Could Solar Solve The Energy Crisis?

[Music] this week solar takes on the energy crisis self-charging gadgets how green is your wardrobe we've got the scores on the drawers and we do a deep dive into the deserts of june [Music] solar power is the earth's most abundant energy source and today that goes far beyond simply plonking panels on rooftops we keep seeing scientists develop new ways to make the technology more flexible more powerful and more useful this factory in stockholm is making ultra thin solar cells that don't even need sunlight to harvest energy the idea is that they can be used outside or inside your home to power products i'll be showing you later on what that means for various devices but first here's dan simmons who's been looking at how solar could help the energy price crisis although most of us like the idea of clean energy so far we've not been persuaded maybe it's because we don't own our own roof or it's the upfront costs maybe we're thinking of moving and we feel we can't take solar panels with us or just those glaring large slabs isn't quite the look we're after so i've been to the homes of two british startups who want you to look again this is the solvus arc its curves are wrapped in an organic solar film which doesn't contain any toxic substances nor rare earth materials that could require mining and so it has a much smaller carbon footprint than traditional panels and that's not all now the ark is designed to capture sunlight throughout more of the day and that's partly because it's got five surfaces on which to harvest energy and this curved design means that it usually has a sweet spot which is very useful at the start and the end of the day in particular i think it looks quite futuristic and if solar sculptures like this were to catch on i can see them being seen as a sort of carbon neutral status symbol something for the neighbors perhaps to gorkat i don't like the look of conventional solar panels i just don't like them so i thought well i want to get the home energy independent but how can i do it with avoiding solar panels so started looking into new solar technology that was out there this is solivus's testing yard in kent where they've been adapting the shape of the sculpture to maximize efficiency the multi-layered solar film used is provided by german firm heliotec these solar panels are made up of three distinct layers at the moment and the top layer will capture the high energy light the middle layer will capture the sort of visible light and then the bottom layer captures more of the infrared more of the heat so maximum efficiency for a conventional solar panel is about 33 whereas for this technology it's tunable and they can layer it with in theory as many layers as they want to choose different parts of the spectrum and capture overall more light coming in despite this sunny outlook today this solar film is only eight percent efficient with a 10 version expected later this year now last year that may have been a problem high initial costs of dogs solar as a cost-effective option until the maths changed driven by supply issues and fresh demand from a world recovering from a global pandemic energy prices are surging more than 50 percent in a matter of minutes and that was before many western nations imposed sanctions on russia's gas and oil following its invasion of ukraine with the uk's energy price cap lifting next week many household bills are about to soar from around 18 pence per kilowatt hour last year the variable rate of electricity is expected to jump to more than 26 pence by the autumn and at least 32 pence if you want to fix your prices for a year or more depending on where you live in the uk at three and a half thousand pounds the ark isn't cheap but it is guaranteed for 20 years its film panels which are upgradable are expected to produce an average of a thousand kilowatt hours per year by the end of 2022. when it becomes a thousand kilowatt hours a year in the uk you're looking at about 21 pence per kilowatt hour that amount of energy will be locked in at that 21 pence for 20 years and after that it's free obviously let's be clear one of these isn't enough to power a home even one that uses gas or oil for heating in theory you'd need at least one for every bedroom you have and if you don't have an expensive battery to store any surplus energy as it's captured you'll end up feeding it back to the grid for a fraction of the market price one alternative is that you can plug the ark directly into your electric car if you have one i found another solar entrepreneur in london's notting hill this prototype features a unique cost-effective way to attach solar film to regular blinds so owners of flats and garages can take advantage too because to date solar power has been for the rich and um it's not been there's not been a system or a product in place where it can go on any building my company's aim is all around the democratization of solar so any window can now become a solar panel david's applied for patent for his creation and will take it first to spain where these types of blinds are more common installations begin later this year and he's also in talks with a london authority which wants to fit them to council flats so for this size of window it generate about 10 to 15 of your energy needs and this is a three-bedroom house so for between a hot summer or a cool winter the amount of energy you could generate would be probably about 10 to 15 percent less during winter compared to summer so not much different no not that much no and with this new solar film it it generates energy in cloudier climates compared to silicon panels another good thing about solar film is that it's scalable some places have more roof space than others of course so for reasons of cost savings as well as the environment this rugby stadium has decided now is the time to cover its stands in the new lightweight solar film there's an estimated two and a half billion square meters of south-facing commercial roof space in the uk and a lot of it wouldn't have enough strength to support weighty traditional solar panels for the panels we will pay 15 pounds per kilowatt hour that is half or less than half of what um the current cost of a kilowatt hour of electricity is so that's a significant saving for us if you've got a big roof or a big area of land and i don't know why you wouldn't consider this as a viable option i mean you know it uses an asset that you can't really use for any other purpose it saves you money and it's good for the planet increasingly these new types of flexible solar panels are making solar more accessible for people they don't replace traditional panels which will be ideal for some and there are other options like solar tiles out there too but solar film is now getting more efficient and importantly cheaper just as grid prices are going through the roof so both practically and financially now solar could be coming home [Music] hello and welcome to the week in tech it was the week the world passed one