241: Shining a Light on Future Solar Tech

https://youtu.be/6-yAMfUQbDw

Matt and Sean talk about some new and interesting solar panel technology, and what’s happened to some of the weirder proposals. How many pieces of solar panel tech have ended up in the garbage pile?

Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, Why These Quirky Advances Could Change Solar Forever https://youtu.be/XAFzRFth1lE?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi66M5ZJIZziqyRVVGmISv8Z

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Creators & Guests

Host

Matt Ferrell

Host of Undecided with Matt Ferrell, Still TBD, and Trek in Time podcasts

Host

Sean Ferrell

Co-host of Still TBD and Trek in Time Podcasts

What is Still To Be Determined?

Join Matt Ferrell from the YouTube Channel, Undecided, and his brother Sean Ferrell as they discuss electric vehicles, renewable energy, smart technologies, and how they impact our lives. Still TBD continues the conversation from the Undecided YouTube channel.

Hi everybody. In today's episode of Still to be Determined, we're going to be talking about a variety of future solar products that, well, maybe they're not too far in the future. Welcome everybody to Still to be Determined, the follow up podcast to Undecided with Matt Ferrell. I am not Matt Ferrell.

I'm glad we got that cleared up. I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm a writer. I write some sci fi. I write some stuff for kids and I'm just generally curious about technology. And luckily for me, my brother is that Matt of Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which of course takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives.

And Matt, how is your weekend impacting your life? It's going well. I know people hate it when we talk about weather, but it's a beautiful fall, New England. Trees are changing colors. And there's one thing that's speaking of solar today. Uh, I've been surprised at how much energy my solar panels on my new house are still generating in the middle of October.

Um, this is the first time in this house in October, the middle of October, I've had solar panels and good Lord, like yesterday we produced like that. They were, they were put in right at the end of the installation done and went live. It was like right at the end of October. So it's basically November was the first month we had it.

And I was, I was like, wonder how it's going to do in October because in my old house, it was like, you could definitely notice a decline in this house. I haven't noticed a steep decline. We produced 69 kilowatt hours of power yesterday. We don't use anywhere close to that. I was like, uh, really, really pleasantly surprised.

And I know what I would attribute that to, but what do you attribute that to? It's been a, we've had a nice string of sunny weather, no clouds, and the sun getting lower in the sky, I think is actually at an optimal angle for my panels right now. Where in the summer. They're a little too high. It's a little too high.

So I have a feeling like right now, it might be like the perfect like alignment to my house. Yeah. Also, I know that when you designed this house, you had it placed on the lot at an angle so that the roofs would be able to maximize the We the lot we, yeah, we picked. It sounds so bizarre. I picked the lot based on the orientation of the lot, thinking, okay, I want a house that has a roof that's gonna face as far south as we can get it.

Right. It was like, there were lots we looked at that were decent, but it was like, ah, it's gonna be facing a little like too much to the North, not gonna be able to fit it. So like that was actually part of the, the calculus in deciding what lot we picked. So it's, it's panning out, Sean. It's pretty cool.

Yeah. Before we get into the conversation about your most recent video, just kind of as a sneak peek into that, since we're talking about your current house and lot placement, just big picture, yes or no. It seems to me like some of the things that you talk about in your most recent video would alleviate some of those issues of, oh, this lot faces the wrong direction and my house will have to look weird facing a different angle in order for that roof to get that sun that it needs.

It seems like these texts would be a good answer to, well, your face, your house doesn't face that way, but it doesn't matter. Yeah, that's kind of the whole point of this video, which was Not everything is going to be in an optimal situation. It's like, think about skyscrapers and like urban infrastructure, like you could put stuff on the sides of buildings or on the tops of buildings, but it may not be perfect orientation.

Your house might be in a, in a weird location in a lot that has trees on the side that would most likely make you say, ah, I can't do solar, but these kinds of things might help to address some of those issues. Yeah. Right. So before we get into our deeper conversation about that, we always like to swing back to our previous episode, that would be episode 240, which was our discussion about solar tech that was already here.

