#on the cover of LSC I mean

[julie-su]

Quick doodle of Hecate the ant. I am drawing so much, but showing so little, it's mo-o-ostly shorthand quick'uns as I pour my life and soul into that dang comic XD

Hec, child of Archimedes, mentor of Julie-Su and Lara-Su. Except, oops - they're not supposed to be training Lara-Su just yet... Bad ant! -squirt bottle-

[chriscoles96-blog]

Birth centre to cat 1

27/1/19 - 28/1/19

Another night on the birth centre ended on the labour ward. I thought hand over for a multiparous women who had walked in at 16:50 at 4cms. She was in the pool when I took over and sounded to be cracking on.

She was due an assessment at 20:50, I was keen for her to get out the pool to pass urine and to do a good vaginal examination as it had been handed over that babies head had been high on the last examination and although I’d done a rough palpation in the pool, her bump did look big and I wanted to check properly. On scans it had been estimated on the larger side and at 37 weeks it had already been bigger than her first baby. She really wasn’t keen on getting out and she didn’t think I’d let her get back in. I reassured her that as long as there was progress I would get her back in.

It took a while to convince her but she did get out after having been in the pool almost 4 hours. I did an examination after she’d tried to pass urine (unsuccessfully - she hadn’t been in a good 6 hours - which was slightly worrying) I couldn’t feel babies head, all I could feel was the waters, I made her about 6cms. I discussed the findings and voiced my concerns about thinking baby was on the larger side. I advised her this may mean moving to the labour ward which she really wasn’t keen on, I advised her to stay out of the pool and mobilise while I spoke to the lead midwife.

I called the labour ward coordinator who said she’d come over and review to see if the lady would be able to stay. I advised the lady of this plan and she was happy to be reassessed and if head felt have her waters broken. She came in and could feel the babies head so decided to break the waters to aid progress and descent, thin meconium was noted in the waters (slightly yellowish - can be normal for post dates which this lady was).

The babies heart rate dropped with each contraction with quick recovery since the contraction ended. The lead midwife reassured me this is normal if the head drops suddenly into the pelvis after an ARM. We monitored after every contractions to ensure they did settle and eventually was off (the midwife advised me that this usually happens after about 10 minutes) which it did.

We got her standing during this time to aid descent and ensure more liquor drained. The pool was reheated to 37. And once the fetal heart remained at baseline throughout contractions and no decelerations were heard I got her back in the pool. After the ARM the midwife had made her 7cms.

At 22:50 I reassessed as the woman was feeling pressure down below so had been involuntarily pushing, on assessment in the pool (as the woman wasnt keen to get out of the pool) - she was 9cms. Blood had been seen on her pushing which was a sign that she may not be fully dilated.

At 23:30 the pool appeared to look a little greenish, I was thinking that the thin meconium was possible becoming thick. I asked her birth partners and they agreed the pool appeared a bit greenish. I let the woman know my concerns and that I was just going to get another midwife to check the colour of the pool for a second opinion.

She thought the pool appeared greenish but not obviously thick meconium. So we made the plan to get out of the pool and stand on an inco to monitor liquor colour. She wasn’t keen to get of the pool but she did. On auscultation a deceleration was heard but it wasn’t recovering.

I did an examination at 00:50 while the second midwife continued the auscultate as the heart rate hadn’t yet recovered. She was 9cms with an anterior lip. We let her know what was happening and that we’d have to transfer as her baby was not happy. The midwife called ahead and we covered her for dignity and privacy. Her birth partners gathered her things and we rushed from the birth centre over to the labour ward.

Once in the room we started the CTG to monitor baby - it’s heart rate hadn’t yet recovered. I got her to lay on her left side as another midwife cannualated her. The heart rate came up but hadn’t recovered to baseline. The doctor came in, I gave him her history, he examined her and said she had an anterior lip, he tired to push it back during a contraction while she pushed but it wasn’t shifting so her called a cat 1 section as babies heart rate had dropped and still wasn’t recovering.

Pre meds’ were given, a gown put on, wedding ring taped and part of a checklist completed prior to transferring to theatre. A catheter was put in by the lead midwife while I held her cannula in place as it was threatening to come out.

We were in theatre at 01:00, LSCS commenced at 01:11 and at 01:23 a male infant was delivered. He came out very pale and floppy and needed resuscitation. I checked the placenta and took cord gases which were low and showed that baby hadn’t been happy.

