EEVblog 1466 - Stanford Solar Power at Nightime BUSTED

[2N3055]

Truth is very different from facts. The most effective lies are crafted from facts only.

The researchers seem to be dishonest in the abstract and intro, but I suspect I see the cause. It is at the opposite side of the publication:

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy No. DE-FG-07ER46426 and by the Strategic Energy Alliance program at Stanford University.

Seems to me like they applied some “lube”, so the project would easily go through and receive support. Doing science is a constant fight for funding and not getting discarded, so I can’t easily blame them.

As for the media, I do not even see a reason I should comment on that cesspool.

The biggest problem is making excuses and "understanding" their reason for being dishonest. If paper is dishonest it is not a scientific paper anymore because that fact violates the first principles of science. And people that wrote it are not scientists but con man(persons)...

Second biggest problem is that they shouldn't get and money to research fake leads and going down the path that obviously does not lead anywhere.
Like Dave said, what is scenario where you have no space for a single D size battery but have space for 10 square meters of solar panels weighing half a ton with construction?

And that is Stanford University sponsored by DOE... Holy smokes... Who CAN you trust?

[capt bullshot]

Submitted: 13 January 2022 • Accepted: 21 February 2022 • Published Online: 05 April 2022

Nighttime electric power generation at adensity of 50 mW/m2 via radiative cooling ofa photovoltaic cell

50mW/m²

Nothing wrong with this, looks like many others didn't read the headline and publishing date of the paper. I'd guess it's a well-prepared Aprils fool that just missed the publication date by a few days. By judging on the reactions, it was quite effective

[Ed.Kloonk]

Well, I found it entertaining.

[EEVblog]

Negative content like this is not really educational or entertaining.

Apart from the hundreds of thousands of people who have thanked me over the years for debunking this stuff, teaching them how to think critically and check things, and providing them with a great laugh.
But ok, sure.

[EEVblog]

Perhaps you missed the parts where it was publicised everywhere?
And as RS20 pointed out, the authors are the ones who talked this up like it was going to " reduce or eliminate the need for battery storage in electrical power systems.". That's 100% grade A delusional 

Plenty of small sensor systems can get by on thermoelectric power alone. Not as if they were talking about powering factories or cities from a TEG.

And this is an insanely stupid and wasteful way to get it when you literally have the panels there that can charge up some super caps and provide orders of magnitude more power for orders of magnitude less cost and complexity.
The TEG's and heatsinks and energy harvesting systems are completely redundant 

[wilfred]

I don't think the authors are the ones who wrote the mealy-mouthed press about the paper. The "big oil" tweet is keenly irritating and stupid, like all tweets. Their abstract is basically boilerplate for a first paper in the field and it's not even false. Plenty of small sensor systems can get by on thermoelectric power alone. Not as if they were talking about powering factories or cities from a TEG.

Negative content like this is not really educational or entertaining. Engineering is not about . Your insistence on posting so many of these overbearingly down-punching videos is why I'm not subscribed anymore. It's also why I never subscribed to thunderf00t.

Youtubers apparently have to chase views and engagement these days. This sort of video if you go by the YT comments does just that. You have to appreciate the irony. Where's Alanis Morisette when you need her? You've got the ill-informed public digesting press releases and videos like this one no more informative.  That's worthy of a facepalm.

For some reason I saw a thunderf00t video recently where he was doing some experiments debunking a Veritasium video on why water drops are charged. I haven't thought about him for years but I was at least surprised (and pleased) to see he was prepared to put in a bit of effort to set up some experiments. Whether or not I was persuaded by the video that at least is something.

[EEVblog]

Youtubers apparently have to chase views and engagement these days. This sort of video if you go by the YT comments does just that.

Me chase views and engagement? I'm literally the example of how not to do that.

[EEVblog]

What if you're at the north or south poles? What if you're on the moon or something? <---------- Literally continues to argue the sentence before. LOL I don't want to argue this. I hope you're doing ok, Dave.

I'm doing great, thanks for asking. You on the other hand I'm a bit concerned about, RU OK?

[bsfeechannel]

Read the above quote from the paper. They literally say it could eliminate the need for battery storage in electrical power systems.

