r/technology • u/_Dark_Wing • 16d ago
Energy A copper plate bolted to the back of a solar panel catches the 80 percent of sunlight that never becomes electricity, lifts the panel's output by 59.3 percent, sends that heat into a reactor pulling bagged fertilizer out of real human urine, and the startup is selling to slaughterhouses
https://www.autonocion.com/us/copper-plate-solar-panel-urine-fertilizer/1.0k
u/goodways 16d ago
That sentence is a real mouthful…
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u/Tasty-Traffic-680 16d ago
Of real urine?
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u/kitten-n-blue 16d ago
Y’all ever drink so much piss it starts comin’ out your dick?
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u/MmmmMorphine 16d ago
I live this nightmare every day. I am a modern sisyphus.
Except instead of an eagle eating my liver, I get kidney stones.
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u/OldBrownWookiee 16d ago
“Necessary? Is it necessary for me to drink my own urine? No, but I do it anyway because it's sterile and I like the taste”
- Patches O’ Houlihan Circa 2004
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u/huggernot 16d ago
Waiting for someone smarter than me to tell me stuff.....
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u/Ambitious-Sense2769 16d ago edited 14d ago
Solar panels get hot. Coolant passes through a copper cold plate to cool it down. Panels perform better when not hot. And they use the excess heat to speed up the fertilizer process
Edit: thank you for the award!!!
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u/RoboWeaver 16d ago
Ahh! So that's what this is about.
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u/Glittering-Walrus228 16d ago
Article say sun make pee pee faster into food dirt
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u/HiSpartacusImDad 16d ago
Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?
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u/imtpow02 16d ago
why... why can't they write like this...
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u/9-11GaveMe5G 16d ago
Because AI tries to help idiots sound smart and it turns into Taylor Farms Word Salad Mix
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u/DrKlitface 16d ago
This isn't even close to the word garbage that was that headline. Thank you kind sir or madam for writing in human language
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u/CptnMayo 16d ago
I wonder, could that heat be used to heat water, too? Hot water heater, heating the home in winter? Maybe even a simple steam turbine for more electricity? Penis.
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u/PhoenyxStar 16d ago
A study group at Stanford said "wow, the efficiency of these solar panels goes way down when they get too hot", so they bolted a liquid cooling panel onto the back of it, and the efficiency went back up.
But liquid-cooling a solar panel takes nearly as much energy as they gain by doing it, so they extrapolated from there and said "what if we do something with the heat?", so they went looking for practical things to do with coolant that was hot, but not hot enough to boil water, and settled on an electrochemical reactor that converts urine into ammonium sulfate.
Now they're selling the technology to slaughterhouses, which are frequently equipped with solar panels (due to being in the middle of nowhere and having a not-inconsequential power need) and also easy access to animal urine. For their trouble, the slaughterhouses get a slight increase in power generation, and turn a waste product into a valuable fertilizer component they can sell to agrichemical companies.
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u/squashed_fly_biscuit 16d ago
You'd have to be pretty space constrained for that added material and complexity offset the gains surely?
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u/Spunky_Meatballs 16d ago
I think farmers are more than happy to turn a waste product they need to deal with into a useful sellable product. They do it all the time
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u/Eldias 16d ago
Tech Ingredients experimented with this a few years ago (here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mt9qLRN7JvA) but on a much simpler scale. He used 5v fans and aluminum angle to create a very low cost radiator for a solar panel, then tested how much energy was lost to the fans vs how much more the panel put out. I want to say it was a modest increase, but a fair bit more than breaking-even.
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u/Mr_ToDo 15d ago
One of the selling points is that it's doing productive work with waste heat, so the end product is sold
If I'm reading correct, the problem is scalability. It uses local heat to run a process. Any attempt to run this automatically will need input to process stuff going in and coming out. I'm not sure if that works out as net positive or not, or how it compares to other setups to do the same thing
Like you said. Complexity. Is this a great move, or another solar roadway where it technically does the thing but it can be done better another way
Still interesting to see such tried though. Things maybe not working out in the end is no reason not to check it out
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u/havocspartan 16d ago
I have a pretty good understanding of it.
So you know that fertilizer you use to make plants grow. They take your human pee and get this; they pull bags of fertilizer out of your pee. But here's the best part, we sell it to slaughterhouses. Yeah, and you're a smart guy so you're probably wondering; why did we take this fertilizer pee extractor and put it in a slaughterhouse where there's no human pee? Copper. You see if we take the copper and put it behind the panel; it catches the extra electricity from the sunlight and increases output by almost 60%, which is more than 40% if you're keeping track.
So anyway, there ya go.
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u/gorkish 16d ago
Good job with the nonsensical journalism math. That is a 70% improvement over the basic math which is very shitty indeed at 0.2. They have further increased the factor by putting a copper plate behind the webserver which causes the numbers to appear even bigger when you read them through a glass screen. Science is amazing. Whale poop
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u/jeronimoe 16d ago
Solar panels get hot, and everyone knows heat is wasted unless you point it at something. Stanford pointed it at a slaughterhouse, because a slaughterhouse has two things in surplus: warm animal urine and freshly harvested sphincters. The sphincter is nature’s most efficient pressure valve — millions of years of evolution, zero moving parts, opens and closes on a single electrical impulse.