After inflation breaths and some ventilating he was okay. I gave him vitamin k and weighed him. He was fairly big, definitely much bigger than her first baby. He weighed 4140g - 9lb 2oz. His apgars were 2/6/7.

Mum pulse and blood pressure had spiked after the babies bradycardia and was remaining high post delivery which meant lots of observations were required and PET (pre-eclampsia) bloods were sent 6 hours post. Baby was on observations which had so far been normal except for one low temperature which was rectified by some skin-to-skin which hadn’t happened within the first hour post delivery.

I went home knowing babies observations were okay and mums were settling. All in all I left a almost healthy mum and baby. It wasn’t the delivery she had wanted but her baby was a little too big to facilitate a normal delivery and the delays, high head and anterior lip with bradycardia suggested this.

At the start of the shift my intuition was screaming at me that her baby was too big for her to be on the birth centre. I was more worried about a potential shoulder dystocia more than anything else and on a two midwife unit that wasn’t great. At 20:50 I was ready to transfer her and although the ending was an okay one where both were happy and healthy, next time I will follow my instinct because it’s almost always right.

Always better to be safe than sorry.

[elvirag403876-blog]

Liver disease C.

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[hermanwatts]

Sensor Sweep: Hammett, Hernstrom, Heinlein, Haggard

Comic Books (Paint Monk): Copyright. Public Domain. Cease & Desist. Not the words one would normally think to associate with a battle featuring Conan of Cimmeria and yet here we are. Now that the smoke has cleared, Ablaze is finally able to deliver translated versions of French Glénat’s Conan comics. Let me see if I can sum it up succinctly. In Europe, most of Robert E. Howard’s works are in the public domain. In the United States?

Publishing (Kairos):  There’s a shortage of paper, because it comes from China. The two largest printers of magazines and books in the U.S., Quad/Graphics and LSC Communications were going to merge last summer, but something got in the way. Now, LSC Communications has filed for bankruptcy. The second largest printer, Quad, has shut its book printing facilities entirely. In some regions, major distributors have shut down or disappeared, while although others, like Ingram, are still operating, although with reduced staff.

New Releases (DMR Books): The next DMR Books release is The Eye of Sounnu, the long-awaited collection of Schuyler Hernstrom’s stories from Cirsova magazine. Today we reveal the incredible cover by Brian LeBlanc (who also did the cover for Renegade Swords.) The title of the collection is taken from the cover story, “Gift of the Ob-Men,” which previously appeared in the first issue of Cirsova, as well as the free anthology The Infernal Bargain and Other Stories.

Hard-boiled Fiction (Elgin Bleeker): The Hammett novel, which I posted about (here), is a complicated yarn of murder and political corruption. Nick Beaumont is an advisor and right-hand man to Paul Madvig, a political power broker. In the book, Hammett showed the strong ties between the men who were long-time friends. A lot of that was lost in the 1942 movie starring Alan Ladd as Nick and Brian Donlevy as Paul because the story needed to be trimmed down to fit a movie’s normal running time. (There is also a 1935 version starring George Raft and Edward Arnold, but I have not seen it.)

Pulp Science-Fiction (Adventures Fantastic): OK, I’m gonna do it.  With the exception of some of the novels, I’ll be looking at the nominees for the 1945 Retro Hugos, which are awarded for stories published in 1944.  I’m going to start with the novelettes.  I read “The Children’s Hour” earlier this week as a possibility Henry Kuttner birthday post before the Retro Hugo shortlist was announced.  Might as well tackle it while it’s fresh on my mind.

Pulp Fiction (Dark Worlds Quarterly): Edmond Hamilton was a Science Fiction writer who is loved for his Captain Future novels, his Star Kings and any number of other Pulp stories. He was an important innovator of the 1920s and early 30s, as well as one of the best writers of Superman comics in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. But there was this time when Ed wrote Mystery stories for money…Hamilton was one of the first SF writers who tried to make a living writing only Science Fiction and Fantasy. He succeeded for the most part but there were lean years in the Great Depression when he turned to Mystery fiction.

