Astro Hacker News - Evaporative cooling cuts solar panel temperature by about 30 C in tests

wjnc |next [-]

Deviating from a standardized product on a curve of technological advancement is very hard to justify cost-wise.

gnabgib |next |previous [-]

Title: Baghdad Heat Spurs Smarter Solar Panel Cooling

DivingForGold |next |previous [-]

and uses a ton of water to the evaporation process.

nielsbot |root |parent |next [-]

could the evaporated water be re-condensed and re-evaporated using ambient air?

dlcarrier |root |parent [-]

Yeah, it but it takes more power than was saved by keeping the panels cool.

reverius42 |root |parent [-]

If you can capture the moist air somewhere, you can re-condense for free when it cools down at night.

toomuchtodo |root |parent |previous [-]

It’s a reasonable use of water imho where you have a lot of it you don’t mind evaporating off in return for higher solar generation.

Certainly, you wouldn’t want to use water for this in water constrained environments.

gnabgib |root |parent [-]

It really isn't..

> “In our single-panel prototype setup, the parasitic energy consumed by the pump and fan actually exceeded the immediate electrical power gain generated by the cooling effect

toomuchtodo |root |parent [-]

I’d be interested to see how the math changes if you use excess solar power that would’ve otherwise been curtailed to pump the water, perhaps using the excess power to pump water up into elevated storage and use gravity to distribute for cooling when you want to increase generation.

Lots of solar is being curtailed today because there isn’t enough daylight load and batteries to soak it up. There is potential to shift that power around on site, power that otherwise be wasted, to increase generation at other times. But perhaps it’s simply not worth it when applied at utility scale.

reverius42 |root |parent [-]

And at the point at which you're pumping water with excess solar power, is it better to just use the water as a battery? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...

kingstnap |previous [-]

The picture has the control panel in a lot of shade in the corner with the shadow of an electric wire cutting diagonally across.

Hopefully that wasn't the actual test setup lol.

Edit: h god it is.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259012302...

Bro. I can see that electric shadow wire in figure 1. If that moves across the control panel throughout the day the test is totally bunk.