This was a development in solar tech that had largely flown quietly under the radar, but is out there in the world and remind everybody, Matt, the difference between this and the standard solar panel. So Matt, just to refresh everybody about the solar tech that we're talking about from last week's conversation.

This is a type of solar panel that's different than the standard ones that people usually think they're seeing. What are those differences? Well, the difference is like what makes up the solar panels. Typically it's silicon that's in the vast majority of panels that are around the world today. And this is cadmium telluride, which is a different chemistry that it like where silicon, we put silicon in our computer chips.

We put silicon in like tons of things. Some of the ingredients for cadmium telluride. Really aren't used by anything. So there's like, it's, it's a waste material from other processes. So here's a waste material that we could turn into a new solar panel. That's essentially it. Interesting. Interesting. Like the things we don't use.

We're always talking about shortages. We're always talking about going into the ground and getting these things and how devastating that will be to the environment. And, but we have to, because we need it because it's so important to the way we live and you forget about the things that people are like, eh, I don't want that.

And then, yeah, I can't do anything with this. Yeah. I can't eat this. Get it out of here. So that conversation about the solar panels themselves almost could have fit within this conversation. Like it's interesting that it was solar tech that was broken out. And my understanding of the reason for breaking that one out into its own video is largely because that tech is actually out in the world.

And the stuff that is in this video seems largely to be still in the lab and figuring out how to make it work. Is that a good assessment? Yeah. 100%. Cadmium telluride is a thing. It's out there. It's still growing. But most people don't know about it because Silicon dominates the field. And then this other stuff is absolutely 100 percent in the lab, super early days, just early research.

So the reason I mentioned that that video is kind of a sister video to your most recent one. I encourage people if they haven't watched the video about the Cadmium Telluride, uh, panels. You could watch it in concert with Matt's Most Recent because it is all kind of a piece. And I think that that's interesting. And the reason I point that out here is because the conversation in the comments Seem to be largely focused on things other than the solar panels, which was the main part of the conversation.

Instead, people zeroed in on conversational topics, such as our conversation about sewage treatment plants, which was born itself of another comment. So there was this comment from Steve who wrote in to say, unfortunately, in 2024, we're still seeing sewage pollution issues. A local town is paying huge fines because they didn't keep up with the maintenance and expansion of their treatment plant several times over the last few years.

There have been uncontrolled discharge events into the local river. I love the discharge events euphemism, that's just human waste going into the local river. Gross. Junker jumped into the comments to say one thing about sewage treatment. The treated water is basically non toxic and bacterial levels are under control, with solids and numerous known contaminants removed, not all but most.

That's about the best we can do. Plants actually do pretty well finishing the job. Lake Tahoe's water system pumps the treated sewage into a reserved watershed. By the time it reaches the other side, you can't tell that it started life as treated sewage. In any case, this is massively different than you would have, than what would happen if you pumped untreated sewage into the ocean or into a watershed or river.

I wanted to share both of those comments because on the one hand we have somebody saying, yeah, there's a town that has really kind of screwed things up and they inadvertently discharge stuff into the river. And then here's the counterpoint, which is if it's done right, It's fine. You can do it. You can do it.

You can do it. And that's, that's the thing. If you do it right, it's okay. And neither Matt or I are out there saying like, do something else with human sewage. That is not, that is not the calling that we're sending out. That's making me think of like, what would Sean be proposing to do with our sewage?

What is Sean's idea about what we do? What do we do with this sewage, Sean? Well, I got a list. Hang on, let me get it. There was also a bit of back and forth in the comments about our discussion of, strangely enough, disguising cell towers as trees. Matt, you will remember, of course, that we have driven past the large tower that is four times as tall as any tree nearby and is wrapped in what looks like a bunch of discarded Christmas trees.

And Victralman jumped into the comments to say The species of those tall evergreen trees masquerading as a designed cell tower is called the She'll call ya.

