By J I Thacker reporting from the front line of the climate emergency
A new prototype solar panel from the Technical Institute of Copenhagen (TIC) promises to be a game changer for renewable energy prospects.
“Hitherto, daily and seasonal intermittency has been a killer for solar panels,” says Rickard Pierrot of TIC, one of the team behind the invention. “Only an idiot would make solar a major part of energy infrastructure in a developed country. But NightShine answers the sceptics, and then some.”
Pierrot first had the idea for his invention when he read a story about diesel generators masquerading as solar panels in Spain to claim the over-generous subsidies. The scheme was only rumbled when the “solar panels” continued to feed power into the grid at night time.
“What if solar panels could work at night?” Pierrot wondered. “At first, I thought of charging enormous batteries and then using them to generate light to shine back on themselves. But that was a dumb idea.” He laughs and sips his soya latte. “You might as well just send the battery power to the grid. Why illuminate the panels?”
His next idea was a true lightbulb moment. “Traditional solar panels work by intercepting photons. Naturally the Earth is opaque to photons, so at night the panels are useless. But the Sun emits another kind of particle that shines right through the Earth, even at night: solar neutrinos.”
The only problem for the team was finding a material that would intercept a particle that is extremely reluctant to interact with any ordinary matter. “Neutrinos only interact via the weak force,” Pierrot explains, demonstrating a salt-shaker dodging around a pepper mill. “That means you have to bring the neutrino extremely close to another particle before they notice each other. But what not a lot of people know is that although neutrinos pass through the Earth, they do change on their way through – a bit like the way white light is changed into a rainbow as it passes through a triangular prism.”
Keying in on this relationship, Pierrot was able to theorise a molecular structure that would be partly opaque to neutrinos, based on the precise orientation and atomic spacing of the lattice. A materials scientist at Bologna University produced a prototype to that specification that, according to Pierrot, “caught 10% of solar neutrinos in at least one of the three flavours.” He laughs. “Personally I like vanilla!”
The NightShine solar panel is still in its testing phase at the moment. The magical material may still be a trade secret, but we know it is expensive, and the panel’s lifetime is uncertain. But Pierrot is confident he’s onto a winner. “If we can catch 10% now, in ten years we’ll be able to catch 30%. This technology has the potential to be a game-changer in the fight against climate heating. By the way, are you single? You have the most incredible blue eyes!”
Pierrot’s work was funded by, among others, the European Union Onion Growers’ Union (EUOGU).
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Well I can top this scheme.
I have a device that captures and concentrates the aether that pervades the universe.The aether then powers my Heisenberg compensator (HC). The HC dissolves matter in chamber into an energy stream where it can be directed at c velocity to another complementary, quantum entangled HC where it is reformed.
Because Science.
Infinite Improbability Drive?
Is it a certainty that the HC works?
You had me going until I read that. 🙂
I made it all the way to “By the way, are you single?” before being sure it wasn’t just a researcher with an oddball sense of humor. I hate April Fool’s Day. Being mildly autistic, it takes me way too much attention and energy to separate wacky-but-true from wacky-because-it’s-a-joke. I should probably just get off the internet every April 1st.
Same here.
Well, this is great news. We can say goodby to the climate emergency. You might be interested in my Dark Energy Generator, which turns Black Matter into useful electricity, which is infinite, cheap and much more practical than having to have these very low efficiency neutrino panels. Should be ready in about a year.
But the Spanish worked out how to get their solar panels to collect subsidy at nighttime years ago. No neutrinos required, just diesel for the generators.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/08/17/nobody-expects-the-spanish-solar-inquisition/
Bah. I have a better solution for nighttime shine solar panels. One word: fireflies. The application should be obvious.
There’s this one meadow in Virginia, outside of Front Royal, along the Shenandoah River that would be perfect for your Firefly Panels.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Shenandoah+Farms,+Shenandoah,+VA+22630/@38.9558059,-78.1079132,431m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x89b5dcf210ac2e2b:0x3ff24e286c363433!8m2!3d38.9817756!4d-78.0755535
As a kid, one summer evening in the late 1960s, it was just filled with fireflies! Amazing to watch.
I have been putting small treadmills, with micro-generators on them, out back to give the chipmunks and squirrels some much needed exercise. It keeps the lights going all day long. I have yet to experience any blackouts during the daytime, proof that the concept works.
