Hi. Everyone knows one of the major problems with solar power is that well, when the sun goes down, it doesn't generate any more power. But that is So 2021. thinking this is 2022..

we now have Tada solar panels that generate electricity at night. They've been developed at Stanford University. It's got to be legit. Look at this.

It's reported on Npr here from none other than like a Pulitzer prize winner with 258 000 followers. It's got to be true. Take that big oil. We can now generate all renewable power at night because Stanford have done the research and they can generate power at night.

Ah, a team of engineers at Stanford University have developed a solar cell. They can generate some electricity at night. The research comes at a moment when the number of solar jobs and residential installations are rising just at the nick of time. While solar panels can provide electricity during the day, this device can serve as a continuous renewable power source for both day and night time.

According to the study published this week in the Journal of Applied Physics Letters Stanford University published in Applied Physics Letters, it doesn't get much better. More reputable than this: Look at this. That's in everywhere. Scientists invent solar panels that work at night.

Harvesting infrared night light at night provides continuous renewable power source uses a process called Radiative Cooling that allows for 24-hour renewable energy generation. Just reported everywhere. Look at this work to end panels work at night. It's on interest in engineering.

Radiative cooling might reduce the need for costly batteries in some applications. Oh, if interesting, wasn't interesting enough, it's a wonderful engineering. It can generate electricity at night. I can look 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Zme science. It's like being reported everywhere. and as usual in a lot of these articles, Well, they don't really give you any details, but look, it's you know they colored the article. It wasn't until recently the solar energy declined the price and become much more affordable.

Some companies have brought in the program. California has incentivized the shift of solar as the something or other continues to happen overseas. because, well, yeah, that's got to do with, uh, solar. er.

The present Ceo of the Solar Energy Industries Association, The National Trade Association, told Cnbc that investing in energy alternatives is important and with the global supply uncertainty, we must ramp up clean energy to eliminate reliance on hostile nations for our energy needs. So this is the greatest thing since sliced bread take that big oil. So of course, any engineer with two brain cells to rub together at this point is just going. What's that? I can smell.

It's not actually, but it's the enabler of bullshits. It's yep, you guessed it, the thermoelectric generator. But to be fair, a few of these articles, if you scroll down far enough, you do actually get the actual data that tells you. Yeah, this ain't the revolution that's made out to be.

So after they waffle on about, you know, one billion people access to the electricity agreement like a real problem. And you know such batteries can be prohibitedly expensive because obviously you know a battery storage is the thing, right? But you know, yeah, it's fairly expensive. Then you've got to have excess solenoid and not using during the day so you can use it at night over 24 hours. But so this is like fair enough.

So this is why it like it. It ticks all of the social media boxes here to get uh talked about on these channels. So the team at Stanford University have assembled an off-the-shelf solar cell and added a thermoelectric generator. Our friend, the enabler of many debunking videos.

The thermoelectric generator. I love it. The Teg: This is a device that produces currents from the difference in temperature between ambient air and the solar cell itself. Yep, you know it's you.

knew you knew exactly how this was working as soon as you clicked on the video, didn't you? The solar panel turned out to be a very efficient thermal radiator. Very efficient says the Um. Stanley Hue fan at Stanford University research team. Ah, must be good, right? So place your bets down below right now.

How many watts per square meter do you think we're going to get out of a solar panel with a thermoelectric generator plonked on the bottom of it? Come on Ta-da The Modified: The solar cell was able to generate a power output of 50 milliwatts per square meter, which is 0.04 percent of the power output of the solar cell during the daytime. Nevertheless, that's still a useful amount of power enough to power devices like a mobile phone charger or low wattage Led light take that big oil, but there's still lots of room for improvement. What's probably most relevant about this approach is that the energy users would have a direct power source at night without the need for battery storage as batteries can be expensive and not reliable. They also require a lot of energy to be manufactured and can pollute the environment if they are improperly disposed of.

50 milliwatts milli with a little M, not the big M little M Like this is Psn energy harvesting stuff, So here it is. This is how it works. The solar cell heats up during the day and at night time it has radiative cooling to the open sky like this. It's got thermoelectric generator with a heatsink on the back and the temperature are differential.

They say it's a couple of Uh degrees and then the teg produces a piss out a little bit of current with a minute um, terminal voltage on it. You know, low enough that you have to use proper energy, low voltage energy harvesting circuits and then maybe you know you can light up an Led all night. So how all this stuff like you know this stuff gets published and then I don't know, it goes on to the the news network thing and then like you know, Npr, pick it up. And once Npr I've picked it up, I don't know.

Everyone picks it up and then they all just waffle on these articles and things like that. And if you're lucky like some of them will actually tell you, then you go right down here. 50 milliwatts? Yeah, 0.04 of the solar panel during the day. let's actually run the numbers on that.

Let's get the confuser. So look at the panels that I've got on my roof. These Lg are ones here. 370 watts.

I know there's better these days, but there will just run with the ones that I've got. Lg. By the way, if you didn't hear the news, um, I should have done a video on this. They've completely gone out of business.

They're not not Lg, but their solar panel business has shut down. So so much for their 25-year warranty. Yeah, they are claiming that they will, um, technically like for the next couple of years, honor the warranty or something. but after that, near sorry.

But hopefully yeah, they're good quality panels, so hopefully my one shouldn't fail. But anyway, there you go. That's news. Anyway, we can, um, calculate Um based on the size of the panel.

