Podcast: Sexy & Sustainable: Meet The Solar Ivy

In this episode, we explore a novel renewable energy solution that blends sustainability with aesthetic design—a creative ivy-shaped solar panel system integrated into the façade of the High-Tech Campus Eindhoven. Join us as we unravel the intersection of innovative technology and architecture, where solar energy meets artistic sensibility and discover how this forward-thinking project redefines sustainable energy solutions by increasing the potential areas for solar installations while embracing nature-inspired aesthetics.

This podcast is sponsored by Mouser Electronics.  

EPISODE NOTES

(3:00) - Creative ivy-shaped solar panel system against façade on the High Tech Campus Eindhoven

This episode was brought to you by Mouser, our favorite place to get electronics parts for any project, whether it be a hobby at home or a prototype for work. Click HERE to check out the article about how countries like the UK & Portugal are betting on novel renewable energy resources like harvesting ocean energy via tides and waves!

Transcript

Hey folks, let me ask you a question. Do you like the idea of solar cells, but just absolutely hate the design? Well, you're not alone. In fact, this is such a big problem that the Dutch Government has funded research and a very cool project to address just that problem. So, if that's something that's interesting to you, then buckle up and let's get into it.

I'm Daniel, and I'm Farbod. And this is the NextByte Podcast. Every week, we explore interesting and impactful tech and engineering content from Wevolver.com and deliver it to you in bite sized episodes that are easy to understand, regardless of your background. 

Farbod: Alright people, as you heard today, we're going to be talking about a novel new way of harnessing the energy of the sun. But before we do that I want to quickly talk about today's sponsor, Mouser Electronics. Now you guys know we love Mouser. Mouser is one of the world's biggest electronic suppliers and what that means is that they have a lot of connections to a lot of different industries and they're typically on top of it with like what the state of the art is in any given category. So, they have these Mouser technical resources that dives deep into new stuff coming out, new technologies, and even some how-to guides on how you can set up your own equipment with stuff you can get from Mouser to accomplish some of those new things that are coming out. But this one that we're going to link in today's show notes is about capturing the energy of waves and tides. Because if you think about green energy, it's not just one source, right? It's not like one silver bullet. It's actually an array of resources. You have geothermal, you have solar, which is what we're talking about today. But you also have waves and they have the benefit of pretty much always waving. Like unlike the sun, you don't have these like, you know, crazy peaks. And then at night you're just not generating anything. Waves are semi-consistent.

Daniel: That's actually something we'll talk about in today's episode, right? Some of the disadvantages of rooftop solar with the peaks of energy. You need to design a system that's able to capture that peak of energy and handle it without wasting any electricity. But the fact of the matter is it's actually underutilized during the rest of the day. Tides and the waves, they're pretty much always waving, like you said, so it's a more consistent yield of energy distribution across the clock and it yields 24 hours a day, which is awesome.

Farbod: Yeah. And there's countries that are already leveraging this behavior, this natural behavior of the oceans. Like the UK and Portugal, they’re leaders in harnessing energy from the ocean. And this article just kind of goes into that. They talk about the components required to do it. They even have some links on how you can purchase some of those equipments if you want to try them out from Mouser. But yeah, if you're interested in digging into this a little bit more, feel free to check it out. We're going to be linking in the show notes as always. And with that said, let's jump into today's article. Now we're going to be talking about this creative ivy shaped, like the plant ivy, solar systems that you can put on the facade of your building, like, you know, the walls, the exterior walls instead of on top of your roof. And this is coming from the TNO, which is the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research. It's coming from an actual well, they're the ones leading it, but there's like a joint effort that's going on to which I think makes this all the more interesting. There's architects working on it. There's composite developers that came up with new noble materials. And then you have people like the contractors actually getting the permits that they can start setting these up and testing them out.

Daniel: And all of this is installed at High Tech Campus Eindhoven, which is like a conglomerate of all these different startups and universities. It's like the Silicon Valley of Europe, if you will, where all these high-tech companies, institutions, researchers, they're all co-located, they're all working on high-tech projects together. Something that I definitely have on my bucket list to go visit, cause I've heard so much cool stuff about it. And one of the things is they're putting their money where their mouth is. And instead of just talking about facade generated solar energy, which is where you've got the solar panels on the sides of the building, as opposed to on the roof. So, we've got facade versus rooftop. Instead of just talking about the benefits of facade generated solar power. They're also plastering these creative, ivy-shaped solar panel systems over their facades in their own buildings in that high-tech campus, which again, makes me excited to go visit it one day.

