Energy is the most
common type of power plant in the Australia but solar just hit a huge milestone
that might make them finally shine past the there for watching I'm
trace for all the talk about solar panels being better for the environment they
are still notoriously inefficient or were until now
Australian
researchers from the University of New South Wales created the most efficient
solar panels ever these new panels convert 46 percent of their sunlight energy
into electricity typical rooftop panels for example hover around 15 percent at
best this new technology works by distributing the solar collection into three
cells picking sunlight up in multiple wavelengths and then reflecting that
excess light at a fourth panel is genius so 46% huh that's the best we can do
46doesn't sound like much does it right it's less than half traditionally power
plants usually use heat to create steam and move turbines those turbines
generate the electric current I bet you're as curious as I was about which
plants are more
efficient than 46%
but these solar panels are actually doing better than a lot of other plants to
calculate efficiency of a power plant you take the output power and heat that
together and then you divide by the total amount of power produced essentially
you are accounting for the fact that burning fuels is hot and you lose a lot of
heat in that power transfer so let me give you an example in the there are over
1,400 coal power plants burning this fossil fuel and an efficiency of about 33
percent meaning two-thirds of all the energy produced from a coal power plant
is lost even the most efficient coal plants are only 45
percent efficient
nuclear energy also measured by the previous equation ranges from the low 30s
into the high40s with the best most heat efficient plants topping out at around
48 percent as technology improves and the population has become more interested
in Environmental Protection both coal and nuclear have become more efficient
but if we're honest with each other which you know would be new
so we try to be
making the plant perform better isn't easy it's a quick solution is to take
that heat exhaust and loop it back into the plant this conserves those extra
BTU s of heat rather than letting them float away into the atmosphere some
plants do this to conserve energy and heat as much as they can they also help
burn the fuel more efficiently or fine-tune the plant to help keep it in
tip-top fortunately wind power there are kind of the big loser outside of
commercial solar but even with that
they're running anywhere from 25 to 50
percent efficiency it really varies depending on the design and the location
offshore wind farms run more often than on shore ones but the
efficiency depends on how hard the wind is
blowing how much of that wind power the turbine can harvest and so on and so
forth as technology improves they get better lots of scientists are working on
making super efficient wind power bio mimicry is a big part of their recent
advances with some scientists discovering that mimicking sharks whales or birds
will help make the installations capture more energy this also informs the
winner
