In reply to Jouni Valkonen's message of Wed, 3 Oct 2012 03:04:19 +0300: Hi, [snip] >Individual PV-cell is operating at 20x efficiency, because the light is >concentrated with lenses. However as only minor portion of the cone is in >direct sunlight at the time, the total amount of silicon required is only >about 75 % less than with conventional flat solar panels.
This makes no sense to me. It seems that at any given instant only some of the cells are exposed to direct sunlight, the other half to indirect sunlight (unless the sun is directly overhead). Therefore if anything, one would need 75% more cells, not less. I can't guess what effect the lenses would have, but I'm guessing it would be minimal, since they only appear to cover a fraction of the total area. Nice video, but my common sense says it's mostly nonsense. I would like to see the test results. Regards, Robin van Spaandonk http://rvanspaa.freehostia.com/project.html
