this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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I too have a bridge to sell you!
I love when people act like progress never happens, we're in a world where developments happen so fast it's impossible to keep up with a single field of development because so much new stuff is happening but sure anyone interested in the emergence of printable pv is a rube...
I see the same in ai discussion, I use it when coding all the time but every article about a new development has someone saying it's useless and a gimmick.
Rapid deployment solar is happening whether you like it or not, the science has been building for a couple of decades and every interesting new study and development opens up new avenues of possibility. This will be a game changer in many situations and it's something we can see getting closer, studies like this are so interesting because we can see which avenues things are likely to take and consider how it would affect things.
We have a tendency to think of science as someone waking up and inventing something and then it's ready to hit the shelves but it's never worked like that. If you'd been reading the news when photography was new you'd see endless news stories about progress towards colour photography, about potential methods and means of a making a single plate colour image - famously you'd have also seen discussions in the letters section of the Times between some of the chemists that'd go on to actually solve it.
Progress happens, science happens - sure you don't care that they found a way of transferring printed solar onto fabric which avoids the need for the fabric to be able to endure the entire fabrication process but it's actually a pretty cool thing. The article is kinda dumb I really don't think this process will hold up to the intense sea air and mechanical stress of being a sail but for simpler uses such as an awning cover over carparks or even better train lines its likely to be very useful - imagine being able to generate the power for electric vehicle charging or train travel simply from a fabric roof which also shades the area from hot sun.
A process that makes the current chemistry cheap and fast to print onto a useful material is a big thing, not as huge as extending the working life of the materials but by being easier to make and replace we might find that there are a lot of uses for rapid temporary deployment of PV in situations like disaster zones but also in seasonal infrastructure which is especially important for things like music festivals, holiday locations (which see power usage vastly increased when tourists are in town), and travel routes.
It can be as plain as "we literally couldn't do this last week" - like when we invented grass that doesn't need to be watered - and people will be there to tell you it's shit and you're incompetent if you feel otherwise.
Yeah, you're missing the point that this is a shouting headline that I've read about 50 times in the past ten years at least. Progress happens, I'm sure, I neo t say it doesn't. This, however, is sensationalist bullshit, not progress.
I think you probably don't understand the article because you only read the headline, the actual study is very interesting and solves a problem that was often talked about before. Those of us with an interest in this field recognise the advancement that's been made are are interested in the implications,
The headline is like if every article about CERN, James Webb, and any other physics study was titled 'could lead to unified field theory' or if every time anyone releases a new machine learning model the headlines were all about AGI - Oh yeah, they do that one too...
So yes it's a bad headline but it's great science and we really are making great progress with printable PV - there will come a time where you start seeing it everywhere.
Much like AI people have known that the relevant breakthroughs have been coming for a long time but it's not until a certain threshold is met that we see companies scrambling to stake their claim. Someone will make a factory producing one of the various printable PV methods and market it to a suitable situation, people will find other uses for it also besides the initial market and as demand becomes established others will leap on and start making their own variation.