Spinning Solar -BUSTED!

this is today's green minute and I'm Jim parks if this technology works out it'll be so cool in 1931 Thomas Edison said to Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone I'd put my money on the Sun what a source of power I sure hope we got to wait for oil and coal to run out before we tackle that B three solar claims their spin so we'll deliver electricity from the Sun at two-thirds the price you're paying now eighty two years later the wait is over developed by v3 Solar Dynamics spin improves performance and lowers costs so that solar can finally compete with fossil fuels on price see solar panels when they face the Sun directly are most efficient the further from a perpendicular angle to the Sun the less efficient the panel is but if panels are formed into a cone they get direct sunlight during the sun's entire arc through the sky [Music] spin cells sounds the heat problem it cools itself by spinning as distributed solar becomes part of our lives I think which will generate 20 times as much energy as regular solar panels and they're going to put them in these beautiful little trees to make them aesthetically pleasing and this message is brought to you by David avocado Wolfe tireless in his quest to promote pseudo scientific and scams yeah the problem with is 20 times more efficient than regular solar panels and that's the current solar cells run at about 20% efficiency that is of the energy from the light that falls on them about 20% that gets turned into electricity so 20 times more efficient would be 400 percent efficient and what makes my engines truly remarkable is the afterburner which delivers 200% fuel efficiency that's especially impossible these these solar panels aren't just efficient they're magical not only turning 100 percent of the light that falls onto them into electricity they're magically getting another 300 percent of efficiency from somewhere how that's amazing I mean being able to create energy from nothing in this perpetual motion machine she made today is a joke it just keeps going faster and faster hallelujah folks it's a miracle Lisa get in here in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics so why spin these things and why put them in a cone well first of all let's deal with the cone thing cuz that's just really stupid because no matter where the Sun is at least half of your solar cells will not be directly in the sunlight and will essentially be reading no power so here let me fix that for you not 20 times as efficient but half is it efficient it's a regular solar panel now for convenience we're going to compare this to a tracking solar panel yeah no it doesn't look like a tracker but trust me it is and in both cases we're gonna put the same area of solar panels on both so to make the math easier we're going to take a cone about 1 meter high and 1 meter in radius at the base so it's about 2 meters across at the bottom now the surface area of just that outside bit of the cone is PI which we're gonna say is 3 just so the Bible can be right for once times the radius at the base times by the length of the side of the cone which in this case is about root 2 or about 1.5 so that's easy the surface area of this cone is about 4 and 1/2 meters squared so our regular solar panel which is gonna say is going to be 1 meter high again which means it's going to be about 4.5 meters wide now that make our comparisons simpler here we're just going to assume that these solar panels are 100% efficient in turning the light that falls on them into energy so how much energy will these conical solar panels generate relative to a flat solar panel well maybe the simplest way to look at this is from the sun's perspective basically how much is exposed to the sunlight what its cross-section in the sunlight is is the maximum flux if that's the maximum energy that can be turned into electricity so it really isn't matter how you cut it putting the solar panels on a cone like this or reduce their solar cross-section by about two-thirds I looked up another way let's just say the sun's over here a solar panel on the front there is going to be generating let's say 100 percent power and obviously this is going to drop off to 0 once you get to the edge and then it's going to be 0 for the entire backside of the cone which will be in darkness and we'll be generating no power so far from these things more efficient plane twenty times more efficient the simple act of putting these things on a cone has thrown away about third of their potential energy generating capacity so is there any potential upside to this well they quite rightly say that solar panels become less efficient when they get hot now let's try now solar panels can lose around with 21 percent of their energy generating potential once they get up to about 60 degrees Celsius that's so hot that you couldn't touch it without burning yourself which is why solar panels when they're on the roof are typically kept off the roof such that you in circulate air around them keeping them more or less near at the air temperature which on the hottest days is you know maybe 100 Fahrenheit or 40 odd Celsius even though these solar panels will inevitably be somewhat hotter than the air temperature so yeah solar panels because they get hot have a modest drop in efficiency okay so let's just say that you're going to get a modest boost in efficiency from spinning the solar panels let's give them a 20% boost in efficiency for that and in this case I'm just going to be super generous and add that on to their efficiency that means at best you're up to about a 50 or % relative efficiency compared to a flat tracking solar panel add that where the benefit ends because they want to put these big glass lenses over the top of their solar panels yes they were so frantic to keep their solar cells cool that they put them in a greenhouse please God Tommy this doesn't have almost 6 million hits on Facebook naturally we could rely on Hollywood's finest to think this one through four looks like a Christmas tree bunch of little holes all rotate because I saw has to be heat-resistant that's expensive that's great you can call solar panels by keeping them in the shade but let me just let you in a little secret here you know what else solar panels don't do when they're in the shade you don't generate any power yeah this is almost as brilliant an idea for keeping saw panels cool as putting them in this shade on top of that the whole lensing thing is a complete joke I mean let's be generous and say that all the light falling on this lens actually gets onto the solar panel as you can see this is not exactly a monstrous increase in the cross-section but it does have a huge fabrication cost for that glass comb which is maybe why they settle for a computer Jerry to one instead however when you take a closer look at the people doing this you get a distinctly different vibe like they're trying to use magnifying glasses to focus light onto the solar panel to get them to generate more energy which of course is trivial enough to do I'm sure in that case if they would get a lot hotter and they would need cooling problem is to get twenty times the light onto something you would need a lens with 20 times the cross-section yeah that's the approximate size of the lens they would need to generate 20 times more power and that's just assuming that you Inc an optical lens that would do it and lettin that sighs I may add would put the world's largest refracting telescope the 1 meter lens of the earch Observatory to utter shame that of course you have the problem if for any reason whatsoever the motor that drives this should fail for any reason as will inevitably happen if you're looking at running hundreds or thousands these things for the long term there is no way to turn the Sun off so these things will cook like an ant in a magnifying glass in seconds so that thing is saw power in right venue is actually pretty good and spitting solar panels and putting them on a cone might look cool and it might fall the odd celebrity or the odd guy on Facebook who puts it up for something that was seven million people to see it's just a really dumb thing to do Satur thing is that the number of things I've got to bust has gone up like crazy now people keep sending me this stuff plants that power USB Dimond batteries saltwater powered batteries saw water powered cars Walter that doubles the fuel efficiency of your engine or just water that cures absolutely everything free power for the third world and the billionaires idea or on masks Mars mission yeah seems like the amount of science out there has got ten times the media footprint of real science and for that I would like to thank all of those who support this channel through patreon in helping to somewhat redress this balance [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Thunderf00t

Views: 1,175,417

Rating: 4.8523746 out of 5

Keywords: solar, power, powered, cone, fun, cool, science, busted, david, avocardo, wolfe, phil, mason, thunderf00t, physics, sun, energy, futurama

Id: zMQA9khsF10

Length: 11min 13sec (673 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 09 2016

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It is not just the x-files. When it comes to most things, people want to believe