Everybody with a college course in Thermodynamics.
this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2026
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Punches below the belt. Right in the photovoltaics.
I wonder if we could kill 2 birds with one stone. Have parabolic solar panels that reflect unabsorbed light to boil water.
How about running water through the back side of the panels to keep them cool, transfer the heat into a heat battery (sand) then us that to assist your hot water heater.
Either that or use it for temperature differential power generation.
Although I guess you could use the power generated by the panels to run a heat pump to boil the water used for cooling too.
Right on. and PV get's less efficient when it gets hot, I'm unsure if there's enough waste heat to do anything useful. but there is at least a marginally good reason to cool them.
It would be a less efficient boiler (because the 'mirrors' would be much less reflective), and much more expensive (because solar panels -- especially custom-made curved ones -- are much more expensive than mirrors).
Overall, I suppose maybe you could come out ahead if you used very efficient solar panels for it, and that would let you generate slightly more watts per surface area used...
But we really don't need to optimize for surface area in 99% of cases. Almost everywhere solar power is used, space to install panels is abundant, and it would be much cheaper and more effective to just put one or the other of these solar collection methods over a slightly wider area if you want increased production. (And even then, most of the cases where production-per-surface-area is very important are on solar-powered vehicles, and these parabolic sun-tracking mirrors are impractical for use on a moving vehicle.)
You'd just have 2 inefficient power generators
At least hydro and wind power are still safe from the boiling water...
Still safe so far
Hydro is the OG boiled water.
Sun heats water. Water evaporates. Go up high. Falls down. Turn turbine.
Wind power is a side effect of the same process happening on a rotating globe.
Water evaporates.
Evaporation =/= boiling.
With all the solar mirrors, won't we overhear the sun shooting all that light back?
there's a silencer on its gun, so we probably won't hear much.
heat transfer fluid is circulated
solar battery pumps?
Would solar boilers be more efficient than PV?
No, neither will it be cheaper.
People stopped building those some years ago.
(But those incredibly expensive concentrators with a single tower are more efficient. Nobody is building those anymore either.)
They used to be cheaper. Solar is bananas cheap now
Generating electricity by boiling water used to be the cheapest option, but nowadays it's a bottleneck that itself is way more expensive than the alternatives that people actually build.
It only got cheaper with time, though. It's the alternatives (PV, wind, batteries, gas) that improved a crazy amount.
I assume not efficient enough to justify cost
Turns out that sunlight is very cheap. You need a lot of efficiency to justify any extra cost.
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PV panels have very low maintenance needs
Another thread I read said that photovoltaics have an efficiency of around 45%, while turbines are somewhere in the 40% range. Source: I dunno.
PVs max out around 28%
wait these could be built with co2 turbines as well, right??
Yes, super critical CO2 turbines can work in such a system. As can sterling engines. Or thermoelectric solid state couples.
Any system that uses a temperature differential to generate power can be used. It’s just a matter of what you care about in a given situation. Upfront cost, mechanical reliability, noise/vibration, and availability of needed components play in to what makes the most sense.
Seems iffy outside of totally clear skies.