Fiction (Jon Mollison): Is now really the best time to write a post-apocalyptic novel? It is if you know what you are doing. And as a writer, let me assure you – I know what I’m doing. The sad fact is that we already live in a post-apocalyptic world. Sooner than expected, we’ll be tasked with finding a path out of the relative doom that follows the American Empire. And fiction can help us do that. If it is the right kind of fiction.

Fiction (Track of Words): Black Library’s Siege of Terra series reaches its halfway point with Saturnine by Dan Abnett, a 500+ page beast of a book in which secrets are revealed, big names start to fall, and the stakes – somehow – get even higher. Having taken Lion’s Gate spaceport, the traitor host marches on the fortifications of the Lion’s Gate itself while simultaneously driving at the Eternity Gate spaceport, stretching the loyalist defenders to breaking point. With battles raging on multiple fronts and resources dwindling, Dorn faces impossible questions of compromise and sacrifice, as he searches for a strategy that might tip the balance in his battle of wills and wits with Perturabo.

Warhammer (Warhammer Community): This is Warhammer’s biggest plastic monster yet… it towers over a regular gargant and easily stares Archaon and his three-headed mount in their many faces. It’s festooned with details that mark it as a creature of the Mortal Realms, including trinkets from across the various factions and bits of monster – presumably to snack on after battle.

D&D (Boggswood): Both before D&D was written, and long afterward, Dave Arneson stocked his dungeons randomly and he devised different methods and  applied different ways to do this.  Monsters, for example, he stocked through a random “Protection Point: system.  Gold he rolled dice for and items he created random tables for.  The best early example is his The Loch Gloomen stocking list from 1972, reprinted in his First Fantasy Campaign booklet.

History and Writers (Frontier Partisans): H. Rider Haggard, an Englishman who had worked for several years in Natal in southern Africa, created one of the the quintessential Frontier Partisan heroes of fiction — white hunter and adventurer Allan Quatermain, hero of King Solomon’s Mines and a whole series of what Deuce Richardson calls “exotic adventure fiction.”  A hunter of wild game and hidden treasures; a “Man Who Knows Indians” (or, rather, African tribesmen); an English gentleman by heritage and termperament, yet one who sought out the wild places of the earth to wander.

Fiction (NC Register): The unmistakable features of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle looked down upon me from an impressive Victorian town house. Below a larger than life portrait there was a sign; it announced: “The Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Centre.” I made a mental note, intending to visit what I assumed was a place dedicated to the memory and literary legacy of the creator of one of literature’s most famous figures: Sherlock Holmes. It was then that I noticed another sign. It offered “services” and other activities: the building was a center for spiritualism — necromancy by another name.

D&D (Jeffro’s Space Gaming Blog): I just had no interest in running a game featuring kobolds and goblins like happens so often when you run Keep on the Borderlands by the book. But you know, with three healing spells at first level for each cleric, high powered rangers and paladins holding things down, and with enough money in the game that the fighting-men can afford plate armor now… hoo boy, they can hold their own up against some pretty tough opposition. Tougher opposition means bigger payoffs– a tradeoff that seems quite satisfactory, at least when the players are winning.

New Release (Amazon): A resurrected sorcerer grants the wishes of the desperate men who have returned him to life—but in ways none of them anticipates. A prince makes a bargain with a barbarian criminal to travel into a lost world of violence and sorcery to save the life of a woman who may already be dead. Marauders who attack a city devoted to a great goddess suffer her strange curse when she answers the pleas of her dying priestess. The last survivors of an ancient continent confront evil at every step as they march beneath skies of endless darkness to reach the haven they hope will lead them to safety.

Art (DMR Books): “Legacy Circle members of the Robert E. Howard Foundation have something to look forward to: The Challenge from Beyond Drafts. In 1935, fan publisher and future DC Comics editor Julius Schwartz wanted to celebrate the third anniversary of his Fantasy Magazine. He asked five prominent science fiction authors and five prominent fantasy authors to collaborate on two stories, both to be titled ‘The Challenge from Beyond.’

Louis L’Amour (Paperback Warrior): Deemed “America’s Favorite Frontier Writer”, Louis L’Amour’s chronicle of the fictional Sackett family was a bestselling series. Beginning in 1960, the 17-book series is still held in high regard with fans of the western genre. While Barnabas’ son Jubal is mentioned in these books, it is explained to readers that he was a loner and distanced himself from his family. Jubal was obsessed with exploring the far west and walking “where no white-man had ever wandered”.

