this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2026
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I wonder if we could kill 2 birds with one stone. Have parabolic solar panels that reflect unabsorbed light to boil water.
How about running water through the back side of the panels to keep them cool, transfer the heat into a heat battery (sand) then us that to assist your hot water heater.
Either that or use it for temperature differential power generation.
Although I guess you could use the power generated by the panels to run a heat pump to boil the water used for cooling too.
Right on. and PV get's less efficient when it gets hot, I'm unsure if there's enough waste heat to do anything useful. but there is at least a marginally good reason to cool them.
You'd just have 2 inefficient power generators
It would be a less efficient boiler (because the 'mirrors' would be much less reflective), and much more expensive (because solar panels -- especially custom-made curved ones -- are much more expensive than mirrors).
Overall, I suppose maybe you could come out ahead if you used very efficient solar panels for it, and that would let you generate slightly more watts per surface area used...
But we really don't need to optimize for surface area in 99% of cases. Almost everywhere solar power is used, space to install panels is abundant, and it would be much cheaper and more effective to just put one or the other of these solar collection methods over a slightly wider area if you want increased production. (And even then, most of the cases where production-per-surface-area is very important are on solar-powered vehicles, and these parabolic sun-tracking mirrors are impractical for use on a moving vehicle.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility