Solar Panels about to give 1000x more power - How will this change solar IoT? (including Wyze)

Watercooler
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For those who haven’t heard, there is mind-blowing news out of Japan. Japanese scientists developed a new type of solar panel that uses titanium dioxide and selenium to create solar panels that are 1,000x more powerful/effective (collect 1,000 times more power) than same-size traditional silicon-based solar panels.

:exploding_head:

To put that in perspective, the average suburban household needs roughly 438 square feet of traditional solar panels to cover its energy needs with silicon solar panels.

This new titanium dioxide and selenium solar panel would only require a solar panel that is 63square-inches or less than 7.94" x 7.94"!!! A 1 foot by 1 foot solar panel could almost cover all the power for both you and your neighbor’s entire household will need throughout the entire year!!! Seriously, 1 foot of solar.

That just blows my mind! A solar panel roughly the size of Wyze’s solar panel can power all your electricity needs for everything all year long.

How do you think this going to change IoT like Wyze devices?

I mean, Electric Vehicles will now be able to put a tiny solar panel on the roof and have unlimited mileage driving nonstop all day long with no need to recharge at a station. That’s crazy.

I can see the future of almost every outdoor camera soon coming as a solar-powered camera with a 1-millimeter solar sensor on it so it is truly 100% wireless and can still record continuously on max settings without draining the battery.

Sensors will last forever, regardless of if they are indoors or outdoors, because even though indoor lighting is only 100 to 1,000 lux and sunlight is around 100,000 lux, since these panels will be 1000x more efficient, they will still collect enough power from indoor lighting to never need to recharge since they don’t use much power already.

Imagine all our IoT devices, cameras, etc no longer need to be plugged into power in the coming years.

It will certainly be cost prohibitive at first as is the case for everything until production scales up. Plus Titanium is expensive to produce (though using yttrium is a new method reducing costs). Still, my mind is blown. No longer will you need to cover your entire roof to power your house year round. You could put a tiny 1 foot solar panel on your roof and be good all year long.

Where’s my people who also find this mind-blowing?

I know it’s probably a long time away from getting the manufacturing processes and economy of scale in place, but I can be excited now anyway. :slight_smile: The future is looking bright for wireless smart home / IoT, cars, and everything else.

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Meh. Just tech growing exponentially as always. :slightly_smiling_face:

I am more impressed with Majorana-1. Coupled with AI, watch out.

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Yeah, I am excited for that too. :grin:

But the QC’s are still years away from availability. The solar stuff will come out first.

Though, traditional computing is not going away and is better than Quantum computing in many things. Day to day computing for most people will still use traditional computers. A lot of things will still use traditional computers.

But I’m excited for the potential uses QC will have with cancer research, personalized medicine, extinction issues, logistics, finance, AI using it as a tool, etc. It may make personal assistants and predictive models great!

The only problem with Majorana 1 is that MS likely isn’t going to share how they developed the topological qubits nobody else has been able to achieve since 1937. They will likely license use of it though.

It is a little scary though. Quantum computing could have devastating implications on current security that isn’t quantum-resistant yet.

SciFi singularities are about to become reality with nearly unlimited energy meets unlimited data processing in parallel. :star_struck:

I am so here for it.

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I’m calling BS on that claim. Current solar panels are between 10 - 25 percent efficient - some really expensive ones are higher. That means for every joule of energy that is delivered to the panel from the sun, between 10 & 25 percent of that energy is converted to electricity. Even if we take the really low end 10% panels (nothing being installed these days is this low), that means at absolute best you can do is to improve the efficiency by 10 time. Can’t exceed 100% efficient.

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Thanks for the clarifications. That makes sense. After reading your response, I tried asking a few AIs to explain the contradiction between what the researchers are saying vs your well reasoned counter and they came up with some interesting semantics interpretations to try to explain what the Japanese scientists may be referring to instead of efficiency which is hardcapped by physics, but it’s still kind of confusing.

Definitely not as exciting. I appreciate your insights as usual. :slight_smile:

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After @K6CCC 's helpful explanation on the efficiency constraints, in back to being more excited about Majorana 1 instead :grin:

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