We can actually calculate the wattage per square meter. So that's 370 divided by uh, 1.7 square meters. About 217 watts per square meter. That's peak power at, uh, a thousand watts per square meter.

solar insulation, 50 milliwatts divided by 217. I get, um, 0.02 Yeah, so I don't know where they're getting their 0.04 from. Yeah, I'm getting 0.02 So, but it doesn't matter. it's Naf all.

and it says somewhere that they're hoping to get double the output of this thing and that sounds oh, we're hoping to get double in product, you know. And when these things hit production, double knuffle is still nuffle. So before we look at the actual uh paper here, let's just run some numbers again. I've got 14 panels that gives me a total of 24 square meters for my fight.

Just my five kilowatt end phase uh system. Just a new one I've got installed, and um, if we can actually achieve a peak output of 50 milliwatts per square meter. That gives us 1.2 watts. 1.2 watts all night.

The residual power of my house is about a hundred times that two orders of magnitude. It's about 120 watts all night to run like the fridges overnight and just the you know standby, uh, power of stuff 1.2 watts. and that's like maybe one little piece ant Led light to read by. But meh.

So let's assume that we could get say that 1.2 watts for say 12 hours. Let's let's say you know, at best like 15 watt hours? What's 15 watt hours? Well, an 18 650 cell, Just a small 18 650 so you have in your torch? That's about five watt hours. So basically it's like charging up three of those. I mean charging up three of those during the day takes Nafl energy.

In fact, let's go to my Uh end phase array here and have a look at a uh, good day. I was peeking at uh the other day at 3.8 kilowatts. So on a good day, just the other day, I was producing uh, 25 kilowatt hours. This is 15 what hours? That's 0.06 percent of the energy I produced in that during that day.

So if we simply used 0.06 percent of that 25 kilowatt hours I produced on that day and charged three 18 650 cells, then well, we get the same amount of energy as this. Wow. Fantastic. Take that big oil.

Come on, it's a joke. Anyway, I'll link in the Uh Pdf paper down below. you can check it out like look, I have no problems with this research. It's great.

It's the fact that they you know they always talk it up. even the researchers themselves talk it up. And I've done debunking videos before where research because they have like a commercial arm of their research facilities they have to talk it up and they just like marketing just starts right and the wank words come in and they just no right similar thing happen here and then all the media outlets just talk it up. but it's in the title of the paper right? You don't have to read down, it's there.

50 milliwatts per square meter? like? So anyone who really has any business writing articles on stuff like this should be able to know that, come on. 50 milliwatts per square meter? You know, Like, surely, like even like the Joe average technical writer. Um, for some rag somewhere should be able to, you know, do some like simple multiplication. I mean, come on.

And here's the abstract here. and we achieve 50 milliwatts per square meter nighttime power generation with a clear night sky. So once again, it's still dependent upon, like the cloud cover and stuff like that, ironically, um, with an open circuit voltage of 100 millivolts. Okay, so yeah, you can string them together.

um, and get higher. But yeah, this is energy harvesting stuff, right? Which is orders of magnitude higher orders of magnitude higher compared with previous demonstrations. Oh, and that's what they ran with in some of these articles. Like, you know, they'll talk it up like they're talking up in their own paper.

orders of magnitude higher. It's still 50 milliwatts per square meter. During the daytime, the thermoelectric generator also provides additional power on top of the electric power generated from the Pv cells. Come on: 1.06 Our system can be used as a continuous, renewable power source for both day and night time in off-grid locations, and that's the abstract.

Come on right? we're talking like 0.02 0.04 percent. Whatever you want to take it as right, it's Nafl. You can run like a little torch bowl with it. See, and even down here.

Like first paragraph, developing a means that should be to um, extract energy from existing Pv cells at night would alleviate the daytime elimination of Pv power generation and reduce or eliminate the need for battery storage reduce by 0.06 percent. Come on. This is just no talking up their own research. It's just no.

Anyway, Like you know, apart from that, like it's a good paper, right? They go into all the mathematics there, right? For all you fanboys, uh, fear the Pv, The tag, the heatsink, and that's the uh, thermal equivalent uh, circuit there. and they got all the maths behind it. and we actually get a photo. Here you go.

Here's what it actually looks like. There's their prototype, right? So they haven't even done a square meter. They're just extrapolating from like this tiny little tiny little thing, right? And is that like a styrofoam box around it, Like as if you're gonna like embed like a styrofoam box. And then let's not get into the whole, um, the heat sink and ability of existing solar panels.

They're designed to be as incredibly light and cheap as possible. You know you're not gonna build like massive amounts of aluminium that goes in, which is very expensive and energy consuming to actually produce that to get Nafl, uh, power out of these things if you want to try and commercialize this somehow into like, commercial, uh, solar panels, it's just ridiculous. And look at the size of the heatsink. I mean, it's just absolutely enormous.

This is to get there. 50 milliwatts. See, here's the diagram over here. Yeah, it's It's a polystyrene insulation around that.

So you're going to put insulation around you around your solar panels you can build it in, so have massive chunky thermal heatsink aluminium on your um, solar panels, and cost an absolute fortune to be an environmental nightmare. Um, and then polystyrene insulation around there, and heatsink, and giant heat sink. and basically, come on, come on. you know, like it's to think that this has anything but just niche, academic, uh, value Like this might be some incredibly niche application somewhere for it.

But to talk it up as if it's going to, you know, reduce or eliminate the need for batteries at night? It's just. it's just absolute. Anyway, they've They've got the grass there, right? It's pretty good. It's only a short paper.

I'll link it in down below, but that's that is thoroughly busted. Anyway, that is thoroughly busted. Right in the title of the paper. 50 milliwatts per square meter? Anyway, come on, come on.

Anyway, if you like that, give it a big thumbs up. As always, discuss down below. Catch you next time.