small temperature gradient means low efficiency in a heat engine. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot_cycle#The_Carnot_cycle

A "35% efficient steam [system]" is not a physical reality here.

The emissions and environmental footprint of lubricant oil in a wind turbine is insignificant compared to the footprint of directly burning fossil fuels for the same amount of energy. It's like thinking the motor oil you put in your car is anywhere near as much of a problem as the gasoline you burn every time you touch the pedal. You even make this connection yourself and then don't follow the thought anywhere.

Fiberglass is a durable composite material that's been used in homes and vehicles and elsewhere and then landfilled for decades. The importance you attach to "thing end up in hole" doesn't seem tied to any particular concern regarding the environment or human health or sustainability substantiated by research.

>It's JUST conservatives who are questioning whether or not these things are really that environmentally conscious.

Total nonsense. Environmental scientists publish life cycle assessments of renewable and conventional technologies all the time. It's a well established field of study. There are many comprehensive reports that highlight real concerns e.g. dirty production of turbine steel, they're literally just a google scholar search of "wind power LCA" away.

You're not a critical thinker if you just pick a twitter pundit/similar who appeals to your preconceived notions and uncritically regurgitate their disingenuous bullshit.

This article explicitly attributes Germany burning more coal in 2022 than 2021 to the ongoing natural gas squeeze and French nuclear failures. Germany has been winding down nuclear production for like a decade and coal has trended net negative over that time. Any dumbass can look this up, kind of weird of you to lie about it.

there are thousands of experts working to engineer cheap tandem architectures in both public and private research environments. such breakthroughs are not at all precluded by any "firm constraints" physics undergrads learn in passing.

This is a brief summary of some NREL research linked in the article that anyone really interested in the details can go read.

>Depending on the panel size a 7 meter gap could easily hold an entire additional panel.

Doesn't really matter if that erases your profit margin. It's niche techno-economic research to improve cost modeling efforts, you don't need to have some incisive perspective on the subject or complain that the studied effects aren't big enough to interest you.

are bypass diodes "a lot more"? or are they a cheap and common element of most existing PV systems?

and yes, those major technical challenges mean this is very far from the market, if it ever makes it there, and all the articles deliberately do a poor job of explaining that.

but you can do better than being one of the many "helpfully" chiming in to let us know windows need to let some sunlight through as if that dooms the economic prospects out of the gate. It doesn't - these technologies are cheap to fabricate and new buildings are going to need glass somethings in the window frame. "It will always be better to build a normal building but then also pay a crew to go mount and install conventional solar panels in a field" is very much not a certainty, and private building developers probably don't care very much even if it's true.

yeah, I know what bypass diodes are. since you know what they are too it's kind of strange that you wrote a comment pretending they don't exist.

>You can combine multiple windows to a shared inverter, but if one window is shaded (even a bit), then all the windows must turn off.

what is your basis for this (ridiculous) statement?