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It's not a measure of efficiency. Nothing in the original post claimed it was. It is, however, a legitimate measure of the social benefit created by the industry. Much has been written about the jobless recovery that has created enormous profits for a small number of people without helping most of the population. If subsidies for fossil fuels merely inflate the already egregious oil company profits, while subsidies for solar energy create jobs, that is a clear advantage to the latter.

This is independent of questions of efficiency (megawatts/dollar), environmental impact, etc.

Too bad solar manufacturing is heavily subsidized by the US government

Or is it?

They do the same thing with oil. Look it up.

FTFY

On a seasonal basis, this automatically happens in most homes and small businesses anyway. Heat generated by the servers helps contribute to keeping things toasty in the winter. It is not a reason in itself to not increase their efficiency though. Fuel, such as natural gas or oil burned in an onsite furnace results in 85-95 percent usable heat. The typical electricity generation cycle using a coal, oil, or natural gas boiler is about 33 percent efficient , Since this heat would be generated anyway, you might as well use it if you can, but furnaces or heat pumps are more efficient ways of providing heat.

In the summer the situation is reversed. All of that waste heat needs to be removed, meaning you pay for electricity to run the server, and the air conditioning to remove the excess heat. Same goes for lighting and all appliances that generate heat. The strategy is to find a way to circulate that heat in the winter, and maximize efficiency of all of the electrical devices year round. That's about as simple as I can make it.

The "Wind and Solar don't handle base load" argument is bogus:
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/05/10/why-wind-intermittency-is-not-a-big-deal/

Just look at the map

According to this article http://cleantechnica.com/2011/03/08/u-s-department-of-energy-announces-new-biofuel-to-replace-gasoline/ the Bioenergy science center has already produced a microbe to efficiently produce a fuel. With the cost of oil now around $100 a barrel, I would think that there would be a great demand for this technology. I would assume that it is better to use our money to produce the oil and jobs locally rather than paying questionable sources in the middle east.

I would think that any person pushing to eliminate our need for foreign oil or oil in general and actually expecting some level of success would have done a tiny bit of research.

Oil billionaire T Boone Pickens did the research for his Pickens Plan. Of course some accuse him of using the plan to hide his plan to steal water.

We could reduce our need on oil by a massive amount with nuclear power

Yea, and create more problems. Nuclear power is not profitable, it is hooked on subsidies.

On the other hand, there's A Solar Grand Plan: "By 2050 solar power could end U.S. dependence on foreign oil and slash greenhouse gas emissions". There's also Wind: "The United States has enough wind resources to generate electricity for every home and business in the nation."

To tell the truth there is not one energy source operating on large enough scale to power the US that does not get subsidies. Even oil gets subsidies.

Falcon

It says "campaign for trains". That means write your representatives. There simply are no modern trains in the US, and there won't be unless the public asks for them.

Fastest current US train lines seem to be the Northeast Acela trains, which do 125mph, and are still getting implemented. Meager by modern train standards - but still faster than driving. http://cleantechnica.com/2010/11/03/amtrak-spending-466-million-on-new-electric-trains/ It's a national embarrassment that China, still a developing and mostly chaotic country, already has 2,197 km (1365 mi) of rail lines with top speeds of 350 km/h (220 mph).

Looks like solar is cheaper than coal now: http://cleantechnica.com/2010/10/17/silicon-solar-thin-film-manufactured-for-under-0-70-cents-a-watt-by-swiss-co/ also more conventionally: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/19/a-cheaper-route-to-solar-cells/ Compared to 4 or more times more expensive that coal for new nuclear power, that is vastly superior. Wind is much cheaper than nuclear power as well.

Not that one or two of those proposed 25MW nuclear generators wouldn't be out of line either.

25MW, $25M
Assuming that's ONLY for the reactor, not the steam plant to actually produce the electricity, say $50M for a power plant

Let's assume that $100/gallon is a worst case scenario for a short period of time of intense fuel convoy attacks, and that it averages closer to $10-20/gallon.

Diesel is 37.3 MJ/L, $2.64-5.28/L, Assuming 30% efficiency*, 1 MJ = .278 kWh, 3.11 kWh per Liter, or $.85-1.70 per kwh, using diesel. Ouch.
A $50M 25MW plant, assuming a 90% capacity factor, should produce 197 Million kwh a year. Assuming it lasts 5 years, that's closer to 5 cents a kwh. Even if we double the cost AGAIN to $100M, that's still only 10 cents a kwh before operation expenses.

$800 for 200 watts of solar panel doesn't seem out of line right now. Figure once we're done militarizing it, adding extra components like inverters, and shipping, $1600 for 200 watts. Being fairly generous, that 200 watt panels should produce ~ 788 kwh/year. Figure on 5 year timeframe**, that's 41 cents a kwh.

Either way I see potential for major savings. I'm forced to agree that for bases that are large enough, a suitable nuclear generator would probably be the best solution. For the small ones, solar power looks like a good solution, but you'll still need a generator.