That's what they say.

Developing a mean to extract energy from existing PV cells at night would alleviate the daytime limitation of PV power generation and reduce OR eliminate the need for battery storage in electrical power systems.

If it's not possible to eliminate the need for battery storage, at least it can help reduce it. So their statement is still true.

[Nominal Animal]

In the pre-release thread for this video, I wrote: Even peer-reviewed articles today need to use buzzwords and marketing-speak, to ensure the researchers' future careers.  Bye bye, actual science; it was good knowing ya.

The latter half of the abstract:

We achieve 50 mW/m² nighttime power generation with a clear night sky, with an open-circuit voltage of 100 mV, which is orders of magnitude higher as compared with previous demonstrations. During the daytime, the thermoelectric generator also provides additional power on top of the electric power generated directly from the PV cells. Our system can be used as a continuous renewable power source for both day- and nighttime in off-grid locations.

The area of their experimental setup was 153 cm² = 0.0153 m², and they say "the TEG power reached a sustained level of around 0.7 mW on the night of October 11", when the "nighttime temperature difference reached its maximum", "sustaining [the setup] at around 3°C below the ambient throughout the night".

And this article was featured in Applied Physics Letters 120.

Did you realize that the "which is orders of magnitude higher as compared with previous demonstrations" refers to the open-circuit voltage (and not the power generated), and a specific demonstration: B. Zhao, M. Hu, X. Ao, Q. Xuan, Z. Song, and G. Pei, Sol. Energy Mater. Sol. Cells 228, 111136 (2021)?  In the text, they refer to that specific demonstration, and mention that they got so poor results they didn't even measure/describe the energy, only the open-circuit voltage.

Yeah.

What the article describes, is a way to use a heat sink and a TEG as a horribly inefficient replacement for other methods of energy storage.
The "orders of magnitude better" refers to exactly one previous demonstration which only listed open-circuit voltage and not the power generated.
They chose to use units that nicely obfuscate the fact that their demonstration device had a bit over one hundredth the unit area, so that their estimates are two orders of magnitude larger than the figures obtained in their demonstration.

This article is a perfect example of how to write marketing-speak, to publish and popularize a childish experiment, with carefully written text.  I, for one, applaud the academic writing coaches at Standford U.

This is not applied physics, this is applied psychology.

[2N3055]

Read the above quote from the paper. They literally say it could eliminate the need for battery storage in electrical power systems.

That's what they say.

Developing a mean to extract energy from existing PV cells at night would alleviate the daytime limitation of PV power generation and reduce OR eliminate the need for battery storage in electrical power systems.

If it's not possible to eliminate the need for battery storage, at least it can help reduce it. So their statement is still true.

0.1 % or less of capacity difference makes it technically correct but bullshit statement. If we add 50% of cost to an existing solar installation to gain 0.1% of more capacity is simply stupid. That is why it was a failure to let them even research that. Money could have been spent for something useful. For instance, battery chargers with  slightly better efficiency, batteries with a bit less losses. Even making batteries that have smaller temperature coefficients could gain percents of difference...

[bsfeechannel]

Like I said in the video, there may be some small niche for it.

Fo' shizzle. Edison discovered the tube rectifier but didn't see any practical application for it, because what he was looking for was a means to reduce the production of soot inside light bulbs. Across the pond someone (Fleming) said: hey we could use this to detect radio waves. And the rest is history.

But at a huge material and cost expense.

Yes, generating energy from plutonium balls is prohibitively expensive, however that's what powers Voyager 1 and 2.

[bdunham7]

Like I said in the video, there may be some small niche for it.

Fo' shizzle. Edison discovered the tube rectifier but didn't see any practical application for it, because what he was looking for was a means to reduce the production of soot inside light bulbs. Across the pond someone (Fleming) said: hey we could use this to detect radio waves. And the rest is history.

But at a huge material and cost expense.

Yes, generating energy from plutonium balls is prohibitively expensive, however that's what powers Voyager 1 and 2.

