2 axis solar trackers are much more efficient, but fixed installation beats them in cost/W in many cases.

Any solar installation gets dirty, the question is do you save labor/equipment cost by having them cleaned by a single solar cleaning train, vs. tons of workers or automated brushes cleaning a large open field installation. Do you need to do cleaning passes after every train? Daily? Monthly? Yearly? Is there an intersection of efficiency loss and cleaning investment that is profitable?

If you could install and maintain them in a fully automated way with just a few specialized trains, I can see why it might be an attractive idea. Question is how automated can you make it really? Do you need to fasten the panels down? How do you tie them into the grid?

If the savings on installation, maintenance and cleaning offsets the loss in revenue from the suboptimal placement and dirt, it might work.

I could see this working out if deployed on large scales, where the up front investment of developing all the specialized process and equipment, like trains, becomes a small part of the cost.

Any such proof of concept installation of an unproven technology will be more expensive than if you really deploy it at scale.

If rail didn’t exist today and we had to develop the first train and track and all the necessary infrastructure around it, the first 10km would be ludicrously expensive and would never pay itself off compared to the existing road network or shipping routes.

It’s a finetuning and risk taking problem. Does the idea make sense in a vaccum? And does the idea work in competition with existing solutions? Is anyone willing to invest enough money to make it competitve?

I hate it when extremely complex multi-variate problems always get judged based on one or two possibly negligable variables because of ignorance or intellectual laziness. Sometimes you can successfuly jugde things this way, yes, but rarely are things that simple.

wow so cool, I wish I had one

I don’t believe you, name every tree

put some silicone lube on it

nuh uh, solar punk is when the buildings have plants on them

what I find most amazing is that people don’t destroy the water by throwing in garbage. no way would that work where I live

let’s just ban them and make have a mechanism in place to avoid another switcheroo to another “not yet proven harmful” class of chemicals. I’m sure they’ll come up with something better eventually. I don’t want to have to shop around endlessly to not wear poison.

You know what they say: Plastic is a girl’s best friend

no wait, it was: Plastic is forever

Solo Piano, solo acoustic guitar, Lofi, chillhop dreamhop and steel drums

something like that: https://youtu.be/ej0ARP97RPo

https://youtu.be/uwEaQk5VeS4

maybe even this: https://youtu.be/nWufEJ1Ava0

You could build a sun powered Dye laser. Dye lasers are capable of absorbing polychromatic light and emitting monochromatic light.

You could split the sunlight up into its various wavelengths with a prism and then run each wavelength through a specific dye to get more of some specific wavelength of light that is optimal for your task. Mostly just because it’d look cool tho.

a lot, those are some real hard working cables

lmao, the drill sergeant shouts them down for putting the algae plastic shell casings in the wrong recycling bill

Imagine solar powered war.

You have like a 1m² solar hat that collects 200 watts so you can fire one rifle equivalent shot every 20 seconds, at 50% efficiency.

Your tanks covered in solar panels generate about 6000W of solar energy, vs the 1,120,000W of the Abrahams, so you can drive it for 7.7 minutes per day.

The solar impulse 2 can carry pilot, so about 80kg at a range of ~7000km. The smallest nuclear bomb is the Davy Crockett at about 23kg, so you could carry 3 or 4 of those around 7000km. Really you could build a gigantic solar glider to carry nuclear weapons.

What else? Maybe land mines that need to charge up their explosive power with solar.