Fiction (Fantasy Literature): Of the nine books that I have read over the last year or so from Armchair Fiction’s current Lost World/Lost Race series, which runs to 24 volumes, no fewer than three of them have involved the discoveries of hitherto unknown civilizations far beneath the Earth’s surface. In Rex Stout’s truly thrilling Under the Andes (1914), three unfortunate Americans go through a hellacious experience at the hands of a lost race of Incas beneath the mountains of Peru. In S. P. Meek’s The Drums of Tapajos (1930), a quartet of American adventurers discovers the descendants of both the 10 Lost Tribes and Atlantis, uneasily coexisting both inside and beneath a mountain in the Brazilian wilderness.

Heinlein (Pulp Net): As a young science-fiction fan, I read several authors, and would often gravitate to a particular author at a time, reading almost everything they did, before I moved on. Often I wouldn’t follow on their later works. One of these authors was Robert A. Heinlein (1907-88), one of the “grandmasters” of science fiction, and sometimes referred to as the “dean of science fiction.” Like many SF authors of the time, he got his start in the pulps, and was successful in leaving the “pulp ghetto” for better-paying markets, such as The Saturday Evening Post, and original books.

Sensor Sweep: Hammett, Hernstrom, Heinlein, Haggard published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

[isisbaume346-blog]

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[technato]

The Dawn of Solar Windows

Future skyscrapers will harvest energy from the sun with photovoltaic windows

Illustration: Eddie Guy

Illustration: Eddie Guy

The view from the office of Ioannis Papakonstantinou at University College London affords a great perspective on a wasted opportunity. He points to the university hospital, a tall oblong block adorned with decorative green glass strips. They look modern but serve no purpose. They don’t even let in light.

“What are they doing with these green surfaces?” he asks. “Nothing. Would you ever put a conventional solar panel there? Never.”

Papakonstantinou is one of many who have dreamed of turning glass panels into photovoltaic modules that can be integrated directly into buildings, both for decoration and to look through. His lab is among many groups and companies developing widely differing approaches to solar windows; some are already installing them in buildings.

The appeal is, well, clear. Such windows would unobtrusively generate power for the building while allowing its occupants to peer out onto the street, enjoy natural light, or watch clouds pass overhead.

By 2020, 8.3 billion square meters of flat glass will be installed annually in new buildings worldwide, according to the Freedonia Group. That area, covered in standard solar panels in the ideal orientation, could produce more than a terawatt at peak output, and over one year it could generate some 2,190 terawatt-hours. That’s 9 percent of what the world’s annual electricity consumption was in 2016. Substituting this source of energy for coal in 2017 would have saved about 1.6 percent of carbon emissions from fossil fuels, industry, and changes in forestry and land use.

Photo: UbiQD

Catch Some Rays: UbiQD’s glass prototype uses quantum dots, the light from which is shunted sideways toward solar cells in the frame.

And powerful regulatory forces are now dragging solar windows and their environmental benefits into reality. A European Union directive requires all new buildings to meet a “nearly zero-energy” standard by the end of 2020. Japan, following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, has gone further by requiring all new public buildings to be zero energy by 2020.

Solar windows will never be as efficient as conventional solar panels, because windows must of course remain at least partially transparent. But they can create an enormous network of small photovoltaic sources. And developers maintain that the money that the windows save on energy will repay the cost of installing them.

Already, the cost difference is pretty small, says Thomas Brown from the University of Rome, in Italy, who used to develop solar windows. Adding power-generating components to window materials could pay for itself in less than a decade, he says. And there are various technologies, each with different costs and features. Developments now under way will therefore determine whether this technology will take off and, if it does, which of the many approaches will dominate.

AT&T’s Bell Telephone Laboratories commercialized photovoltaic cells in 1954, when it unveiled its silicon-based technology. Today, rooftop solar panels still commonly use such cells. When they’re hit by photons, electrons in the silicon crystal lattice are nudged into a higher energy level, leaving a positively charged hole behind. Electrons and holes then move in opposite directions through silicon layers toward the cell’s electrodes, producing electric current.