FFS, stop trying to imply that we don't understand the significance of scientific inquiry in general.   The objections to this 'research' paper have to do with the non-scientific hyperbole implying a specific practical application, not the science itself--that would be interesting if not for the fact that is is almost entirely not new. 

[David Hess]

My comment a couple days ago in EEVblog IRC after I saw the first articles:

<DHess_US> Deploy the Dave!  https://www.npr.org/2022/04/07/1091320428/solar-panels-that-can-generate-electricity-at-night-have-been-developed-at-stanf

The media response reminds me of the "solar power breakthrough" by a 13 year old back in 2011:

https://gizmodo.com/genius-13-year-old-has-a-solar-power-breakthrough-5832557

50 milliwatts per square meter is about 200mAH (over 12 hours) so a single 18650 cell could replace more than 20 square meters.

[bsfeechannel]

Did you even watch the video?

Yes, I did. Twice. And an ad against the soft-drink industry in between.

I spent maybe a third of it showing all the hyped up media reports.

That's why I asked what is being debunked, the news or the paper?

And then I showed some delusional claims in the paper itself.

The only "delusional claim" you showed is that they say that they can reduce or eliminate battery storage. You admit that battery storage can be reduced, but you think that a reduction by 0.04% is negligible, which is an opinion, to which you are entitled, of course.

Seriously, adding huge amounts of heatsinking and TEG and associated circuitry which ALSO require storage itself in the form of capacitors, to get the equivlent of a single 18650 cell of energy per day is so far from being practical it's a joke.

It's a research, Dave. Not a final product ready to be marketed. Lots of cool technologies we have today started out as impractical or failed experiments like this one.

If it was just the paper on it's own without any delusion claims or replacing battery storage or other stuff and simply presenting the research and then no meadia hype, fine. But that's not what happened, so it gets busted.

The media live on hype. Without hype they starve. But I got my answer: your video contraposes the hype so that we can see things from another perspective, and draw our own conclusions. That's OK with me.

And it's busted in the same way that solar roadways, batterieser, fontus etc etc are busted. All of them "worked" and could have a small niche application. Did this one have to raise a million bucks on Kickstarter to be worthy of being busted?

I see. You are trying to nip it in the bud. Good move.

[SiliconWizard]

This article is a perfect example of how to write marketing-speak, to publish and popularize a childish experiment, with carefully written text.  I, for one, applaud the academic writing coaches at Standford U.
This is not applied physics, this is applied psychology.

Yup. And, don't forget this kind of work gets significant public funding. That alone warrants debunking.
It might look like just a small harmless experiment to some, but it's Stanford and unfortunately constitutes the bulk of all the marketing greenish bullshit that's been happening for years now, wasting everyone's time and money. Even if this particular paper may look "harmless", I don't think any of those are, and so I agree with Dave debunking them. I consider them globally harmful, as they often serve as a pretext for publicly-funded, larger-scale tests that go nowhere, waste time and money, and have the public believe that something is really happening, when all that's happening is things getting worse and their tax money getting ripped off.

[bsfeechannel]

Dave is not trying to favor the campaign for defunding scientific and technological research, and therefore favoring the agenda of anti-scientific groups like creationists, for example, is he?

That'd be awful.

[EEVblog]

Like I said in the video, there may be some small niche for it.

Fo' shizzle. Edison discovered the tube rectifier but didn't see any practical application for it, because what he was looking for was a means to reduce the production of soot inside light bulbs. Across the pond someone (Fleming) said: hey we could use this to detect radio waves. And the rest is history.

But at a huge material and cost expense.

Yes, generating energy from plutonium balls is prohibitively expensive, however that's what powers Voyager 1 and 2.

FFS, stop trying to imply that we don't understand the significance of scientific inquiry in general.   The objections to this 'research' paper have to do with the non-scientific hyperbole implying a specific practical application, not the science itself--that would be interesting if not for the fact that is is almost entirely not new.

This.
We get the value of research. But they are making claims for a specific appliation applied to solar panels. They are not inventing or researching new TEG designs which would have application elsewhere, in which case we would all applaud the research. Instead they are using COTS TEG's specifically for an application attached to solar panels that generate orders of magntiude more power during the day. The application the paper refers to is completely redundant given other storage solutions available.

