Slashdot Mirror

Subsidies are an interesting question. All energy sectors get them. Here is a link that looks at the period 1943-1999: http://www.crest.org/repp_pubs/pdf/subsidies.pdf. Hyrdo is included, but much of the hydro capital investment happened before 1943. The Hover Dam was completed in 1935, for example. Non-market interest rates play a big role in hydro subsidies since hydro also plays a role in flood control, a government function. Wind gets a production tax credit which is not permanent while hydro appears to recieve a tax break in addition to production credits http://www.renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/partner/s tory;jsessionid=0D08A08E27326292C69011005A97F1DE?i d=49601. It seems to me that we can manage a subsidies accounting when wind reaches the market penetration of hydro. I suspect that owing to less favorable financing (private rather than public), wind will turn out to have the lower subsidy at that point.

Panels are tilted to account for the dilution of sunlight owing to the latitude. What you are mostly seeing is that you get rain while deserts don't.
--
Better power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

The two main objections I see to fusion right now are 1) too little too late and 2) thermal pollution. Both might be dealt with, the second more easily.

Renewables turn out to be very inexpensive. There is an energy plan going around call Energize America http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/5/18/62733/6577 that includes a chart that takes selectively from this link: http://www.crest.org/repp_pubs/pdf/subsidies.pdf. So, the big dramatic number which shows up in the chart is that the subsidy for nuclear power in its first 15 years of development was $15/kWh generated, which is comapred to wind at $0.46/kWh generated. There are problems with making such comparisons because some problems are harder than others and take more time to develop. But there is some validity too. From the pdf, the number for solar is about $7/kWh generated. Nuclear power converges towards a subsidy of $0.012/kWh which can't reduce much further owing to the the arrangements on liability and waste that fusion, solar and wind will not face so they can tend to zero. Note that this subsidy makes the actual cost of nuclear power higher than for coal. So, now that wind is cheaper than both coal and nuclear power and solar is headed towards an even lower price, where will fusion fit in? It's first 15 years, subsidy per kWh generated is infinite; again we see the problem of picking a fixed span. But, can it beat solar on price? Most plans have a replacement of the lithium blanket every couple of years so you have to work in a very hot environment and do precision machine work. This kind of effort is going to be similar to refueling in a nuclear plant. I think this alone makes the lowest possible cost for (big) fusion about $0.04/kWh. But it looks good for solar to get to 0.007/kWh. So, even if you have to pay for storage, the base cost of the power generation is going to be hard to beat. Another thing about renewable energy is that once it is in place, there won't be much reason to change. Thus, the market for fusion would only be for new generation. But, new generation may not be much needed when fusion is ready because the world population is projected to stabilize about then so energy markets may not be experiencing much growth.

The problem of thermal pollution is perhaps not so hard. This one is easily handled with dilution. But, you do need a place to dilute and that usually means a river. Just as we have run out of rivers to dam, a large deployment of fusion may run out of rivers to warm. This already happens for nuclear power in Europe in the summer time.

I usually find a way to celebrate when fusion reaches a mile stone. But I think we'll end up using it in niche applications like propulsion and dark outposts, perhaps in the oceans and space. The power-to-weight ratio should make it attractive for the outer solar system for example. The power-to-weight ratio for those lab-grown cells that you dislike is the main reason solar power is chosen for work in the inner solar system. 17% efficient silicon is about 200 times better than coal on the surface of the earth. On orbit the 30% efficeint cells are about 3000 times better than coal given the better sunlight and lack oxygen. Durable 50% efficient cells will be here before fusion I think. The article I cited has commercialization in three years. These are intended for soldiers in the field.

He's right though. The volume of electric customers actually taking part in using solar, wind, and hydro power technologies to power their homes, let alone actually get them "off the grid" is extraordinarily infinitesimal right now. The demand may be increasing, but right now costs and effectiveness of the technology just isn't showing much benefit for consumers.

I think you mean suppressed :) although I still disagree and I think you've picked a bad example.

