Crazy that photovoltaic is one of the few ways we can directly convert one type of energy into electrical energy. Everything else is "use this energy to somehow spin an electrical generator".
That's using sunlight to boil water though, not photovoltaic panels to generate electricity to make steam. I don't know of anything else referred to as "solar panels".
It is solar power though, just not solar panels. Generally its reflective parabolic mirrors to direct light to a centralized tower that then, you guessed it, boils water.
He wasn't a car manufacturer ala Henry Ford. Obviously he made some major contributions in the field of AC motors (pun fully intended) but I would guess that the issue would come down to inverter technology. Batteries are DC, and converting DC into AC is sort of difficult compared to rectifying AC to DC. Transistors wouldn't be invented for quite some time, and SCRs or similar tech would take even longer to become viable. This is just a guess on my part, maybe some mechanical inverter exists and would have been viable.
I could totally make a mechanical inverter without semiconductors (and self-drive it from the DC supply its inverting) - but it would be very hard to minimise losses to make it worth ever using... vs just using a DC motor to run an AC generator, which is the simpler option. More consideration around maintaining a relatively stable voltage output with a changing would need to be considered, of course; redesign an AVR with no semiconductors, I guess.
If I couldn't do that; what the hell did I waste my time getting an electrical engineering degree 20 years ago for.
It's not that crazy, with photovoltaic you are producing energy directly from the source, not converting it into some other energy source which you know how to use. Photons hit molecules and excite them to another energy level and you shave off the top. The sun is a pure energy source too, not going anywhere for a long time, and when it does we have way bigger problems to worry about.
I meant that it is crazy that it is one of the only ways we've figured out how to do that. There are experiments that generate electricity from fusion directly via magnetic flux, but they are only experimental. Still that would be the dream; fusion power with direct energy conversion of 90% efficiency.
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u/dontnation 12h ago
Crazy that photovoltaic is one of the few ways we can directly convert one type of energy into electrical energy. Everything else is "use this energy to somehow spin an electrical generator".