Slow clap. Thank you, Victrola man. That I thought was wonderful. Fantastic. Yes. Very, very good. No notes. And there was also this from Mac Fisher who wrote, I nerd out on TV and radio towers to include cell towers monopoles, Rhone, Pyrod Towers, Panel Antennas, Different Frequency Antennas, and Mounting Configurations.

A company I work on a New England project with, the city wanted cellular towers, but didn't want towers. Answer? No tower, no cellular. That area ended up not getting coverage. Deep pocket company spent like a hundred thousand dollars for one fake pine tree tower. I mean, this is a case similar to where you live, Matt, where a town has made a deal for a type of internet service provision, which doesn't make any sense for the consumers.

And it's all probably because a salesman came in and said, there's trouble, trouble in River City and did his song and dance and convinced the town elders, you know what you don't want, you don't want access. You want this, you want us to do it all and do it all in a way that makes it super problematic for consumers.

And you've been butting your head against that wall. So I think this is another case of. Townships not having the best interests of the town in mind, for whatever reason. Well, here's the argument I would make, is sometimes the town thinks they're making the best argument for the town, not thinking about the long term ramifications.

Because like in my town, The deal they struck with a very large cable and internet company that most people would know as Craptastic. Um, they promised basically the town. What's funny is everybody listening is hearing a different name filling in Craptastic. Everybody has their own, like, nobody likes any of these companies.

So there's somebody out there that's just like, Oh, I know who they're talking about. And somebody else is like, Oh, I know who they're talking about. And they're like, No, I know who they're talking about. But they, uh, They cut a deal with the town because they were going to bring in fiber for the local industry where I live.

And basically, we're going to run this into your town. There'll be this high speed fiber that will help provide things for the local industry. And they were kind of like, that's great. And so they signed this contract. Because this company was going to take the brunt of the infrastructure costs of doing that.

So you'd say, okay, they made a good decision because it didn't cost the taxpayers money to get that fiber in for the local industry. But guess what? They're not sharing that fiber with the residents. So it's like now we're in this position as a resident of this town, I can't get fiber internet. Every town around me has it.

Every single town. We don't because this craptastic company, they have a monopoly of if you want cable television, you basically got one choice. If you want any kind of high speed internet, you got one choice. And it's because the town signed this deal because they, it was kind of this myopic, you know, like who needs like crazy fast high speed?

It's like, it's good enough for the residences. It's the industry that needs the high speeds. Not thinking five years from now.

So it's, it was a short sightedness that leads to these problems. Like what, uh, Mac Fisher brought up too. I don't have the link on me, but I actually found a YouTube video Of the signing of that agreement and immediately upon signing it you can hear in the background from some unknown location Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Ha ha. Very good impression, Sean. Thank you. I think it was the Alderman. Finally on the topic of Cell Towers, there was a quick comment from Octothorpe who I think is confirming the exact tower that Matt and I have been referring to. you. Octothorpe jumps in to say there's a cell tree near the border of New York and Connecticut on the Hutch Merritt Parkway.

It's hilarious. That's the one. That's the exact one. That is the exact one. So I think what we should do is we should start a new tradition where around Christmas time we go and decorate the cell tower. We climb up the tower. We climb up the towers, a bunch of like tinsel, a few ornaments and some lights.

I think it would be lovely. Yes. The only problem with that is planes would probably get caught in it because they would be like, is that the airport? And then, uh oh. Finally, I wanted to share this comment just for, I don't know. I just like the fact that we are two countries separated by a common language.

This is from a viewer in the UK. Ken H writes, very off topic. But I really wondered what you were talking about when you said that a one story building was too much for your parents. Implication was that they needed a no story building. Then I realized it's a quirk of our not that common language. In the UK, a one story house is a bungalow with no upstairs.

We have a two story house with a ground floor and a first floor. I have noticed that in the US, in buildings with lifts, sorry, Elevators. I have to get out at floor 1 to actually leave the building, whereas in the UK you'd have to walk down a final flight of stairs if you got out at 1. Yes. These are some of the, just some of the differences between us and our UK counterparts where like, Oh, I can go there.