Farbod: I'm with you, man. I'm with you. And I want to, again, quickly note on the collaboration with like having architects involved and the rest of the group. One of the biggest challenges with solar panels is like, you know, logically, depending on where you are and, you know, the cost of getting the panels, et cetera, et cetera, it's a great deal. It's good for the environment. It can be a great way for you to save money on your energy costs. But it's just kind of ugly. Like that is the root of the problem. And I'll never forget Top Gear, it's like that car show, one of my favorite shows of all time. I remember when the first McLaren production car, the MP4-12C came out, Jeremy Clarkson, probably one of my favorite hosts on that show, was like, it's just, it drives well, everything's well, but I can just tell it was designed by an engineer. It has no soul, like I just don't like it. And that's the problem with solar panels. Like for the most part, you can tell an engineer design that they're perfect shapes. They do the job, but they don't have “oomph” when it comes to design.

Daniel: And we're all engineers here. Yeah. I don't know. But it's not to say that all engineers are stupid or they can't design something that looks beautiful. But I agree with you, man. The fact that they're going so far is to include the architects, which are like the artists of the construction world including the architects from the start, might help them develop a solution here that's got this artistic balance. It feels like it's got soul in it. And I'll encourage everyone to go check out the article on the show notes. Click on it and a big picture that comes up. You can see it looks like someone's designed and installed an art installation on the side of this building, not someone who's trying to like just brute force generate a sun, a ton of solar power. And I think we're used to seeing solar installations be like, let me plaster every single part of this roof that I can with these ugly, you know, not attractive, huge flat solar panels versus this is like, feels like it's got more finesse to it, feels like something that people can coexist with and even be excited about the designs.

Farbod: There you go. Yeah.

Daniel: And an additional benefit there being that it actually pays the bills for itself by generating a bunch of electricity too.

Farbod: And the article goes deeper into how the technology that they're using allows these creators to come up with facade solar cells that can be the shape of a logo. So, imagine my office has a massive logo of the name on the building, right? And it's just there for show. But what if it could actually harness some solar power? That'd be super cool. And now think about every single office that is in DC or really anywhere, any metropolitan city in the world. Like just imagine all those signs that do nothing but be there for show, generating some sort of solar power. And now let's extend that, right? They actually talked about how in the Netherlands, there is something like 2,200 square kilometers of facade that gets sunlight on it. And about 660 of those are suitable for actually having solar panels on them, which by their estimates comes out to 58 gigawatts of energy potential. Like that's not a trivial amount. That's a pretty significant amount of energy that you're getting out of it. Which when you.

Daniel: You put that into perspective, right? With how much solar the Netherlands already has installed. Yeah. It's like just under 19 gigawatts, 18.8 gigawatts. So, all the solar installations in the Netherlands as of 2022, we've got almost three times as much as a potential sitting on the sides of all these buildings where we haven't yet installed, you know, additional solar on the facades of these buildings.

Farbod: Yeah. And I don't know, I think there's a lot of problems there. And I think the big value add here, at least in my opinion, is twofold. It's one, coming up with a desirable architecture for these solar cells. Like, I don't know how much of a problem this is, but I know like around where I live, homeowners’ associations just straight up don't allow people to set up solar cells because they're ugly, right? They're afraid of bringing down property values. So even if it's like a good solution for the environment and again, your pocket, the organization, your society might not want it because it's ugly. So, if you can solve that problem, adoption is probably gonna go up. And that's feeding more into the bottom line of the world becoming more sustainable. But on the other end, it's also showing us that there's areas that you can leverage for solar power, which have typically been neglected. Like pretty much all solar solutions that I've seen are for your rooftop. But I've never seen anything that's like, hey, you can put this up on the side of your building. And I think that has some like pretty critical advantages, especially, you know, debris setting on top of souls if they're the cells, if they're, you know, laying horizontally versus vertically. Yeah, my two cents.

Daniel: Well, and I will say I was curious about this and I dove into it as well. And I've got a little bit of a hot take that's been cooking.

Farbod: Uh, drop it.