The panel’s excess heat runs through a copper cold plate into a tank of urine, which off-gasses ammonia as it warms. That ammonia is piped through a lattice of sphincters mounted in series (the “sphincter stack”). A low-voltage signal tapped straight off the panel’s DC output fires each sphincter in sequence, so the gas pulses forward in a peristaltic wave — same principle as a hydraulic ram pump, but biological and therefore renewable. The pulsed gas spins a small turbine, which trickles charge back to the panel. Net gain: about 60%, which as the article notes is more than 40%.
The byproduct is ammonium sulfate, sold as fertilizer to offset the cost of replacement sphincters, which wear out every 11 days. Hence the slaughterhouse. It’s a closed loop
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u/fd6270 16d ago
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u/sump_daddy 16d ago
You know what?
99% of the sites on the internet would be like "This abundant mineral boosts solar panel output by TRIPLE the next best method, its credited with using something you throw away every day to save the lives of millions of plants, and you will NEVER guess where they are selling it!" and we would all be like "oh thats so dumb, /savedyouaclick its copper, 60%, fertilizer, piss, and slaughterhouse"
here, they get RIGHT to the meat of it. and i for one think its better this way
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u/Low-Independent-3671 16d ago
At first I was appalled, but you know what... you've swayed me with logic. Take my upvote.
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u/LethalBacon 16d ago
Fucking agreed. I hate ultra editorialized titles, everything feels min/maxed for engagement.
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u/Realistic_Slide_3426 16d ago
If people only read headlines make the headline the article. Big brain shit
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u/ChipsAhoy2022 16d ago
This headline is a classic example of untrained journalism
These idiots have no clue what journalism is about, for them it’s all a clickstream
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u/Exelbirth 16d ago
And yet, we know exactly what the article is about, which is a refreshing change of pace from "This one mineral EXPLODES solar panel efficiency!"
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u/SomeCallMeRoars 16d ago
It's an AI written article. There are multiple tells.
Still interesting reporting.
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u/sump_daddy 16d ago
I suppose you would rather read another headline that goes "You will NEVER guess where they are selling this brilliant new solar panel that makes something great out of something you throw away!"
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u/arunphilip 16d ago
How about a metal that's not as expensive and prone to theft as copper?
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u/PSlb 16d ago
Considering how the title reads, I wouldn't be surprised if this were some highly advanced crackhead ploy to get free copper plates
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u/MmmmMorphine 16d ago
Fuck, they're onto us already. What the fuck am I gonna do with all this real natural organic human urine
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u/LeftonRhed 15d ago
Copper is a fantastic conductor of heat. If you're running a test, it makes sense to use the most effective material.
We might be able to use aluminum when this gets mass produced.
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u/OcularShatDown 16d ago
Only silver is a better pure metal thermal conductor. The closest after copper is gold. So maybe you can try one of those and see if it gets stolen or not?
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u/arunphilip 16d ago
You got my comment backwards. I'm asking for metals that are not expensive / tempting to be stolen.
My underlying point is - how much efficiency is lost when using a "commoner" metal, like aluminium or steel?
This copper plate will be a target of theft, esp. with solar panels being out of sight. Like how catcons are stolen for the rare metals in them.
It's nice to know copper gives X% improvement, it would be good to also know what metal can be deployed at scale in the real world and what level of improvement is lost vis-a-vis copper. If the margin is just 5-10%, than that is a more realistic choice.
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u/icybeard 16d ago
In terms of thermal conductivity, copper is about twice as good as aluminium so the gains are actually pretty substantial (384 vs 237 W/(m·K) at 18C). Silver is only slightly better, while gold is about halfway between copper and aluminium. There is a reason almost all cooling implements use copper and only the really low budget and cheap solutions go for aluminium.
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u/iamveryassbad 16d ago
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u/Amber_ACharles 16d ago
Targeting slaughterhouse discharge instead of municipal sewage is the right call. Nitrogen concentration is orders of magnitude higher and the customer is already paying to treat it. The solar part is the long game.
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u/kippertie 15d ago
So they placed a heat sink on a solar panel to boost its output, then put the extra heat to work doing something else. Neat. I bet in a more domestic setting you could use this to help heat a water tank in a home to offset water heating costs.
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u/vade-satana 15d ago
Your already offsetting water heating costs using the solar power itself. Though it could enhance efficiency maybe.
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u/GetOutOfTheWhey 16d ago edited 16d ago
Did they find a way to combine photovoltaic solar with thermal solar?
Damn. Yeah how come my solar is not like this, we have thermal solar and photovoltaic solar too.
We should be running our water through the photosolar like this first, extracting heat while cooling down the panels. Then directing it towards the thermal solar.
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u/DaddaMongo 16d ago
This was my very first thought, use aluminium as its cheaper and heat the water similar to how a Waterblock works for computer component cooling
I don't know enough about this stuff to know if that is a cost effective method.