I speak that language. And then you find what, what do you mean I'm on the wrong floor? Having worked in a building with people from the UK who, when they first come over, they spend a good week getting out at the first floor, and then I watch them as I get to the lobby and they come through the stairwell with a sheepish look on their face.

America. That's right. We know how to count. That's right.

It's all about like, it literally is like, well, you're here now. So how many floors up are you going? You're going one floor up. You're going two floors up. It makes sense. But. Well, it also doesn't make sense if you're saying like you're on this floor and you're at floor one, now you're at two. On now to our discussion about Matt's most recent.

This is from October 15th. Why these quirky advances could change solar forever. And before we get into the content. Itself, I wanted to talk a bit about the delivery, Matt, you have asked, you sent out the call. How do people find the translation services? You've heard some negative comments. Oh, this is turning into a garbled mess.

Translation services that are hard baked in to his videos and available on YouTube. So you can watch in your native language. Well, there's this from James Heller who says, I am from India. And I just watched the video in Hindi. I'd say it's working pretty good other than the lip sync is working wonderfully.

It's not translating all the worlds, all the words like solar and efficiency, just like we do in real life. So that's a plus. So I thought that was really cool. That's really, really cool. Jokes on you, James. Matt has been recording his videos in Hindi.

I am fluent in Hindi. Yeah, no, I'm barely fluent in English.

I'm sorry, that's making me laugh. This from Baba Rudra, who says, interesting research that's definitely worth keeping an eye on. It would be interesting to see whatever happened to some of the old solar research. That has gone on before. Remember solar roads, solar sidewalks, solar roofing, which I see in YouTube ads that I always figure are another one of those scams.

Just hoping I mistakenly click on it. Yeah. You and I talked about some tech, like we've now been doing this podcast for, I mean, seriously, what is it now? Uh, four years, four years. And I remember some of the discussions we had four years ago were about tech similar to this about like, is there a, is there, is there an ability to, uh, do solar roads?

And I know there was some talk in one of our videos about charging stations that would just be built under roads and stuff like that. And, and as time has moved forward, your, your response has been like, yeah, those concepts have fallen out of the trash pile. So to talk about just like big picture, Baba Rudra mentioned a couple of the old solar research topics.

But amongst not only these, but can you think just off the top of your head of some of the other also rands that you know are just like, these are not going anywhere based on your understanding of what's going on in the research? It's not that they're not going anywhere. Some of the stuff like transparent solar panels are still a thing.

There's still a lot of research. There are companies that are bringing it out, but it like, It is such a niche thing because of the efficiencies of those panels that at this point, it's not going to catch on, um, just because the cost benefit doesn't work out, even though the technology works. You're just not dollar for dollar.

Right. So it's like, they're still working on it and I hope they can make it work, but it's like, it's one of those, uh, it's getting kind of sketchy. The more you look at it, the longer it goes on. And then there's another one that I just, every Friday, me and my team, we post a fun fact Friday up on my social accounts.

So like up on X and, you know, Instagram and stuff like that. And this past week we put up one about the solar roadway. About a company that is doing solar panels in between the railroad tracks, and they spent gobs of money working with a company that built a train car that is designed to lay these things down on the tracks and Then pick them up as modules if something goes wrong and swap them out And they're doing a pilot project that's like a hundred meters long, I think it is.

Um, I can't remember what they're doing it, but they're doing a pilot project to see how well this works. And I posted this. The reason I said, this is a good one that we should post it on Friday was I'm like, I look at that and go, how is that's not gonna, that's not gonna work well. And so we posted it basically like, what do you think?

Like, do you think this even has a shot? And the responses are all like, that's insane. And I actually. One of my patrons has experience working in railways and said those things are going to get demolished. Yeah, I can't imagine. It's one of those, like a train going over I know sprays debris in its wake.

It pulls along with it, uh, like gravel that are on, that's under the train tracks. I know that the train is moving fast enough that some of those are literally like swirling around like just shrapnel underneath the train. This is exactly the point of like the solar roadways and stuff like that. There is stuff that it's like, they take serious abuse.