All these hair brained ideas just show us how gullible people are. Wouldn’t it be easier to just stop the world from turning so the sun would always be shining? Then everyone could move to the sunny side of the earth and it would immediately do away with the need for lights, reduce heating needs, increase crop growth, and save even more energy while producing more.
If everyone was on one side you might get a speed wobble and everyone would fall off.
😂😂 that really made me laugh.
They could compensate with all the cheap energy available and fly to the dark side every evening and then fly back in the morning to go to work – get a great night’s sleep in the pitch black. Any wobble problem could be fine tuned using homeless people. They don’t vote anyway.
Talking of April fool stories, one appears to have turned up in the UK’s Daily Telegraph today.
lts been claimed that “The beast from the East” in March 2018 was caused by melting of the Arctic ice, and it further claimed that we can expect further heavy snowfalls in the future thanks to the Arctic sea ice loss over recent years. So it now seems that global warming risks causing NH cooling.
So global warming cools the northern hemisphere, wonder what they think it does to the other half
I appreciate the sense of humor, my mother was great at April fools day, She could keep a straight face.
“The NightShine solar panel is still in its testing phase…”
Up until I read that line, the whole scheme sounded genuine,
but no decent Climate Scientist would skip the modeling phase
of such an important concept. (-;
Well written, I especially like the University of Bologna
April fool Joke.
😎👍
This technology has been around for a long time. It’s called a neutrino catcher. All you need to do to make one is to train the atoms to watch the incoming neutrinos and move to intercept them before they pass by. The only reason this is not in widespread use is that oil companies have been suppressing it. They’ve been paying atoms to not interact with neutrinos for years.
This one is a real stretch. Given the date I will just ignore it.
These would work well on the dark side of the moon.
If there were a “dark side of the moon.” The half unlit by the sun changes every day — continuously!
Dark side denier!!
Yeah Clyde, c’mon man – tell Pink Floyd that.
What was he smokin’ when he wrote the song?
It was a whole album – for many years the best selling album of all time. Syd Barrett took the whole fall (excessive LSD reportedly), before the others did the album. Look it up, because I’m a half a degree of separation from all of this and it’s not that pleasant – Syd that is.
I know the effort doesn’t get the appreciation deserved, but somebody has to do it!
Are we talking April, May, June, July and August fool?
Jape of the decade
-h/t Holly.
The respect they had for him was awesome!
Just an awesome series overall.
I would have been disappointed if someone hadn’t contributed an April Fool’s joke.
Off subject, sorry- and NOT an April 1 joke (is April 1 a world wide phenomenon?)
on the Guardian
“Rapid global heating is hurting farm productivity, study finds”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/rapid-global-heating-is-hurting-farm-productivity-study-finds/ar-BB1fd7X4
“The climate crisis is already eating into the output of the world’s agricultural systems, with productivity much lower than it would have been if humans hadn’t rapidly heated the planet, new research has found.”
Rapidly? Not rapidly enough for me, here in cold/damp Massachusetts. :-}
I think they have read the graph upside down.
Renewable energy is GREAT ! These new dark panels will compliment the fantastic new wind turbine design. The wind that comes from the spinning turbine blades creates the wind for the next wind turbine. New modeling predicts virtually unlimited energy coming from these secondary wind recovery units.
Biden should have waited until today to release his $2.25 trillion infrastructure joke plan.
That was his plan, but he forgot what day of the week it was.
For alarmists, every day is April Fools day.
Delaware nailed it:
https://twitter.com/delaware_gov/status/1377611629312024581
Richard Pierrot = Dick the Clown? Or a reference to the call sign of the F-16 pilot played by Will Farrell in an SNL skit from a few years ago?
I wonder how many Greenies would link this if it was posted on The Puffington Host or Jones’s Mother? Or pay for it on GoFundMe? So many gullible Greenies, so little time…
I’ve forwarded this article to the White House and recommended that President Biden immediately invest $10 trillion dollars a year for this project. Heck, just put AOC in charge.
What ever happened to the idea that all fat people would be employed to run on treadmills nightly to generate massive amounts of electricity when the sun isn’t shining?
I tried calculating once how much energy is stored in all the excess fat of people in the USA but it didn’t come out that high relative to daily energy needs of the USA.
So you just had to eat your calculations?
Hardy-har-har.
Seriously? Capture neutrinos and convert them into electricity? Any serious climate scientist would know you just send the neutrinos up a super-cooled graphite twisted strand wire and use them directly. This way they can interact with local Dark Energy and you get 3 times the energy out that you captured. (because 0 = 3 x 0).
Lol