Daniel: You know, we're used to seeing rooftop solar as like the poster child for solar energy generation. And it makes a lot of sense, right? Especially in areas near the equator and the Southern hemisphere, it makes a lot of sense for you to put the solar panel on the roof, where you can generate the most power, you get the highest peak power output during the day when the sun straight overhead. But when you start to add a couple more nuancing factors is what I, what I'm going to call them. Like the fact that the Netherlands are actually very far north on the earth so that the peak angle for the solar panels isn't actually going to be flat so that you can get sun from straight above. The sun actually is mostly hitting the southern face of these buildings as opposed to the roof. In addition, the Netherlands are pretty urbanized, right? So, we're talking about a lot of buildings and crammed in a small space where there actually isn't a ton of roof space, but there's actually a ton of wall space by comparison if you've got these buildings that are high rises, so to speak. And then in addition to all that we talk about the visual appeal of it. Some of these facade installations have the benefit of being able to look like building art as opposed to these big flat, ugly panels on top of the building. And then I think the real X factor here is something that we alluded to when we were talking about waves and tidal energy from the sponsored article at the beginning of this episode, is the fact that the yield distribution curve of a facade solar energy is actually a lot flatter over the day. So, we don't have as high of a peak of energy production during the middle of the day. When the sun's straight overhead, the energy production actually dips right around noon when the sun's straight overhead, if you can imagine, because there's not a ton of direct sunlight hitting the side of the building and said it's hitting the roof, but because the curve is a lot longer and flatter. If you can imagine like a shallow hill that generates electricity spread out over the entire day, as opposed to a steep mountain that has a giant peak in the middle of the day, you're able to downsize the electrical architecture associated with this because you don't have to handle large amounts of power in the middle of the day. You can actually have a less expensive installation here because it's handling trick or trickle power, as opposed to like high peaks of power that end up going underutilized during the remainder of the day. And the way I like to view it is it's like, if you were going for, you know, trying to go for a really, really long run, you're able to actually sustain a pretty decent pace. If you're saying I'm going to go walk 15 miles. But, you know, most general people I think could actually do that in a day. They can walk 10, 15 miles, no problem. But if you were to say like, Oh, you have to go 15 miles, but you have to get to a full blown sprint in the middle of that, you know, right during the middle of your run, you have to get to a full blown sprint and then you have to like cool down back to a walk at the end, it's going to take a much higher toll on your body. And it feels very, very similar the way that the electrical architecture has to be set up to support high power generation during the peak of the day for solar. These facade solar installations actually allow us to do something that's a little bit more grid friendly, so to speak, and that that's actually a huge issue with solar generation today is we can create a bunch of power with solar panels but the grid can't actually handle all the solar power that we're generating all that well.

Farbod: No, that's a really good point. And I'm kind of curious just based on what you said like just imagining a building as a cube, right? I'm wondering if you had just a top cover with solar panels and you know, you got that peak energy production in the middle of the day. I wonder how that compares to if you just had one side of that cube covered with solar panels, the same area that you would have on the top. I'm guessing you would get more consistent power generation up until noon, you know, when it reaches the top and now it starts going on the other side. But I wonder what the total amount would compare to. And if you would need basically to double up the area that you're putting solar panels on to match that peak power output. Which, you know, that might still be a good solution because you have a higher initial cost. But like you said, you get more consistent power and it's a smaller load on the grid. On the other side of this, like I'm kind of conflicted about where this would be a good solution for. At least when I consider, you know, the area that we live, Northern Virginia, we have, we don't have like this super compact set of living spaces like you would in a typical city. But we have a lot of townhouses that are connected together and a lot of them I think would be a good candidate for a solution like this. However, we're still in an area that's developing quite rapidly. So, I could totally see someone setting something like this up and it costs, let's say, $50,000 - $60,000, that's not cheap. And then within a year, you have a new construction that's gonna totally block, let's say, half of the sunlight that you're expected to get anyways. So, I'm wondering like, if this is gonna become something we want to have installed in our homes and become like a normal thing, would we have to change building codes to accommodate that and make sure that your investment isn't just gonna totally become useless or like, I don't know. This seems like, just like the inception of the product itself, it seems like the long-term answer also requires a multi-discipline effort to figure this out.

