The sun delivers more energy to earth in one hour than all of humanity uses in an entire year. How can we make this power more accessible to everyone, everywhere? Solar designer Marjan van Aubel shows how she's turning everyday objects like tabletops and stained glass windows into elegant solar cells — and shares her vision to make every surface a power station.
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*scrolls down to see intellectual feedbacks about the talk,
Sees,
1st,
2nd….*
What’s up with all the negative comments? People help create solutions & implement them. If you have no solution; then implement the ones offered.
+Tint Supplier not if its not going to change anything…
+Tint Supplier i have solutions that are far better and am disappointed when I see terrible TED talks like this put focus on that which is politically popular yet utterly ridiculous. If you wish to combat climate change with solar cells you would need to make them 4000% more efficient for 1/10 the cost and waste (disposal + manufacturing) which is practically impossible due to the laws of physics. Nuclear is the only good option that is feasible today.
Hope is what being human is all about.
Yes, but no, because too bad we human in the world don’t have much time to accept and do something to reverse that climate change do killing us, all together.
yeah, push it all of to religion and god will sort it out, oh no wait
I thought it was frigging.
It’s people like you making me hopeful for the future. I’m sure there’s equally enthusiastic researchers out there with similar day to day ideas for wind or geothermal, or just other sources on energy that can be used in less sunny places. I’ll be eagerly awaiting the day when your Power Plants are released commercially 🙂
I love your work, joining art and technology
Great intentions, but I honestly think that we need to futhermore lower prices and make solars more effective, let’s begin with cheap solar roof tiles and other obvious applications, the rest will come afterwards.
If we want to make solar power one of main power sorces with winters we also need to store that energy, ex. as lakes pumped up / down to “charge” / “discharge” those lakes, there is still a lot to do, but solar power seems to be one of better renewable power sources, because it’s very predictable.
+TheBreed010 I agree with you on most points, apart from:
– I’m not involved in any way with selling/producing solar panels, I honestly think that even in best scenarios we still need some 4th gen nuclear power plants (not yet implemented) or even better fussion poer plant (far from implementation, ITER will still be mostly scientific experiment)
– wind is less predictable than solar power, depending on day or even weeks, there might be long periods with no wind created electricity at all, where solar panels even in worst scenarios generate some power, my parents life near wind turbines, they look nice, they don’t disturb their lafies in any way, but even when there is a lot of wind not always all of them all on (probably due to servising), and when there is not enough wind they don’t work at all
– storing, I agree on water solution, I’m not really into this, I just heard about this and rolling stones up and down a slope, probably there are another reasonable solutions, but I simply don’t know them
– “northen europe” was my wring, I meant central, in germany solar power is very cheap, but I doubt that it will be reasonable in scandinavian countries, at least norway has 97% their electricity from hydro power plants
+Christoph Aigensberger Yes and no, how about hydro power plants in places like fiords?
Also, 3rd gen fusion reactors are good but not that brilliant, 4gen will come soon, those should be brilliant, if I remember correctly, 95% less waste, and 4th gen can reuse waste from previous generations as a fuel.
There is always question of fission power, which might be avaible in 10-25 years, we don’t know that, but there is one promising sign, private sector has started to develope them, so some companies think that tehnology is nearly good enought, so there is some hope for incredibly cheap electric power.
My intend of that comment was: “it’s not really about designing solar powers to make them look nice what can make them really into really important source of electricity, what we need to do is improve them and make them cheap”
well fusion is at least 50 years away from noteworthy contribution (20 years till DEMO and at least 10 years for 1st gen development and a decade of building up the numbers). 4th gen fission is also at least 15 years away probably even more, also I don’t think that a closed fuel cycle with such high efficiency is possible (but it’s also not needed). Regarding nuclear waste, you can reduce that by about 90% or so by just reprocessing the spent fuel which mostly doesn’t happen because of political reasons but even if you don’t do that the amount is miniscule due to the high energy density of the fuel but getting rid of it is again not a technical issue but rather a political as it turned out. To sum it up at least in Europe going nuclear is certainly not an option due to political unfeasibility.
I don’t think fjords carry that much water to really justify the destruction of the landscape but even if I don’t think Norway is interested in destroying their fjords for a couple extra GW of power for other countries and they certainly can’t power the rest of Europe or even a significant part of it.
My bets are on some form of carbon capture and maybe a bigger role for nuclear but I have a hard time seeing that. I would recon we will most likely just don’t do a whole lot about it until it really starts to impact many nations (with higher economy) and then maybe a big international carbon capture effort on the cheap but I haven’t seen cheap CC for such a massive scale but … we’ll see
Batteries and manufacturing and waste when they reach the end of the lives are real concerns if you hope to scale it globally.
+TheBreed010 completely true. The arguments against nuclear are uniformed at best and emotional at worst. There are many plentiful and cheap nuclear fuels and regressed plant ideas as well which the USA forbids research into sadly such as thorium. If anything but oil companies gain the most from preventing nuclear research. Also on nuclear waste, if you were to put all nuclear waste from all plants in human history in drums side by side you wouldn’t fill 1/8 of a football field.
Exactly the kind of thing we need! Great work! 😀 Keep it up!
I on the same way to you
NUCLEAR POWER NOW!
Solar power?! Wow such great idea! She’s a genius!
+James I was naturally referring to its’ applications to designers to make them more appealing to the masses.
Nevertheless, if you feel the need to make sarcastic comments in order to inflate your own eago then be my guest! 😀
I’d hate to get in the way of whichever digital prescription you’ve prescribed yourself to help get you through the day.
Can you already buy the table online? I think it looks amazing
Transparent Solar panels on glass buildings will be a huge thing.
It would increase profitability for the office buildings, which they like a lot.
Solar power will win. If that was a political party, then we could bet on it 🙂
This is amazing and exclusively creative. Thanks for initiating our imagination to look out for better ways of maximizing things for functionality.
Well done.
I absolutely love the idea of stained glass windows which function as solar panels! We need more of these combinations of art and tech to create more beautiful places that serve everyone. 🙂
44.5% eff…… divide that by 2 and get the actual best performing panels.
Realistically it’s 20-30% efficency for a good solid fixed position solar panel
SunPower makes the highest efficiency panels at 23% efficiency, anything higher than that can only be found in a lab at this point in time.
SunPower solar PV panels are also Cradle to Cradle Certified for clean chemistry, clean disassembly and remanufacturing in a “circular economy”.
No energy gathering and utilizing method is perfect but I would prefer funding for solar research than fracking. Meanwhile sustainable use of wood energy is probably the best alternative we have.
Normal PV panels *are* beautiful already! We don’t need more design(and more expensive), but we need them to be (even)cheaper! Let’s get them first dirt cheap, and then we talk about design.
Apply the technology to the windshield and sunroof of electric cars
Thank you very much for your innovations.
Man kind will proceed forward with the help of people like you.
thanks for mentioning climate change and ur work on solar u beautiful woman
I want to learn solar engineering from scrap. Where should i start.. 🙂
i think it’s too early to talk about “aesthetics.” I think we should prioritize efficiency, cost reduction and storage.
Solar cells have their application, but may not work so well for powering cities, or countries. Michael Shellenberger’s TED talk covers most of this.
Dull and ignorant concepts. which PV material has 44% efficiency in ambient at 300K.