Why Skyscrapers Should Be Solar Farms

You forgot to mention the UK’s first major solar project on a tall building, the CIS Tower in Manchester, completed in 2005. At the time it was the largest commercial solar façade in Europe.

I have a feeling more parking lots and facades will get covered in panels in a few decades ... makes so much sense even if the panels are not at the optimum angle

PV on the side of a building at very high latitude like Canada could make sense but the angle to the sun will be so poor below 45 latitude it can’t be cost effective. Your 20% efficiency will be more like 7% based on the panels orientation. Sorry you’re stretching your assumptions to please the sponsor.

Finally, the ultimate grand return! Welcome to 2024!

Great video! Integrating solar panels into buildings to provide electricity is a great idea that we will become more and more common.

Killing two birds with one stone? Don’t tall, glass-clad buildings cause enough avian carnage already?

If you could get more than 1MW average from the Burgh Khalifa I've got a bridge to sell you.The building is essentially vertical and panels get higher efficiency when they face the sun so less well under a third of the building will get sun relatively incident on it for 4 or 5 hours a day. For 6 months of the year you will also lose about 10% efficiency due to it being so hot.

I generally like your videos, and while this topic is interesting the information given simply doesn't make sense. Apart from the fact that the panels are less efficient and would be in the wrong orientation, the idea that whole cities could use this foregoes the fact that buildings are in each others shadow.

Was this channel ditched in favor of the B1M

There's so much more to be discovered in the world of secret solar power. Yet it seems to be taking an age to get them to market. From water cooled domestic roof panels ~ increasing the efficiency and providing hot water ~ via thin and flexible mats designed to look like roof slates, to the ones featured in the video (which remind me of the old heated rear window filaments on cars; it's all very exciting and encouraging.

I love seeing solar integrated onto existing structures. No need to cover up potential agricultural land when a factory roof can do the same thing.

Transperent solar panels are becoming a reality and can actually make this a reality for galss glass building as well. Additionally, the windows can be installed with transperent solar panels that can produce electricity. Note - I know that the efficiency of transperent solar panels is very low, but it is improving slowly.

Do you know why panels tend to be angled towards the sun like at 2:56 as opposed to lying flat on the ground? Now imagine a vertical skyscraper where the panels are all pointing sideways ...and three quarters of them away from the sun. That's why this will never be a practical thing.

Namibia Mentioned ❤ 🇳🇦

The problem isn't the placement of new solar panels persé: it's the cabling them together and transforming that power into usable voltages, as well as means to storage that energy for when it's really needed - which, in temperate climates, is hardly ever when the sun's shining brightly... Here in the Netherlands we see plenty projects fall flat on their faces because, after panels have been installed by east European workers, all the cabling (loads of copper!) has been nicked. Police is forever guessing who did it, while most outside of said police force have a pretty good clue, but not allowed do anything about this theft. Copper prices are rising, which means additional costs to be paid by the clients - not to mention all the extra security firms since police still hasn't got an inkling about the culprits. And even if they *did*, nobody there speaks polish anyway. End result: less solar panels installed, and even less properly working. On topic: High-rise buildings clad with integrated solar panelling would be lovely, but it's usually shot down by architects, who don't like their "artwork" marred in any way shape or form, including actual use by the owners. Architects and project developers are quite (i.e.: far too) familiar with city councils, and just do as they please, which is making vast amounts of money providing very little in the way of usable living accommodations. No matter how high: it's either going to have solar panels on the roof (depending on that massive skylight for an architect's price winning atrium, of course), or none at all.

Sunlight hitting buildings already generates heat, which translates to lower heating costs/energy consumption. Also just to point out that the Burj Khalifa numbers are way off, since efficiency on fixed panels is hugely dependent on sun position and panel orientation. They're not the easiest or cheapest panels to clean, maintain or replace either. I'd also like to see a breakdown of the costs and efficiency of panels with translucent overlays, and whether they make financial sense or even reduce overall carbon emissions.

You could put solar on the side of buildings but you see a heavy drop in efficiency compared with panels angled towards the sun. This would make the panels so expensive that they may not even pay for themselves over their lifetime. Also that estimate of the power that the Burj khalifa could produce was lazy in the extreme in its calculations as well.

Rest in peace 🙏 🪦 😢 we loved your videos, you were the best youtuber out there in construction and development field.

Cover every canal and reservoir in solar panels to collect sunlight, cut evaparoation om those waterways, cool the panels due to them sitting over water, and create electricity over surface area thats not being used for anything else. Then you put these solar panels on the roofs of every single school, shopping mall, church, hoospital, parking garages, sky scrapers etc. We continue with home or modular/mini wond turbines that sit on these skyscrapers and other tall structures to capture wind to generate electricity. With all these forms of electricty we need energy storage we can use excess energy to create hydrogen to be used when these forms of energu produciton arent producing eneough.

This sort of stuff is nothing more than green washing, the inclination of the panels is important if you want to optimize energy production... The orientation panels would always be suboptimal, they are hard to service and not to mention that due to their transparency these panels are already less efficient than regular ones.