[nctnico]

Perhaps you missed the parts where it was publicised everywhere?
And as RS20 pointed out, the authors are the ones who talked this up like it was going to " reduce or eliminate the need for battery storage in electrical power systems.". That's 100% grade A delusional 

I don't think the authors are the ones who wrote the mealy-mouthed press about the paper. The "big oil" tweet is keenly irritating and stupid, like all tweets. Their abstract is basically boilerplate for a first paper in the field and it's not even false. Plenty of small sensor systems can get by on thermoelectric power alone. Not as if they were talking about powering factories or cities from a TEG.

Negative content like this is not really educational or entertaining. Engineering is not about . Your insistence on posting so many of these overbearingly down-punching videos is why I'm not subscribed anymore. It's also why I never subscribed to thunderf00t.

I agree. The world can do with less negativity. And likely others are noticing as well. Keysight has a new event featuring several 'Youtube' electronics content creators but much to my surprise, Dave / EEVblog isn't included. https://live.keysight.com/s/live-from-the-lab/home

[Ed.Kloonk]

Negative content like this is not really educational or entertaining. Engineering is not about .

Bullshit is isn't.

From my standpoint, this rotten information filters down to the normies and pretty soon I'll need to explain to someone why they think I'm lying when their solar panels don't make power at nighttime like the had hoped, because they saw the research. 

[floobydust]

I worked in a university research lab and it was strange.
The academics are all about getting grants, funding for their labs and will jump on a trendy bandwagon in the blink of an eye if it means securing cash.
Doesn't matter at all if the research is practical, as long as it brings media attention and fame and glory for the university and academics.
Academics have quite the ego and look down upon technologists and non-academic staff. Publish or Perish is the mantra, pound out the papers, exploit the ideas and fresh energy from grad student's work.

I found it gross, like a bubble world where everyone is content being 1,000 miles from anything practical and PhD's thinking they are intellectual elites.
Worse yet is how the uni goes on about patenting the nut-bar IP further wasting money and preventing any corporation from developing something out of it.
The difference between fantasy IP and reality does involve some unicorns and rainbows.

P.S. - Did they get the 50mW/m² during a full moon?

[Nominal Animal]

SiliconWizard and floobydust highlighted the problem I have with this kind of "research".

I know from experience how difficult it is to get any kind of support for genuinely new, useful research.  Those with their hands on the purse strings need publicity.  Here in Finland, they prefer to (exclusively) support research that is already being done elsewhere.  Not to be first, or support or compete with others, but only so that they can say that the research they support is at the forefront of science.

Because the only metric used is the number of publications in high-ranking academic papers, the quality of said papers is in steep, continuous decline.  Not only are an increasing fraction of papers being shown to be incorrect or invalid later, but even the experiments they claim to be based on are increasingly difficult to duplicate.  Even in physical sciences, more than a quarter of papers end up being retracted or later shown incorrect.  (In humanist "sciences", that fraction is already over half the papers; with many authors forming clusters that only refer to each other.  Meta-analysis of the literature, especially directed graphs of the citations, shows a very dire picture of the "science".)

The experiment/demonstration in this featured article is laughable.  They didn't even use a standard commercial panel, only a tiny 153 cm² one (that's less than five inches square, or something like 9 cm by 17 cm).  There is no merit in this paper, only very good writing (as in how the statements are constructed to evoke emotions in the readers; psychology).

If this kind of crap is selected as a featured article, consider what kind of "scientific furor" would be raised if someone bought a commercial photovoltaic panel, say one or two square meters (I forgot what the size of the individual panels Dave uses is), and then combined one of the commercially available solid-state battery technologies, by laminating a few cells on the underside of the panel, forming a combined solar cell battery.  Pick a chemistry that is more or less safe (chemically, so avoid carcinogens and such) and benefits from the heat from the solar cell (say, adding mobility of charge carriers).  You'll probably need a budget of say USD 1000 to get all you need, but it's all commercially available, and you only need to do a couple of days of research.  Then, find yourself an accomplished scientific writer –– the ones at Stanford that helped those guys are seriously good, just look at how not only is each sentence in the paper quite well constructed, but the entire paper has the classical structure, with all weaknesses visible, but cleverly side-stepped; consider the "orders of magnitude claim"! –– and become the sole author of a future featured paper in a leading journal.