So it's kind of like, imagine all the panels will get, okay, you've designed a train that can swap it out. Bravo. But how often are you going to be changing those things out? Because they keep getting smashed and destroyed. And then how much money is that going to cost you every time you have to swap those out?

How does that make sense when you could just, you could put the solar panels literally on like a stilt racking system that goes over the train tracks, you've completely removed, you don't need some kind of special train car. It's not going to get run over by the, it's like, it's just one of those, there's things like that, that pop up that make you just go, did nobody think this through?

And they're spending how much money doing the pilot test? Um, I just found that story fun, which is why I shared it last week. I thought it was just like, to me, I think it's bananas, but I was curious to see what other people thought. But it's, there is tons of stuff like that on the roadway, the like littering the roadway of solar research.

That's just like, when you think about it, it's like, I don't think it's going to work. There was a comment from Mateusz Zeldelga, holy, he, I think he's implying crap. Holy crap. I'm surprised that you're talking about my alma mater. Nice to see about Polish, Polish researches on Undecided. I wanted to pull this comment out just to give you an opportunity to talk a little bit about the research that's going on in this field is a global Effort.

This is not one region or one country has the market cornered on any of this, as far as like being the dominant research force in this or the dominant corporate force. We have, of course, companies and countries that are the highest of manufacturing, but the research itself and what the hope for this technology is, is not isolated to any one place.

So other than Poland, do you want to just rattle off a few of the other places that you know of that have been making a footprint in solar research that are maybe not the countries or regions that we would typically think, Oh yeah, that, that kind of research is going to take place there. I mean, take your politics aside, put those off to the side, but like China of course is the huge one.

China has tons of research that they're doing in facets of solar that might surprise people, but they're doing a lot of amazing things, but the ones I would call out are like Korea. There's a lot of stuff coming out of Korean technological institutes that are doing amazing research. Australia is another big one that has tons of interesting, not even just solar, doing tons of stuff with hydrogen and solar, like they're, they're doing amazing things down there.

And then of course, pick your European country, like there's, there's Poland, there's, you know, the UK is doing stuff. Germany's got a bunch of stuff. So it's like, there's some amazing research happening in the smattering of European countries. And then of course, The United States, of course, we have a couple of very prestigious institutes that are constantly doing amazing work.

But for me, it's Australia, Korea, and other handful of European countries that are like, you might not expect it, but they're doing some really good work. There was this comment from Sequoia Elizabeth who said, what happened to the clear PV to use on office buildings? It is fun to watch those things evolve.

I've been doing so for decades. So this was a tech that I remember we talked about a long time ago, the idea that you could take a solar panel that would be clear and layered on the top of a window and then something like The New York City skyline, which is of course, lots and lots of glass, cover some of those buildings with this material and you start generating electricity that way, whatever happened to that.

I kind of brought that up earlier in the stuff that's littering the path of solar research that went nowhere. This is that thing where it's like. It is there, it works, it is possible to do, but the costs of the system just do not make sense yet. So that's part of the reason why you're not seeing it.

You're only seeing it in like pilot projects or pilot tests. You're rarely seeing this kind of stuff just like taken over to New York or anything like that. You're not going to see it because it's like the amount of money you would spend doing it and the amount of power you'd get out of it just doesn't make sense when you could put just regular bifacial solar panels on the roof of your skyscraper.

It would cost you way less, and you might get Almost a similar amount of production out of it. So it's like, that's the battle right now in transparent clear PV is trying to get that price point and installation cost low enough that it would make financial sense to do. There's also this from Dubois who said, I love the graphic at seven minutes, 22.

I think the possibility of recapturing energy expended by indoor lighting is something that I've never really considered, but it makes a lot of sense. Even if the efficiency is low or very low, it would be better than nothing. Reusable energy in any way, particularly in the winter months when we use more indoor lighting would be really interesting to know if any companies are working on projects to make indoor PV panels a thing.