terawatt of solar installations theoretically enough to power the entirety of europe globey a firm providing an alternative to satellite imagery by using drones has just broken a guinness world record for collating the largest digital album of aerial photography and the uk's national fraud reporting center action fraud is warning about fake emails pretending to raise money for victims of the war in ukraine however fortnite players across the world have been raising millions of dollars for ukrainian charities developer epic games says it has raised 50 million dollars so far from in-game purchases microsoft has confirmed it was breached by the lapses hacking group after source code from bing bing maps and cortana was leaked microsoft said that a single employee's account was compromised by the hacking group but added no customer code or data was compromised and finally the volta zero electric truck has completed its cold weather testing program driving one step closer to series production at the end of the year engineers focused on how the 16-ton truck performs under harsh conditions no not rush hour traffic instead temperatures as low as minus 30 degrees celsius it's coldly going where no truck has gone before we know that fashion can hurt the earth its production makes up 10 of humanity's carbon emissions dries up water sources and pollutes rivers and streams but all products whether they come from farms labs or factories take their toll with hidden impacts in materials manufacturing and more frankly even with the best of intentions it can be really hard to know which items that you want to buy are better for the planet take these two shirts for example they look pretty similar and this one might be made from more sustainable materials but if it's been flown halfway around the world to get to you whereas this one's been made locally how do you know which ones to choose wouldn't it be nice if you could maybe scan the products to see what's good and what's bad here in the netherlands one company is trying to make the environmental impact of products more transparent the idea is that you scan the qr code attached to the product and you get a score out of a hundred this shirt here 66 out of 100 okay this shirt over here which does look pretty much the same 70 out of 100 okay slightly better i think i'll have that one dayrise's co-founder austin sims explained that this one score actually consists of five sub scores assessing things like carbon emissions materials and recyclability and also the impact on the people creating it 68 out of 100 for your lavender and yelang wax melts how necessary a product actually is also gets a score what is an example of a product that has no purpose a product that scores low on purpose would be like an electric pepper grinder [Music] 500 fashion home and beauty brands have already been signed up and this system actually lends itself to online shopping where scores can be easily displayed next to the products the idea is that anything and everything could eventually have this standardized label now there is already an industry standard for working out environmental impact it's called a life cycle assessment but this requires brands to dig deep into their data a lengthy expensive process that few companies bother to do no brand has all the information that we need to actually understand the impact of the product so if you're missing information about certain areas of your sourcing or manufacturing or distribution we call upon 31 different databases eventually dayrise will have one big database of the environmental impact of all parts of a production process with ai being used to estimate any unknowns and this will bring calculation times down from months to minutes if you come in with your t-shirt and say uh that it was made of organic cotton that was produced in sri lanka and then we knew the where it was produced and then we knew where it went to to be actually manufactured and then where it went through to be solved that's enough for us to fill in the blanks so it sounds like there's still a little bit of guesswork here because if you don't know exactly how i've shipped my cotton from a to b i could be doing it in a great way or i could be doing it in a not great way it actually then searches for the information itself and builds on itself and gets smarter over time and we've already scored tens of thousands of products to actually that machine's working really well and if we don't have the actual information from the algorithm then we have enough databases that we can pull the industry average so you still get a really accurate score dayrise says it can produce results that are 80 percent accuracy and a future where it could devise a score without any information or even consent from brands could be just years away a detailed breakdown of harm could even help the worst offenders to improve you'll see that the wall is actually quite high impact so you can look at the different materials or different areas you can source that water so by playing by track by ship it actually determine impacts so you can obviously there's a lot of impact by traveling by train so you can try and do that a different way so what you're doing is quite clever because instead of just effectively possibly naming and shaming brands which don't do very well you're providing them with lots of information it's a consultative service so we actually try and show the brands how they can you know what are things that they can do the deal would be that a brand has to display all five of its scores rather than just cherry picking the one that highlights their strengths but opinion on what's most important will vary between customers and also the science behind the scores will evolve too meaning that a product score might suddenly change as sentiment shifts one benefit of this might be that brands start competing with each other to get better circularity scores better livelihood and well-being schools that's the aim obviously i think it creates that um that that healthy level of competition that we want so there you go laura in the future you could know exactly how green your entire outfit was i don't actually have to wear green though do i no no you keep rocking the blue and i'll keep rocking the grey in more ways than one meanwhile here's a way of making your gadgets greener by using sustainable energy something this solar cell factory in sweden is taking to the next level this machine is printing custom nano ink onto solar panels and they don't even need the sun to charge we have developed our own nano inks and in this machine we print that ink on a proprietary substrate how is the end result and the usage of it different to other solar cells it actually harvests all kinds of light it's sort of like artificial photosynthesis so it will work under any light condition led normal light bulbs even in the shade any kind of light you're sort of using electricity but i guess it's just electricity that was being used anyway we're recycling lights the extra