Poof! Well There Goes One Dream...Solar Roof

pnichols wrote:

MEXICOWANDERER wrote:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-11-20/inside-elon-musk-s-forgotten-gigafactory-2-in-buffalo

An entire RV roof, nearly every square inch...I would loved to see it become a reality

Hmmmm .... over the past 40 years .... myself, my wife, and various maintenance workers have walked on our stick house roof "doing things", "modifying things", and "fixing things" - most of this not at all related to the roof material itself. I've done the same on our RV roof. I wonder how a complete solar roof would handle this kind of real life high pounds per square inch wear and tear?

It seems like the first and most important solar power priority for nearly every solar power installation going forward should be to get the efficiency of solar panels way, way above their current 18-22% conversion range. I hope this is a no-brainer regarding where solar power research dollars are being concentrated.

as far as efficiency, getting much above the current % for silcon based cells is going to be hard, the theoretical limit is around 33% for a single junction p-n cell. Multijunction silcon can get in the 40% range, but that uses different processing than the well known single pn junction process..

Using other 3-5 materials higher efficiencies are possible but (1) silicon process is well understood and that's where the majority of research is going. (2) silicon is very abundant and cheap. Some other materials are much more expensive or much more rare.