215
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
215 points (95.0% liked)
Technology
59287 readers
5022 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Oh, it's just a thermopile put out in the sun.
I can see why it never caught on then. You'd be relying on the difference in temperature between the hot side of a thing painted black put in the sun and the cool side in the shade. The amount of energy you'd get from such a setup would be infinitecimal. I'd expect you'd need to do an absurd amount of work and use an absurd amount of material just to power a single house.
The amount of energy it would take to build a "solar cell" thermopile that'd generate 1.5v with a quite high internal resistance would probably be in the megawatt-hours, likely from coal and oil.
There were some numbers in one of the links I posted, hopefully that is able to give some solidity to the theory.
It was early when I read the article, I got the impression that the 9W was for the furnace version of the thermopile electric generator.
The larger versions generated 45, 60 and 240 watts. Another source said 500 watts.