Ideally, a standard solar panel would harvest every photon possible. However, solar panels doubling as windows can be useful just by absorbing certain photons—particularly those in the ultraviolet range, which fade colors and can be harmful to people, as well as photons in the infrared range, which raise indoor temperatures. To block these photons, normal window glass is often given a low-emissivity (low-E) coating, which also blocks at least 10 percent of the incoming visible light. Solar coatings can use these commonly blocked frequency bands to generate electricity.

However, it’s hard to put electricity-generating components into a window. Windows must also generally meet stringent standards for stability. Such challenges make solar windows difficult to produce and sell.

Photo: Mark Portnoi/University College London

See-Through Cell: This flexible, luminescent solar concentrator, made at University College London, directs light toward its edges, where solar cells can be placed. The technology could be used to retrofit solar windows and other applications for “photovoltaics on things.”

Hunter McDaniel, chief executive officer of UbiQD, in New Mexico, is convinced that his company’s technology has key advantages in these areas. The “QD” in the company name stands for quantum dot, a semiconducting nanocrystal. QDs can fluoresce, re-emitting light in response to radiation; they belong to a class of substances known as fluorophores, which are widely used for labeling biochemicals.

QDs can also be embedded in transparent material within a solar window to form a luminescent solar concentrator. LSCs trap light within the windowpane and then redirect it to a nontransparent solar cell mounted on one edge. After absorbing incoming light, fluorophores re-emit a different color, which bounces between the window’s surfaces toward the solar cell, rather than escaping or being reabsorbed by other dots. Other companies, including Glass to Power, in Milan, and Physee, in Delft, Netherlands, also use this approach.

The best QDs have high quantum yields—they re-emit a lot of the light they absorb, the proportion varying with the color of the light. McDaniel says that UbiQD has created infrared QD fluorophores that enable “color-neutral” LSCs, which do not alter the colors of items seen through the windows, with an 80 percent quantum yield. For visible-light fluorophores, the quantum yield is 95 percent. “There’s simply nothing else even close to that,” McDaniel insists.

Most competitors, including Papakonstantinou, use organic dye molecules as fluorophores, but McDaniel says these dyes are not particularly stable. “Put a newspaper out in the sun and watch how quickly the ink fades,” he says. The same breakdown process causes stability problems in solar windows using organic photovoltaics (OPV), McDaniel claims.

Both McDaniel and Papakonstantinou acknowledge that LSC technology is still at an early research stage. Sarah Kurtz, a photovoltaics expert at the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), in Colorado, echoes this. “I haven’t seen any reports that imply they are moving into large-scale production,” she says.

By contrast, after developing products for more than a decade, SolarWindow Technologies, in Maryland, signed a contract in August 2017 to manufacture its OPV technology.

Photo: Onyx Solar

Stained-Glass Generator: Onyx Solar’s 20-percent-transparent photovoltaic glass modules form a mosaic on the roof of the Béjar market, in Salamanca, Spain; they generate a peak power output of 4.1 kilowatts.

SolarWindow’s most advanced process sprays liquids onto glass, where they form solid organic polymers in a multilayer sandwich. The central filling is an absorber polymer layer where electrons and holes separate. Other polymer layers help electrons and holes move toward their electrodes.

In 2017, SolarWindow licensed its spray-on coating process to Triview Glass Industries, a manufacturer based in Los Angeles. SolarWindow has raised money for equipment for the collaboration but has not said when it will begin selling windows based on the technology, or how much they will cost. However, John Conklin, SolarWindow’s chief executive, insists that his company is committed to getting close to standard window prices—around US $500 for a square meter of continuously insulated pane, according to the Freedonia Group.

Another of SolarWindow’s goals is a window that transmits up to 85 percent of visible light while blocking infrared and ultraviolet. The exact transparency, color, and tint will dictate power output, which SolarWindow is not yet ready to disclose.

But it’s not hard to estimate what the output could be. Normally, around 1,000 watts per square meter of solar energy falls on Earth’s surface. If a solar window is 50 percent transparent, it will absorb 500 W/m2. The record efficiency for an organic photovoltaic cell—the percentage of light power converted to electrical—stands at 11.5 percent. If SolarWindow can deliver 10 percent efficiency, then a 1-meter-square window’s peak output will be 50 W/m2, or enough electricity to power eight cellphone chargers.

Photo: Onyx Solar

Through a Glass Brightly: This skylight at the Lucia Building at the University of Valladolid, Spain, allows for the natural lighting of the building while producing up to 5,550 kilowatt-hours per year.

