Your $20,000 rooftop solar panels lose you money every night. Silicon photovoltaic is physically capped at 22% efficiency forever, and net metering arbitrage transfers $17,000 of value to the utility over a 25-year warranty. A chemist named Frank Shuman proved this was wrong in 1913 with a parabolic trough mirror in the Egyptian desert that captured 70% of solar energy as direct heat. World War One erased his calculation.
This breaks down DIY parabolic solar trough heating, the Shockley Queisser limit, the Phoenix net metering trap, and the $100 bill of materials to build a backyard parabolic trough. DIY solar concentrator, solar thermal vs photovoltaic, off grid hot water, solar absorber coating, evacuated tube collector, sand battery thermal storage.
Credit to : Sketchy Survival