*A GW scale plant can get over 50%, but we're looking at big IC diesel engines.
**Both the reactor and panels should last longer, but I'm being paranoid here. Diesel generators are easy to move and clean up after, relatively speaking.

American cars are seen very popular and often seen as the luxury alternative to cheap Chinese cars.

Unfortunately, most of the products of the US car industry are insufficiently fuel efficient to meet China's fuel economy standards. This means US cars have to be built as local Chinese/US ventures, which reduces the economic benefits. It's significant then, that the Chinese versions of US cars are able to economically meet and surpass China's fuel efficiency standards (5.7 L/100 Km)... unlike the domestic US versions when have relied on lax US governmental standards (8.7 L/100 Km) as an excuse to build cheaper, less technologically advanced machines. It's sad really - in a way the US's reliance on maintaining older tech standards through Government fiat (under the guise of the "free market") reminds me of how the British Empire stagnated from 1850 to 1914. Secure within the largest trading empire in history, it structured its trade to funnel through the island of Great Britain and protected its domestic firms against external competition and as a result they grew fat and weak and lazy. Outside the British Empire, the emerging powers of the United States and Germany were effectively locked out of this market. As a result, they had to compete by through lower prices and more advanced technology. By the time the UK realised what a situation it had got itself into, the UK balance of trade deficit amounted to 5% of its GDP (even with its economic embargoes), Germany had taken half of Europe and the United States was selling its superior products in every country in the world.

Uhhhhh....if you are simply wanting to capture solar energy, wouldn't using molten salt be not only much cheaper but also more efficient?

After all it is certainly cheaper to have some mirrors focus the sun on a tank than to try to build truly efficient solar panels (last I heard the best were around 30% efficient and VERY expensive) and molten salt would at the same time solve the storage problem without the need for the expensive battery.

According to Scientific American we could have nearly 70% of our electricity needs met by solar by 2050 at a cost of 420 billion, using molten salt as part of the plan. Considering the amount of greenhouse gasses that would save by getting rid of coal it seems like a good deal to me. Add in subsidies to get folks into electric vehicles and we could finally stop using foreign oil, which lets be honest is well worth the price to keep from giving tankers full of money to militants like the Sauds.

I have no idea how reliable it is, but this other article on the project says: "Its main connection to Europe would likely go through India, Pakistan and the Middle East."

"Once full, Obsorb floats to the surface, where it can be skimmed off with something as simple as a coffee filter. After that the pollutants can be retrieved and the glass can be reused hundreds of time. Nanoparticles of iron can also be added to convert TCE or PCE (another volatile organic compound) into harmless substances. As a low cost form of cleanup, swelling glass could provide site remediators with yet another in the growing list of non-conventional cleanup tools along with lactate, vitamin B-12, and even cattails." http://cleantechnica.com/2010/01/11/swelling-glass-cleans-polluted-water-like-a-sponge/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+cleantechnica%2Fcom+(CleanTechnica)

GE was working on a more-efficient version of the incandescent bulb. It was to start out twice as efficient as current bulbs and eventually be four times as efficient; comparable to CFLs. I'm guessing they planned to replace the tungsten filament with a tungsten photonic lattice. Alas, stupid laws that banned incandescents outright -- instead of banning inefficient bulbs -- caused them to drop the project.

IMHO, CFLs suck. I've had nearly a dozen (various brands and price ranges) fail in the last 18 years. One of them (a ring-shaped bulb made by Lights Of America) came close to bursting into flames. Because of that, I no longer trust them.

The article refers to bulbs made by Feit. I bought an LED night light made by them which failed after 1 year.

Yes I know. However Hungary is part of Europe. And nuclear power won't last long there either, "In the late 1980s, estimates of the actual size of the country's uranium deposits were unavailable, but official sources indicated that Hungary had uranium reserves sufficient to supply its domestic needs until about the year 2020. In the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union guaranteed Hungary's future nuclear-fuel needs." I don't know how authoritative it is but the Austrian Energy Agency says the Hungary Renewable Energy Profile is advancing to an open energy market with "very good prospects for biomass energy projects. There are additional opportunities for hydro and geothermal energy development (especially for heat applications). However, opportunities for large scale wind or solar projects appear limited." Where Hungary falls short on electrical needs High-voltage direct current transmission lines can provide electricity from solar and wind where those are feasible. Spain and Germany, who are the third and second largest wind energy generators, could provide some electricity. And Turkey, and again Spain, can provide solar power.

Now as a matter of trade, Hungary would have to produce something these other countries want and I don't know what Hungary produces.

Falcon

Oh please. I bet you're the sort of person who believes that we can replace all our coal plants with Wind and Hydro by 2015 if we spent enough money.