Xiaoxi He, a technology analyst at IDTechEx in Cambridge, England, warns that the larger OPV panels get, the more likely the chance of performance-reducing defects becomes. “You might get 2 to 5 percent efficiency in a big window,” she says. Stability is also problematic, she adds—lab results suggest that OPV windows using today’s materials would likely operate for just seven or eight years “in an ideal situation.”

California-based Ubiquitous Energy is vying with SolarWindow to bring transparent OPV-coated glass to market, IDTechEx’s He notes. But because it’s challenging to hit efficiency targets and scale up production, companies’ commercialization efforts are still at “a very early stage,” she believes.

Questions about commercialization prospects are also tempering excitement about one of the newest photovoltaic materials: the perovskites, a class of hybrid organic-inorganic substances.

The technology is similar to that of OPV, but here the middle of the sandwich consists of perovskites rather than the polymer that SolarWindow uses. But unlike polymer absorbers, perovskites are semiconductors, which means that they can transport electrons themselves, making it possible to shrink or eliminate other layers in the sandwich. This capability, together with the fact that perovskite devices are easier to fabricate, has helped raise their efficiency to 22.7 percent, up from 3.8 percent in 2009.

Perovskites are sensitive to moisture, but English startup Oxford Photovoltaics says it has solved this problem by developing less sensitive formulations and by encapsulating them tightly. Oxford PV has worked on solar windows, but right now the company intends to use its most advanced, moisture-resistant product only in regular solar panels. By putting a semitransparent perovskite layer in front of the standard 6-inch silicon solar cells, Oxford PV produces “tandem cells” with 25 percent efficiency.

Photo: Oxford PV

Pick a Color: The different colors of these Oxford PV solar cell prototypes show how easy it is to tailor their perovskite components to absorb different wavelengths.

Photo: Andy Extance

Light Into Power: Oxford PV chief technology officer Chris Case holds a tandem silicon solar cell wafer featuring a perovskite coating, fresh off the firm’s pilot assembly line, in Germany.

“My fear was that a building-integrated photovoltaic product would take more years than we could afford,” says Chris Case, Oxford PV’s chief technology officer. As with any new material, he says, it would be “a lot of work” to scale from 1-square-centimeter research cells to producing sufficiently uniform windows of 600 by 1,200 millimeters. Oxford PV therefore wants to perfect its technique on smaller silicon cells in the hope that it could later be applied to larger windows.

Currently, Oxford PV’s prototype perovskite-only cells are slightly below 20 percent efficiency. The company is working with an unnamed partner that expects to offer tandem cells to customers in 2019, Case says. On his road map, wholly perovskite cells appear several years after that, perhaps including solar windows.

Perovskites are progressing well, according to NREL’s Kurtz, with small-device efficiencies still rising. “We are hopeful that they are headed to a big success, but I haven’t seen data yet for large-area devices that exceed the performance of more established technologies,” she says. “I think they still have some work to do before they are ready for large-scale production.”

Case doesn’t care whether wholly organic coatings or other technologies might be closer to commercialization. In fact, he would welcome it if his competitors went first and resolved the fundamental regulatory, architectural, and practical challenges. “Ultimately, our material should outperform any other technologies,” he says. He may get his wish, because at least one company is already supplying transparent solar cells to building contractors.

I’m on the ground floor of an office building in London, gazing up at a photovoltaic skylight, seven stories above. I see that some practical challenges of integration are being met. The energy-generating areas in the middle of the panes appear darker than the surrounding glass, making them easy to spot.

This 16-by-8-meter system was produced by the Spanish company Onyx Solar. Onyx turns thin-film silicon solar panels into photovoltaic skylights by using lasers to etch patterns into the panels, making them more transparent. “We remove the opaque silicon layer and back contact by laser scribing,” explains Álvaro Beltrán, Onyx’s chief executive officer. The company’s products range from opaque to 30 percent transparency. By comparison, most sunglasses are 18 to 45 percent transparent.

Photo: Onyx Solar

Light House: This view of the Lucia Building shows how natural the lighting can be from the photovoltaic skylight.