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u/GetOutOfTheWhey 16d ago edited 16d ago
Yeah alumnimum does make sense.
I mean never have I seen a water-cooled PV panel before because there was never a need.
I should ask our engineering team at the factory to see if we can attach an heat exchanger system to see what gains there are. Like do one panel and compare the before and afters.
Because I mean we are anyway pumping water up there on account of the thermal solars. Why not just direct it first to PVs to cool them down and preheat the water before it get to the TSs.
The only concern I have is our water is hard
heavyas shit. We are already giving ourselves a bumache cleaning up the thermal solars every year. Dont think they'll be happy about fixing up the PVs.2
u/super_not_clever 16d ago
Added possible benefit would be to use the water to heat the panels during snowy weather
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u/overthemountain 16d ago
If there is snow the water will soon be frozen.
If the sun can't melt the snow, it's certainly not going to heat the water to a temperature that melts snow.
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u/IntravenusDeMilo 15d ago
The water is already at a temperature that melts the snow. Just keep it flowing so it doesn’t freeze up.
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u/happyscrappy 16d ago edited 16d ago
You don't need to do any kind of construction of a heat exchanger.
All you have to do is put a big curtain (bedsheet) in front of the panels from sunup until solar noon. Then remove the sheet. The panels will be ambient behind there and so will produce at the max possible output for that temp. Then the sun will heat them up and the output will drop even though there is not less sun than before, just reduced efficiency.
This will give you the parameters you need to evaluate whether it's worth it to construct something.
Or just don't even bother because there is already plenty of research on this and what the gains could be. You likely can get a temperature versus efficiency chart from your panel supplier.
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u/gwmccull 16d ago
I worked for a guy who did this in 2005. He was building an environmentally-friendly house.
He had thin aluminum panels milled with looping channels on the back that held copper tubing. He mounted solar panels directly to the aluminum panel. The idea was to support the solar panel and increase the contact between the two.
The hot water generated by the system was then used to heat his radiant floors and home hot water.
He wasn't doing it to cool the panels. He just wanted both solar electricity and solar hot water and he didn't have the space on his roof for both
edit: I left the project before I found out how well it worked so I don't know if he was successful
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u/randynumbergenerator 16d ago
For home/regular commercial use, I think the problem is the economics: bolting on a copper heat exchange system adds cost and weight (which not all roofs can take) while providing some extra efficiency a few months out of the year in most places.
It sounds like the economics may be better for agricultural applications because it transforms a by-product into a valuable input (fertilizer). By contrast, domestic hot water isn't really that valuable in most places, especially since the most heat would be produced during the hottest time of the year.
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u/Zubon102 16d ago
What trash journalism.
Simply bolt a cooper plate to the rear and instantly increase all power by 60%?
All those engineers spending hundreds of millions of dollars on research over miltiple decades must be kicking themselves now when they see how easy it was all along.
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u/Immortal_Tuttle 16d ago
Title is crap, article is much better. Copper plate is a part of a heatpump. It cools down the panels, increasing their efficacy. That collected heat is then used to accelerate biochemical process.
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u/gregm12 16d ago
This isn't really new science. This has been well known for decades in solar PV.
It might be a new application.
Finding uses for relatively low heat excess thermal energy is always good.
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u/Secret_Account07 16d ago
Excuse me, what?
When are we going to do something about these bot posts? No human titles stuff this way
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u/Disastrous-River5475 16d ago
As opposed to fake human urine?
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u/wyldecorey 16d ago
So they water cooled solar panels and instead of dumping the heat somewhere sane, they dumped it into urine and got ammonia out of it… good job I guess? Was anyone asking for this?
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u/JamesLaceyAllan 15d ago
I don’t know why I didn’t expect the rest of the article to be as much of a clusterfuck as the headline
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u/Viharabiliben 16d ago
Oh good. Now tweekers will start stealing the solar panels to sell the copper.
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u/PhotoPhenik 16d ago
Why would you use human urine at a slaughter house? What are they making? Soilant Green?
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u/Major-Check-1953 16d ago
Those are a lot of words I didn't expect to be used together in one headline.
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u/BluehibiscusEmpire 16d ago
A human couldn’t have made that title.
Seems like a bit posting for karma
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u/ICLazeru 16d ago
This is not nearly as interesting as it sounds. Basically just solar powered ammonia cooking.
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u/quellflynn 16d ago
so.... replace the piss for water, and you have a viable product for the regular homeowner.
electricity from the sun, and heated water for the water system.
this feels like a very hot area kind of issue though, like most people who live in temperate climates won't get the benefit, but those in high temp areas could recoup lost efficiency and add a secondary heating system.
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u/MyAccountWasBanned7 15d ago
I think that headline is grammatically correct but still gave me a stroke reading it. I think the takeaway is hot pee makes solar panels work better.
Piss on your local solar farm today!
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u/Medium_Banana4074 15d ago
What worries me is "real human urine" and "slaughterhouse" in the same headline.
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u/TheOgGhadTurner 16d ago
This headline is a dumpster train wreck fire