Hacker News Reader

Comment by YugyDugan | Hacker News Reader

for 0.25-6 h per day

That's nice and all, but 15 minutes is a much lesser achievement than the headline implies.

Same thought. It’s a bit of a bait and switch as the title implied to me a major milestone. But it’s not and the real milestone of renewables providing power continuously day and night remains.

running solar at night would be a real achievement!

I think it’s still research stage and it’s debatable whether to call this ‘solar’, but https://www.ucdavis.edu/curiosity/news/anti-solar-cells-phot...:

“a specially designed photovoltaic cell could generate up to 50 watts of power per square meter under ideal conditions at night, about a quarter of what a conventional solar panel can generate in daytime”

The idea is to capture the energy that escapes into space when solar panels cool down during the night.

If you want to debate names, I like "fusion collectors" instead of solar.

Surplus solar and wind can charge batteries. Would this not count as time shifted solar?

Haha indeed. I edited my comment to be a bit more clear. Though I think solar furnaces do work at night.

I have fun news for you https://x.com/bennbuilds/status/1767961251186163857

So batteries are too expensive, but space launches aren't? Even assuming the light can be sufficiently focused to bypass the inverse-square law, it'll still need precision manufacturing to actually deliver the power to the panels reliably. And that's assuming mirrors are enough, and you don't need space-side solar panels and microwave/laser beams (which will be even more expensive than hundred-mile-focus mirrors).

Push am (ever so slightly) larger fraction of the sun's energy output into our atmosphere, what could possibly go wrong!

I know, the amount of net electricity per added total energy might end up no worse than in a fusion power best case scenario, but still... When you add the climate effect of re rocket launches required I don't think it could ever become worthwhile.

Agreed. But every step is worth celebrating.

Next is 12 hours, after that a day and then finally months and years.

Incredible progress is being made.

The step is commendable but the headline makes it seem like they used renewables for all 24 hours of the day for 30 days.

So they could build a battery big enough to serve 15 minutes of the nighttime trough and declare mission accomplished with only enough solar to fill the battery on a rainy winter solstice day? Some goalposts just beg for getting moved. (I assume that this is unrelated to the 2045 goal, so it's not really bad, just bad headlining)

"60% of the time, it works every time" --Anchorman

Well, here it would be: between 2% and 25% of the time, it works every time

Reply on news.ycombinator.com