of quality coupled with this acceptance of "Crap will go wrong, and you will not be blamed" and a certain "We won't kill the workers" vibe (if only because no one else was stupid enough to work there, so we were a finite resource) and it was actually pretty nice.

/Of course the owner paid cash for the $800K mansion he gave to his daughter as a wedding gift, so that's nice.

What's wrong with being sexy?

It's so black, George Zimmerman wants to shoot it.

DarwiOdrade: Good thing people are working on storage, then, huh?

Maybe at elite coastal ivory towers.
But will they export them "storages" to America?

Blacker Than The Blackest Black (new window)

CHARLIE MURPHY!!!

Now let's work on absorbing the invisible part of the EM Spectrum.

So, 0.3 away from being Dolemite?

Define light, because they didn't Does it absorb 99.7% of the visible spectrum, or 99.7% of electromagnetic radiation?

Ed Finnerty: Whatthefark: If I had any Photoshop skills, I'd have him holding Metallica's Black album.

Here you go:

[dtdstudios.com image 492x328]

Nice!

*internet fist bump*

I'm no scientist, so I'm sure you smart farkers can explain this to me. I've always wondered whether solar powers could be improved by using magnifying lenses. I'm sure this is a dumb idea, but It would seem like it would allow you to concentrate a larger amount of heat/light to a solar panel surface.

HBK: I'm no scientist, so I'm sure you smart farkers can explain this to me. I've always wondered whether solar powers could be improved by using magnifying lenses.

Sure. Try selling that to ants.

The All-Powerful Atheismo: BroVinny: "It's so. . . black! You can hardly make out its shape. . . light just seems to fall into it!"

Every time I try to push one of these black buttons with a black background a black light lights up in black to let me know I've done it!


groovy...

0Icky0: HBK: I'm no scientist, so I'm sure you smart farkers can explain this to me. I've always wondered whether solar powers could be improved by using magnifying lenses.

Sure. Try selling that to ants.

yes you would get more power from a lens larger than the panel putting light onto the area of a single panel but the amount you would get per square metre would not increase. If you have only one panel and someone who makes huge lenses cheap then it might be a good idea but if you have a set area for panels it`s not. little angled mittors between panels is a better idea to capture otherwise wasted light

dready zim: yes you would get more power from a lens larger than the panel putting light onto the area of a single panel but the amount you would get per square metre would not increase. If you have only one panel and someone who makes huge lenses cheap then it might be a good idea but if you have a set area for panels it`s not. little angled mittors between panels is a better idea to capture otherwise wasted light

That makes sense. Thanks for the response.

One question- You said you'd get the the same power per square meter, but is that per square meter of solar panels, or per square meter of lens? Because it seems like the cost of a lens per square foot should be cheaper than solar panels. I guess if you're trying to do it on a larger scale, you'd also have to account for building the apparatus to hold the lens.

HBK: Because it seems like the cost of a lens per square foot should be cheaper than solar panels. I guess if you're trying to do it on a larger scale, you'd also have to account for building the apparatus to hold the lens.

You would also need to move the lens with the sun, which would require expensive machinery.
You can do this with panels too, but it's not necessary. For the lens it would be.

I think.

Theme song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFY2kJ96jNY (new tube)

Handsome B. Wonderful: Define light, because they didn't Does it absorb 99.7% of the visible spectrum, or 99.7% of electromagnetic radiation?

Doesn't really matter for PV cells.

HBK: I'm no scientist, so I'm sure you smart farkers can explain this to me. I've always wondered whether solar powers could be improved by using magnifying lenses. I'm sure this is a dumb idea, but It would seem like it would allow you to concentrate a larger amount of heat/light to a solar panel surface.

A 1 square meter solar panel will collect the same amount of light as a 10 square centimeter panel with a 1 square meter magnifying glass above it focusing its light onto the panel.

They use the same footprint, so there's no space savings. The only thing that happens is that you concentrate all the light hitting that surface area onto a smaller number of solar cells. It could be that current tech wouldn't be able to handle that much energy without overheating.

\talking out my ass

Jack31081: HBK: I'm no scientist, so I'm sure you smart farkers can explain this to me. I've always wondered whether solar powers could be improved by using magnifying lenses. I'm sure this is a dumb idea, but It would seem like it would allow you to concentrate a larger amount of heat/light to a solar panel surface.

A 1 square meter solar panel will collect the same amount of light as a 10 square centimeter panel with a 1 square meter magnifying glass above it focusing its light onto the panel.

They use the same footprint, so there's no space savings. The only thing that happens is that you concentrate all the light hitting that surface area onto a smaller number of solar cells. It could be that current tech wouldn't be able to handle that much energy without overheating.

\talking out my ass

There are concentrating cells available. But if there is much of a concentrating factor, they need to be made out of Gallium Arsinide, which is more expensive than Silicon (Silicon isn't as absorptive as GaAs). Often concentrating cells are also multi junction to increase efficiency even more.

Jack31081: A 1 square meter solar panel will collect the same amount of light as a 10 square centimeter panel with a 1 square meter magnifying glass above it focusing its light onto the panel.

They use the same footprint, so there's no space savings. The only thing that happens is that you concentrate all the light hitting that surface area onto a smaller number of solar cells. It could be that current tech wouldn't be able to handle that much energy without overheating.

\talking out my ass

Hollie Maea: There are concentrating cells available. But if there is much of a concentrating factor, they need to be made out of Gallium Arsinide, which is more expensive than Silicon (Silicon isn't as absorptive as GaAs). Often concentrating cells are also multi junction to increase efficiency even more.

To clarify slightly, the most efficient solar cells in the world are concentrator multi-junction compound semiconductor cells. The record holder as of 2010-2011 was a triple-junction cell (Ge-GaAs-InGaP) with a reported efficiency of 42.5% at 500 suns. (Source: PDF item 41 on this list (new window), since Fark doesn't like PDF links.) Due to a quirk of the physics, solar cells are more efficient when illuminated under brighter light, though you have to design the cell specifically for that level of illumination for it to work well.

The solar cells used in concentrator cells are a couple of orders of magnitude more expensive per unit area than the Si cells you'd typically put on your roof, but since you're concentrating the light, the cells you need are a couple of orders of magnitude smaller. However, unlike a regular flat-panel cell, you need a good heatsink to keep the cell cool, and more importantly, you need a control system that allows your optics to track the sun, since the concentrator is useless if the light is not focused on the right spot. Concentrator cells can generate more power per unit area than single-junction Si cells, but for terrestrial solar $/Watt is the more important metric, and last time I was up to date on the pricing they were still a couple of times more expensive, not to mention more failure prone because of the control systems and moving parts.

Martian_Astronomer: he record holder as of 2010-2011 was a triple-junction cell (Ge-GaAs-InGaP) with a reported efficiency of 42.5% at 500 suns.

Sorry! Brain fart! Ge-GaAs-InGaP is a common set of materials for a multi-junction cell, but the specific cells in the linked paper are actually InGaAs-GaAs-InGaP.

It's like, how much more black could this be? and the answer is none. None more black.

HBK: I'm no scientist, so I'm sure you smart farkers can explain this to me. I've always wondered whether solar powers could be improved by using magnifying lenses. I'm sure this is a dumb idea, but It would seem like it would allow you to concentrate a larger amount of heat/light to a solar panel surface.

As noted, using lenses to concentrate light onto PV cells is more trouble than it's worth. OTOH, using mirrors to concentrate light onto heat engines is a proven technology. This is a 200-megawatt solar thermal plant:

common sense is an oxymoron: [i.i.com.com image 610x406]

Everywhere l look, something reminds me of her.