Did you also read that reddit comment thread where people were very disappointed to learn that nuclear reactors just boil water instead of "something more nuclear or something"?
growing up i always thought nuclear was like, harnessing the raw energy of the atom but no its just hotting up water for steam to spin old timey windmills
So you engineer a material where electrons are mostly stuck to atoms but start flowing if they get a little "kick". You tune that required kick (by playing with the material makeup) to the energy levels of photons in sunlight. Sunlight kicks the electrons and you capture that electricity
(you have to make sure that conducting electrons are made to flow in one direction, but this is mostly a matter of sandwiching two dissimilar materials together)
That last part is the grossest simplification I've made, but doing better would require me to explain why the lack of an electron is an actual (quasi-)particle and is just as real as the electrons themselves and a bunch of other things, but it starts at the photoelectric effect
YES! I was so excited the day I realized that an LED is basically a solar cell run in reverse. Electrons flow, photon is released vs. photon is absorbed, electrons flow.
They absorb light-energy, some of which becomes heat when it hits the solar panels and moves the electrons around via the photovoltaic effect (as I understand it). The amount lost is not significant enough to make anyone care, as solar panels are quite low maintenance.
So I’m a mechanical engineer by trade — if you had a painted surface with the same thermal emissivity as a solar panel and an actual solar panel, would the solar panel be cooler?
The solar panel can’t just make energy, it has to come from somewhere. Is it all otherwise thermal?
They absorb light. Some fraction of that light goes to energy. The rest is heat. So you'd be like a little bit cooler just because of the 20%ish that goes to electricity as opposed to pure heat.
Well, it would not be cooler, because it has the same thermal emissivity as the solar panel (meaning, it must do something with the energy that the panel uses to move electrons.
If you mean, something that had the same energy emission as the solar panel minus the photovoltaic energy... I guess so?
so how it works is via the photovoltaic effect, photons can be absorbed and through specific material choice, you can get a material whose photons will jump to a higher energy level at a frequency of light you want. This happens with all materials and's typically minor as the electron will drop down
but if you use a semiconductor, you can custom tune a material so once side has an absence of electrons and wants more, and another has a surplus. then because it's only a semiconductor, electrons don't move normally in them, but under the unusual conditions of these photons, they will.
Given that it’s basically just moving electrons from photon interaction, yeah but also it’s not a steam engine and the electrons utilized are components of the material at an atomic level. My background here is I read an article in popular mechanics once so YMMV.
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You can actually make a solar cell out of LEDs.
Source: https://academic.oup.com/ijlct/article/14/2/267/5307064
The solar panel can’t just make energy, it has to come from somewhere. Is it all otherwise thermal?
If you mean, something that had the same energy emission as the solar panel minus the photovoltaic energy... I guess so?