efficiency means that those silver strips that usually run through solar panels are no longer needed freeing up new design ideas and this allows us to have free form printing so we can print the solar cell for you in the shape of of a circle or a triangle or exactly any device shaped like the device exactly these cells have been shaped to fit a headphone band and this robot is responsible for squirting electrolytes on them to allow conduction it looks like it's going to drip bits in between but it's actually doing it very precisely it's more efficient and predictable and for sure doesn't make any mistakes [Music] the final step is lamination to give the cells custom textures and into the press it goes and here's the finished product a 1.3 millimeter thick solar cell giovanni tell me about the prototypes you've got here what you see here is a fully self-powered sustainably powered headphone has a leather structure to it this solar cell is here on top and it will actually absorb any kind of light and convert that light into electrical energy and charge the battery you go to your office if you take a walk you sit in the office working or you go to the gym whatever you do they will always charge during the day but the luxury of not needing conventional charging will add a chunky 50 dollars to devices several of which have already been created this is a self-powered speaker if you look on the back side here is the solar cell a smart helmet can sense when it's worn in the dark and light up automatically here are the charging panels one two and three it's actually one cell underneath i really do blend in and this bag doubles up as a power bank this is a pretty big surface and you can place this in the sun so it will charge a lot charging from ambient light does have its limitations though how about a laptop how far away are you from being able to create that sort of power in the bag well the laptop you you know is super power hungry and a phone as well you're just not gonna get enough laptops and phones you need much stronger light or you need a larger surface but who's going to walk around with this large solar cell to charge your favorites so it's all about defining the balance right what's the available surface on the product how do you normally use the product in your daily life the company also thinks that an app will help users develop better charging habits by making everyone more light conscious as they put it this is charged anxieties the largest pain point globally in costume electronics so you'll see in your phone how much it charges all the time and how much it drains all the time you're able to track how you're doing and it's sort of gamifying this i'm told this tech will never be put directly on smartphones because well leaving your smartphone out in the sunshine will never be a great idea but this could be a step up from wireless charging for many other devices products like these urban easter headphones do still have a backup charging port though for those who just still want it there for peace of mind that was lara hoping to power up with or without a bit of sunshine talking of which it was the sun and sunlight which gave the visual effects team behind the movie june a bit of a headache their brief was to recreate a harsh desert planet full of sand worms and flying ships all the while making it look realistic and grounded well here's a look at some of the amazing work that went into the film go go go and he was going to be trying to they're going to try and ground it in reality uh as much as possible in a science fiction movie but try and have it in a way where as if you were filming as if it was for real if you see what i mean so it's not visual effects for visual effects but visual effects to help tell the story and move the story along and that's the type of work that i i quite enjoy uh doing so i knew there's gonna be a lot of plate preservation needed by that i mean uh let's say for example sand dunes but was shot with a real camera i knew that we then need to match that completely uh digitally to be able to you know put a sam worm as this in this example put a sound worm through those dunes as well so i knew it was going to be uh as far too real as we could get it it started almost from day one it's like okay sand sand and and and the worm and how do how do we how do we make this happen and make it look 100 photoreal and yet be able to iterate and see different versions and render it and and you know and have it to the level that you know imax uh shows one of the biggest challenges we had uh sticking with sand for a minute was uh was the issue of scale uh so in the deserts of arrakis there's no vegetation in there so we didn't have that you know bushes and things as a scale reference for the eye to look at and know how big things were which is good and bad uh it meant that we had to have a almost a full simulation of all the different grains of sand in there to make that work so early tests that we did with the same grains were just too big the one suddenly looked really small it didn't feel imposing it didn't feel as as massive as it needed to be so the effects team had to come up with different ways of of working with that obviously you can't simulate every single grain of sand in in the desert that's just not possible um so they came up with systems where you could have a representation of what it's likely to look like then they had several systems that they ran uh that would call from a library of different setups that they have to then populate some of the areas around the worm to get that feeling of you know this this is the desert and it is being shifted around and those sand grains are tiny and then from those simulations as well we had dust running off of that which helped with the scale too and uh shifting sands some of the dunes a little bit further out from where the worm is because as the worm moves through the ground is sending out vibrations and it's shifting sands to the left and right and in front of it as it as it moves forward they actually built a lot of the sets or partial sets and so you know we had real ornithopters on the set that were pulled up by cranes and we had helicopters landing to kick up the dust so we could use it as reference to replicate there was a lot of blood sweat and tears and and love in that movie you know it was a very special project that everybody wanted to be there and do their best and then some and so i think you know you see that on the screen of you know a lot of that love for dune is is up there the test is simple remove your hand from the box and you die what's in the box pain well that's it for oscar worthy films and for click for this week as ever you can keep up with the team on social media find us on youtube instagram facebook and twitter at bbc click thanks for watching bye [Music] [Music] you

Channel: BBC Click

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Id: HwTjX0crkO4

Length: 24min 26sec (1466 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 04 2022