So you want to talk a little bit about the idea of the indoor panel and how that might work and is that even. Again, we're talking about price point. If a company is looking at putting in indoor paneling and it's going to cost four times as much as just putting a panel on the outside, yep, that's, I, I, I'm going to, I rarely do this.

I tend to remain undecided and keep an open mind on this. You're never going to see solar panels that you're going to install inside your house, that are going to put power into your home. That's never going to happen. It's like, if you want to power your house, it's going to be on, in your backyard, on your roof, something like that, outside panels. For the inside panels, there are lots of interesting companies doing amazing work

around low light solar panel tech, but that panel tech is the kind of thing you'd have Built into your remote control for your TV It would be built into like you have motion sensors and things around your house for your smart home They would be built into those it would be more about powering individual devices So that you don't have batteries to change out, you just get them, you plop them where you want them, and then you just never think about charging them ever, and you don't have to worry about changing, charging, changing batteries.

That's where that tech is really going to kind of hopefully catch on because that's where it financially makes most sense. So on indoor solar panels, think individual pieces of electronics, not whole home. Whole home, dollar for dollar, it's the outside panels that will always be champs. Finally, somebody looking forward to a future in which It sounds like most of our energy needs would just be washed away.

Luscious writes, It's pretty much a given that if PV cells hit near 80 percent efficiency, you will see them on the roofs of every EV, and on hoods, trunks too. Charging is the Achilles heel of EVs. And a panel that can recharge a pack in near real time would render ice, but all but obsolete. That, of course, is an internal combustion engine.

And the applications don't end there. Large roof vehicles like vans, trucks, buses, portable DC to AC inverters, generators, high concentration dwelling applications, high energy demand, industries, and remote off grid installs. Be excited for what is to come. I want to live in the future that Luscious sees

coming, but I want to ask you the 80 percent efficiency. Would it in fact meet the needs that he describes there? Could you put, if a panel is hitting 80 percent efficiency, would that be enough to charge an electric vehicle? Not in real time. No, that's like, there's no. And is that 80 percent efficiency even likely, or is it even the goal?

Is it even important that it gets 80%? No. I would keep arguing. I keep bringing this up, but efficiency is a little bit, not completely, a little bit of a red herring. It's a little bit of a. Don't get lost in the efficiency argument because it comes up. People hate it when I, when I say stuff like this, money makes the world go round.

It's like, it comes down to costs. It comes down to efficiency is one piece of the puzzle when you're looking at what belongs together and what works the best. It's one piece, not the sole piece. So for a car, my argument would be The goal would never be able to be able to recharge a car in near real time.

That would just, one, that's never going to happen. And two, we don't even need it. Just think about how often you drive your car every day. Most people drive their car, it's like 30 to 50 miles a day. You know, that's the app that's in the United States, that's the average. So it's like, As long as you have solar panels in your car that could add back in 25, 40, 50 miles, just being by left outside during the day, it's not gonna be real time, but if you could get that back over the course of sitting in a driveway for 12 hours, it's like, it doesn't need to be real time.

It just needs to be, can you recoup the energy that you used in your three trips during the day? At the time when your car's sitting in the parking lot at the grocery store, at the time it's sitting in your driveway, your house, that's the thing that we should be thinking about. So I would argue, it doesn't matter if it's 80 percent or 50%, it's just can it achieve that use case?

That's going to be the goal. And you'd still end up in that awesome future that I hope we get to, because I do agree with that sentiment. There's a ton to be excited about, but I would make the case, don't get hung up on efficiency alone. That is not the goal. Soul argument here. It comes down to what's affordable, how well does it work, and what is the ultimate use case you're trying to achieve.

Sounds grounded as usual. If anybody knows Matt, they know him to be a grounded person. In fact, you can't get him to get off the ground. Listeners, viewers, let us know what you think. Jump into the comments. As you can tell, the comments are a major component of the program, and we appreciate you taking the time to jump into the comments on Matt's videos and to jump in the comments on our videos.

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