In "A Solar Grand Plan" Sciam lays out how Solar power could provide 69% of the USA's electricity by 2050, about 35 years after your 2015. The Wind Energy Resource Atlas of the United States by the Renewable Resource Data Center (RReDC) of the government's National Renewable Energy Lab details the potential wind power of various areas of the US. As T Boone Picken's Picken's Plan lays out the Rocky Mountains alone contain enough potential wind energy to also provide electricity to the 48 continuous states.

First you have to get the liscensing for all these power plants. For Hydro, this is mostly impossible since someone will stand up and say that the turbines chew up fish at a ridiculous rate and destroy the river. For wind, people will complain about the birds. These drawbacks were true in 1960 but they aren't anymore. You'll be tied down for at least 3 years trying to get the permits and approval to build. And that's being optomistic.

Dams do mess up rivers. However some years ago there was a story on /. about how hydro can be used to generate electricity without dams. Instead water mills like egg beaters are lowered from a boom into the river then the moving water spins the mills. I wonder what's happened with that, I haven't heard anything about it since. What's stopping wind, especially offshore wind farms in places like Cape Cod in so called "liberals", who are not liberal, backyard are NIMBYs. And I bet many of them say they're environmentalists.

Coal is mostly clean now

Coal is no where near being clean, and never will be. Sure emissions from coal-fired power plants may be cleaner than before but coal mining is not clean what so ever.

As for natural Gas, its completely clean.

Gas is not clean either. Sure, like coal, CO2 may be captured and stored. Nitrogen oxides also have to be captured. Gas, at least Liquefied Natural Gas or LNG, also needs the same sort of infrastructure as oil.

I *want* one of these plants in my backyard.

I'd rather have PVs on my roof and a wind genie in my backyard.

If you want to turn this country into Vermont, maybe you should just move to Vermont.

No, the state for the Free State Project is New Hampshire, next door.

Falcon

So, let's have Google deploy mini-nukes at their data centers...

Seriously, though, current economics dictate Google's carbon footprint. They (reportedly) use vast arrays of commodity hardware - due to the economics. They locate their data centers where power is cheap and reliable, and having a company of that scale do differently would be staggeringly expensive.

I think the poster's point is that Google searches aren't "free" - of course, neither is an ad sponsored program watched on television, it may be getting data to you for less CO2 emission per bit, but is it data you really want? And, if the program has a small audience, it's probably wildly expensive in terms of CO2 emissions, to deliver a broadcast over the air (think about the real-estate advertising channel...)

I'm emitting CO2 as I type this, there is a quantifiable increase in emissions due to the increased blood flow in my brain required to compose the thoughts. Maybe not as much as boiling a cup of tea, but it is there and measurable. Think we could get a grant to fund a study of that?

Let me preface this with I do believe we need to invest in all renewable energy technologies, such as wind, tidal, solar, etc. That being said, we should not throw caution to the wind. We need to explore the effects/affects of what we do. Wind generators do in fact kill birds and bats. Wind mills decrease the number of species in a given environment and can lessen biodiversity. We need to be careful and do what we can to lessen the harmful things we do to nature. It is all about trade-offs and tipping points. We must establish what the tipping point for the number of wind generators we can safely use without being detrimental to the environment.

http://cleantechnica.com/2008/09/17/12-year-old-boy-invents-new-type-of-solar-cell/ includes a link to the press kit. the other link is the same.

The fallacy with your statement is that solar and wind aren't really competing with oil.

But they are. Have you ever heard of the electric car? Have you heard of Natural gas? Natural gas fuel many power plants in the US. But as T Boone Picken has announced, wind can replace those natural gas power plants. Though he doesn't say it so can solar. Then the natural gas can be used as fuel for vehicles.

Falcon

That's why it will be not on rooftops, but in the deserts ... there is enough space and plenty of sun ... great for utility scale projects.

See also DESERTEC and
NEAL, is planning to build a 3,000 km-long (1,875 mile) power cable to Germany to

If you ask me, the Solar Thermal Millennium has eventually been unleashed!!!

Imagine the potential of water splitting and desalination combined with solar thermal power plants, as such build in Spain .

Solar thermal power plants are the most efficient way today to convert sunlight to electricity in large scale and utility scale.

Remaining process heat can be used for sea water desalination.

The desalinated water can then be used for hydrogen production.

The water desalination is essential, otherwise we'd have the biofuel against food fight again, but this time it's about water.

(n.b. High efficient PV for roof tops, needs metals like Indium, hardly available and the energy required to produce such cells is horrible.)

Mouse over the link in the summary. If it says "the register" like this one did, you can be pretty sure that the summary is as informative, if less humorous (oops, sorry, that's "humourous").

I googled and found two other sites with news of this: Wired Blogs and Clean Technica

On a more green note, the CherryPal is supposed to sell for under $400 (monitor, keyboard, etc. not included). It should hit the market on August 4th, 2008. For that price and low energy use, it will appeal to wallets as well as the environmentally conscious. Though there is some understandable skepticism, I'll praise any manufacturer that lowers the bar on PC environmental impact.