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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 12th, 2024

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  • I’m not sure what to think about the Fraunhofer institute in general. They have made some nice discoveries/inventions in the past, such as audio compression algorithms and such. That is why i hyped them for a bit.

    But they really disappointed me with their writings on solar panels in the past few years.

    They said that the efficiency of solar panels today is too low to deploy them widely in practice, which is simply not true. They tried pushing Perovskite solar cells for no reason.

    I’m not sure what to think about this article’s idea. On one hand, adding lenses to solar parks makes them significantly more complicated and therefore expensive to build. Also, if the parks have complicated physical forms, they’re more susceptible to wind, and that could damage them.

    On the other hand, yes, adding lenses means you need fewer actual solar panels for the same amount of energy harvested.

    I’ll therefore put it in the category of inconclusive inventions, together with the idea of adding a motor to the solar panels so they can track the sun. That would also make the solar panels more efficient, but also more complicated and more prone to mechanical failure.