Daniel: Oh, I agree. And especially what you're saying around, you know, I think you've got a higher propensity for the side of your building to be shaded as opposed to the top. And that's the same case, even in the urban areas where we're not expecting there to be, you know, a major new development, so to speak, like you're saying like, Oh crap, now there's a new building blocking my entire house. I think part of that is shown in the fact that this team, you mentioned it earlier. They said there's 2,200 square kilometers of facade in the Netherlands that they thought like, maybe we could put solar panels on this. And then they did some analysis based on which ones actually consistently get sun and aren't shaded. And that dropped it to about 660 square kilometers. So that was about 30% of all that facade was actually usable for solar electricity production. I think it would be interesting personally, at least for me to understand how exactly they got from that 2200 down to that 660. I imagine that you know, depending on where you are in the world, depending on how urban it is, how much there's continued development, how much there's tree cover, that 30% of usable facade might change and shift depending on where you are in the world. But I do think it's interesting. And especially a lot of the nuanced parts that we talked about why rooftop solar, you know, it seems like the textbook solution, but facade solar might be the actual real solution that makes it out into the real world. The Netherlands seems like the perfect storm for something like this to start to take hold. Like we said, it's very far north, so the Southern face of that building is something that you actually want to be angling toward to get a lot of solar production. It's pretty urbanized. So, we're talking about, there's not a lot of big open fields where I can go place a bunch of solar panels. And then on top of that, I feel like, especially at High Tech Campus Eindhoven but also just, I feel like the Netherlands is in general seem to be pretty tech forward and, pretty art forward. And I feel like that's a place that we might be able to easily adopt technology like this that looks like art that can go on the side of a building and helps us produce, you know, renewable energy. I'm excited to see this take hold there. And I think one indicator from my side that I think that this is important and it's potentially here to stay. As a fact that this project not only had backing from industry, not only had backing from universities, it also received pretty substantial government funding as well, which to me shows that it's important and shows that there's potential impact across the board if there were to be more grant programs or legislation to try and encourage use of this type of facade solar cells in the future.

Farbod: Absolutely. Absolutely. And to recap, basically what we just talked about in this episode, right? The traditional approach to solar has been rooftop because, you know, that's where you get the peak energy in the middle of the day. Well, these folks from the Dutch Organization of applied scientific research were like, what if we flip the script and utilize facades because we got a lot of that in urban areas. And this is actually a joint effort. They got people involved that are coming up with new composites. They got architects involved to make sure that the new design is something that people would like to see, right? If they like it, they're probably going to adopt it on like the various HOAs that completely hate solar cells because of how ugly they are and potentially bring down property values. So that seems like a great idea, but what is the actual potential of this? Well, just in the Netherlands alone, there's something like 2,200 square kilometers of facade that can be used for solar. And 660 of that is actually very suitable for solar, which results in about 58 gigawatts of output by their calculations. And for some context, in 2022, all of the solar output in the Netherlands was about 19 gigawatts. So that's a pretty substantial bump that you can get from this. So, imagine if this solution could be utilized in the United States or maybe even everywhere in the world, how much could we bump up our production? And by the way, the solar production from the façades is a lot more consistent, which means that you don't have to worry about peaks and then some, you know, insane energy storage technique to store the excess energy or putting it back into the grid, which is a load that's actually kind of a burden to handle. So that's the solution they came up with. That's the potential for the future. Like it's powered by solar energy.

Daniel: I think you nailed it, dude.

Farbod: I try. I try. All right. I think good time to wrap up the episode. Do we have to give any shout outs?

Daniel: I'll just say, you know, we've shared this before, but a couple of folks have reached out. They continue to ask; how can we help? They enjoy the podcast. They're excited about it. They're excited about being a part of the community. What's the biggest way I can help? I'd say there's two big things you can do. Number one is if you haven't yet, wherever you're listening to this podcast, leave us a review. We hope we deserve five stars. We hope we've done enough to earn that five star rating from you. If not, we'd love if you could reach out and let us know exactly what it is that we need to change to get there because we're looking to always continuously improve this. The second thing is if you've already leave it, left us a review and you've already been happy and you're already a big part of this community, we'd love if you could take this episode, share it with a friend, someone who might be interested in why rooftop solar might be a relic of the past or someone who's interested in art and technology and where they intersect or just someone who you think might be interested in hearing interesting technology on a weekly basis that's boiled down and broken down and easy to understand. That's the biggest way you can help us. And obviously that encourages us and helps us to continue growing and helps us to keep publishing this on a weekly basis. We're now 137 weeks in and haven't missed a beat. So that's all thanks to folks like you who are a part of the community and help us continue to grow.

Farbod: Absolutely. Thank you guys for listening as always. We'll catch you in the next one.

Daniel: Peace.

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That's all for today The NextByte Podcast is produced by Wevolver, and to learn more about the topics with discussed today visit Wevolver.com.

If you enjoyed this episode, please review and subscribe, via Apple podcasts Spotify or one of your favorite platforms. I'm Farbod and I'm Daniel. Thank you for listening and we'll see you in the next episode.

As always, you can find these and other interesting & impactful engineering articles on Wevolver.com.

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The Next Byte: We're two engineers on a mission to simplify complex science & technology, making it easy to understand. In each episode of our show, we dive into world-changing tech (such as AI, robotics, 3D printing, IoT, & much more), all while keeping it entertaining & engaging along the way.