This is great for me… because I have a fuck Delta, or will pay extra to avoid, pricing maximum in mind.

You’re right about US. seems half uses tracking. No numbers on China which is 30x larger market. Economics still only make sense at consumer level of $1/watt panel prices, to me, but I guess there are reasons I don’t understand.

It’s viable as edge of day high power boost in east/west direction, and simply any extra power that is cheap and easy to install, that adds privacy or keeps the controlled beings inside.

The cells are super expensive but super small. They need cooling for efficiency, but if the heat moving is useful, can ignore the energy cost.

I think their approach with module is 20-50x concentration instead of 500x, with cooling permitted to be module wide on air gap, as well as usual bottom cooling.

wouldn’t diffuse light be what it’s going to be best at? While it’d be worse on a sunny day when there is an optimal single direction for the light to come in?

No. Concentrated solar requires perfect alignment, dual axis tracking, to the sun. diffuse light does not concentrate.

A reasonable alternative design would be cheap ordinary PV cells with outward bubbles instead of inverted parabolas that would capture off axis light better on a fixed tilt.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10938951

This is 36% MODULE efficiency with expensive cooling. 30% actual year long efficiency without it. Requires dual axis tracking. Seems heavy as its very tall/deep.

Headline of cost reduction is very unlikely. Especially on a per acre/fairly large area basis. Dual axis tracking requires more spacing than fixed orientation rows, and loses benefits under cloudy conditions. While power at 7am and 5pm is more valuable when competing against high penetration solar, batteries are now more competitive than tracking, and can serve edge of day and night power needs. Tracking solar tends not to be built anymore, due to low cost of panels. The cooling infrastructure is also not as useful as it is on rooftops because the heat capture has useful benefits for homes.

It is also unclear how this has advantage over parabolic mirror.

Agri PV is a real use case, where more free land means more land use, even if most of it gets more shade, except around noon.