The building I’m in uses the 20-percent-transparent product, explains Gavin Turnbull, project manager for McLaren Construction Group, the building contractor. Turnbull and I take the elevator to stand just below the skylight, where I can make out lines of tiny rectangular solar cells running across the glass. Around the edge, a strip of conductive aluminum tape connects them; it disappears into the transoms between the panels, where more conventional wiring hides.

Physically installing the skylight was simple, Turnbull says. However, communicating with Onyx about how to wire the panels in was challenging: The skylight initially produced electricity at a much higher voltage than intended. Workers solved the problem around a month after my visit, and the system now operates properly.

Since Onyx’s factory opened in 2015, panels have been installed in some high-profile buildings, including the Miami Heat’s basketball arena. Onyx claims that installation paid for itself in less than a year. The company is now manufacturing over 5,500 square meters of semitransparent photovoltaic glass for what Beltrán says will be the world’s largest photovoltaic skylight. Fittingly, given the technology’s silicon heritage, it will be installed in the redeveloped Bell Works building in Holmdel, N.J.

And it costs only 10 percent more than conventional low-E glass, according to Beltrán. For instance, in New York City a 3,400-square-meter skylight of 10 percent transparency would cost roughly $172 extra per square meter to install. However, the additional cost would come down to just $48 after taking incentives into account. That sum can be paid back in less than two years, given the 380 kilowatt-hours the skylight would produce each day, on average, Beltrán claims.

NREL’s Kurtz isn’t so sure. “To evaluate whether these specific products are ready to change the world, we should ask about how payback time was calculated,” she cautions. “The low payback [time] might imply that they have made a breakthrough, and it’s very exciting. Or it might mean that they have found a customer willing to pay high prices [for the nonsolar products that serve as the basis of comparison].”

Photo: Andy Extance

Sculpting Silicon: To produce the photovoltaic skylight at 25-32 Chancery Lane, London, Onyx Solar etched this coarse grid into a thin-film silicon panel.

Though a few new buildings already generate power from their skylights and windows using products like Onyx’s, retrofitting existing buildings would arguably be much more difficult and expensive. However, back in Papakonstantinou’s office, he slaps a square of orange plastic—one of his team’s own LSCs—onto a window.

As it sticks there, I see that the LSC’s concentrating effect makes light shine more brightly around the edges than on its face. “If we were looking to commercialize this,” Papakonstantinou says, “we could convert existing areas of large buildings” to electricity-generating windows. Mark Portnoi, a University College London grad student, built a 250-by-250-millimeter prototype from this material, integrated with commercial cells, and exhibited it at the London Ecobuild show last March.

Such a product could also be added to many everyday objects, like cars, computers, and cellphones—“photovoltaics on things,” as Kurtz calls it. These applications could be an important fallback position for Papakonstantinou’s technology, as well as those of Oxford PV, SolarWindow, and UbiQD.

And they may well need that fallback. With a group of successful installations already behind it, Onyx has jumped out to an early commercial lead. On the other hand, barring a revolutionary innovation, it might not enjoy a wide market because of limitations on the degree to which laser etching can make silicon panels transparent.

Therefore, the race for true solar windows is still on, even if the most promising competitor—Oxford PV’s perovskite technology—is still several years away. So too are LSCs like UbiQD’s and Papakonstantinou’s. It’s possible that SolarWindow’s OPV technology will make it to market this year, but if it does, the company must still convince people that its technology really is mature enough.

Photo: Onyx Solar

Solar Siding: The Genyo Building, in Granada, Spain, bears 550 square meters of 20-percent-transparent photovoltaic glass.

Yet each approach may find acceptance independently if it “wins the hearts of the architects,” Papakonstantinou says, quoting the advice of an unnamed official at one of Europe’s largest building companies.

Fortunately, that process has been under way for over two decades. During the 1990s, architectural giant Sir Norman Foster used an innovative—but nonphotovoltaic—“light sculptor” to help turn the Reichstag, in Berlin, into one of the world’s first zero-energy buildings. His words about why we need such innovations have already resonated far and wide, and they underline why solar windows could be so important: “Solar architecture is not about fashion,” Foster declares, “but rather about survival.”

This article appears in the February 2018 print issue as “What Watts From Yonder Window Flow?”

About the Author

Andy Extance is a freelance science writer based in Exeter, in the United Kingdom.

The Dawn of Solar Windows syndicated from https://jiohowweb.blogspot.com