That battery chemistry does not even need to be at all efficient, only good enough that you can show "orders of magnitude" improvement over the article in this thread, and gush about the rapid evolution in the technology and science in this field.  (That is important, because that gives you the place to use the manipulative sentences and wording that will get you research grants in the future.  The idea is not to put yourself at the forefront, but show that this is the field where grants should be directed at.)

See?  There is almost nothing "scientific" about this.  It is pure human social gaming, pure psychology, using already commercially available and perfectly well known technologies, to push a narrative about "science".  It is, in a very real sense, a parody of real science.

Now, if somebody actually did some materials research on how to combine the solar cell with light weight solid-state battery technology that took advantage of the couple of degrees Kelvin/Celsius difference between the panel and ambient air – more during the daytime, so perhaps an opportunity in the charging (high difference) – discharging (low difference) chemistry? –, that would be interesting.  However, that kind of paper is exactly the kind that goes unpublished or ignored for years, because it takes sense and intelligence to realize its potential.  If the University realizes its worth before publication, they'll partner with a company, so that instead of publishing the tech, they license the technology for a high fee instead.

It's just like the situation with patents in most fields.  They were intended to ensure the invention will eventually reach the markets, but in actuality, are used for the exact opposite purpose: to hinder competition in the field for as long as possible.  Most patents nowadays are never used in actual products, and are only taken to be used as a litigation threat against competitors!

[Ranayna]

What if you're at the north or south poles? What if you're on the moon or something? I don't want to argue this....

I'm by no means an expert, but a TEG needs a temperature differential. Sooner or later, the panel and the heatsink on the other side of the TEG are at, or near enough, equilibrium. No more energy for you, i suspect you will freeze to death if you relied on those 50 milliwatts 

I wonder how much less energy the panel produces over the day, just from that film on top. Also don't solar panels like lower temperatures? That isolated chamber also likely gets a lot warmer than a bare panel.

Keysight has a new event featuring several 'Youtube' electronics content creators but much to my surprise, Dave / EEVblog isn't included. https://live.keysight.com/s/live-from-the-lab/home

I suspect that this more related to the fact that Keysight, in large parts, apparently does not give a rat's ass about non corporate customers anymore.
Also, ElectroBoom's Channel is huge, compared to the EEVBLOG, even Great Scott's channel is twice the size. I have to admit though i never heard about Curious Marc before now. And what TheSignalPath does with Testequipment is in a whole other league from what i know
So i would not blame this on any specific negativity. What was one Scope Month has become smaller and smaller over the years anyway. Also, was Dave's Giveaway ever explicitly advertised by Keysight at all? I always had the impression that this was more of a bone that's thrown to the australian community since the official Scope Month was not allowed.

[bsfeechannel]

I suspect that this more related to the fact that Keysight, in large parts, apparently does not give a rat's ass about non corporate customers anymore.

I suspect that the real reason is because Dave refuses to be a shill.

[nctnico]

I suspect that this more related to the fact that Keysight, in large parts, apparently does not give a rat's ass about non corporate customers anymore.

I suspect that the real reason is because Dave refuses to be a shill.

Did you notice the Keysight banner advertisement if you scroll up a little bit? How did that end up there?

Either Dave didn't want to invest the time (which is ultimately his and only his choice) or Keysight skipped EEVblog and the negative ranting videos (which mostly appeal to the nay-saying crowd) may have something to do with it. Dave keeps on claiming that he 'busted / debunked' so many things but the world simply doesn't care. Solar roads are still being developed further and installed (last year the longest solar road for cyclists in the world got installed somewhere in the NL), Batteriser / Batteroo is still being developed and sold, Hyperloops are still being developed and built, Solus infrared heaters are still being sold (fun fact: BEV car makers are installing these kind of heaters in cars to heat them more efficiently), etc. The list goes on. And if you look at the recent videos: the topics are allover the place. From wealth to frustrations about Youtube.