Published On Dec 28, 2019
I made this animation showing how Naked Energy's ( https://www.nakedenergy.co.uk/ ) hybrid solar technology works. READ BELOW in the description for answers to frequently asked questions.
Here's a note from Nicholas Simmons, co-founder of Naked Energy:
"Thank you everyone for your comments - it's great to see so much interest (and an abundance of healthy scepticism!). Just to clarify that heat is really important - especially in the context of generating sustainable energy that can help mitigate climate change. Also we know that PV cells have a temperature coefficient (-0.32%/K with the PERC cells we are using) that reduces their efficiency as they get hotter. Virtu is aimed at the global imperative of decarbonising heat and the electric output is a bonus, piggy-backing off a high efficiency evacuated tube solar thermal collector. For statistics on heat usage globally please see - https://www.ren21.net/wp-content/uplo... and for commercial / serious questions about VirtuPVT or VirtuHOT please refer to www.nakedenergy.co.uk "
Regarding PV Cell Efficiency at High Temperatures, Nicholas Simmons from Naked Energy has this to say: "PV cells regularly get to very high temperatures. If you return to your car on a hot summers day you know how hot it can be. A conventional PV module traps the cells behind glass and lets them bake in the sun. When a solar panel is made the temperatures used in the lamination process go up to something like 150C. As mentioned the efficiency of a solar cell drops off as temperature rises - this is known as the temperature coefficient and is published on the data sheets that go with PV modules. A conventional solar module has no way of losing heat other than through convection, but at the height of summer with no breeze and high ambient temperatures there is very little cooling going on. There is a lot of academic research out there discussing this. The virtuPVT heat exchanger as described in the video is constantly taking heat away to be used for other heating / hot water / process heat. Consequently a virtuPVT collector can actually be cooler than a normal PV module under the same circumstances.
Patents can be found here: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9... / https://patents.google.com/patent/US9...