- Although $10K was a lot of money in 1970 dollars, based on what I've read $10K was a wild under-guesstimate
- Only one prototype was ever built, so most claims seem to be based on regurgitated marketing specs rather than hands-on experience
- In the late 90's Mr. Ramirez was eventually convicted of 12 counts of fraud and money laundering and sentenced to 6 1/2 years in prison after he swindled his electric car investors out of millions

http://www.crest.org/discussion/ev/199811/msg01517 .html
http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc0.asp?docid=1G1 :62578997
http://www.bizjournals.com/twincities/stories/1999 /01/04/daily12.html

He doesn't exactly sounds like the kind of chap who deserves to be lauded by electric car fanboys.

Links:
http://www.crest.org/hydrogen/index.html
http://www.h2fuelcells.org/learn.php
http://www.humboldt.edu/~serc/related.html

(1) If you don't have plumbing, you need to have a stirling engine and generator at each dish. Which is insane.

Which, if you had RTFA (Or anything, for that matter) is exactly what they have. See that box at the tip of each dish? That's the collector, engine, generator and radiator. IIRC from pictures I've seen, the entire box is roughly 3'x3'x6' (though I may be confusing SES's production engine with some other company's design)

The smaller you make a heat engine, the more surface area there is relative to working fluid volume.

That is correct. That is also the reason that making a Stirling engine of any useful power output is a hefty achievement. Stirlings are external combustion, so "dead" volume in the engine is a serious killer. Making huge engines requires huge heat exchangers to get the energy through, but also increase dead volume that robs the engine of useful output. Stirlings do not scale; the design methodologies for a large engine are completely different than that of a small one.

Same thing with generators vs bearing friction and windage losses. That's why commercial power plants use ONE heat engine and ONE generator, both huge.

Any power plant I have ever seen typically has several gen sets, for a variety of reasons. One being redundancy, another being modular load matching ability, and another being the fact that there is an upper limit to just how big you can make things before it becomes unusable. For new plants it is actually more popular to use many smaller setups than a few large ones because matching the load by enabling/deactivating each unit gives higher plant efficiency, even if each individual generator might be a few % less efficient.

That's why I jsut(sic) *assumed* you were going to have plumbing.

Well you assumed wrong. Even the slightest bit of research would have cured you of that. (Incidentally, that's the website of the manufacturer discussed in the article, since I know you didn't read the article!)

Now about not needing a heat sink

My apologies. There was so much other bogus shit in there I missed that one. Of course you will need a means to reject unused heat: in this case, an air cooled radiator, mounted behind the engine.

Hmmm, that's not a very impressive site.

We've established you don't like my source. We've also established your spelling (and reading comprehension) isn't all that great either... but you have yet to cite any sources of your own other than three sentences in an electronics journal, published by some dipshit who cites as "Off-site resources" such useful and relevant websites as "Dilbert", "The Motley Fool", "Netflix" and my personal favorite "The Onion" (Hey, it's America's finest news source!). What a pro.

And yet somehow my energy balance calc still shows 26% real sun-to-electricity efficiency, which matches the calculated Carnot from assumed (and fairly reasonable for solar applications) operating temperatures and the 50% of the Carnot efficiency claimed on the site I linked, plus a little loss for the electricity generation.

So you cite (rather, just mention) some experiment in a Japanese lab where they got 19%. Great. What were the engine metrics? Heat source/sink temp? Working fluid? Internal pressure? Swept volume? Was it an alpha, beta, gamma or free piston configuration? I certainly don't doubt their 19% claim but we must compare apples to apples here.

=Smidge=

If they actually sold a mirror dish/engine system and had a few real installations (not DoE-funded demos) they might be worth taking seriously.

There's no problem building a solar powered Stirling cycle engine. It was first done over a century ago. Toy sized ones are available. Getting out enough power to make it profitable, though, is hard.

Solar power, wind genies, and alternative sources of power aren't cheap up front but over the long term they are cheaper. Depending on the system configuration a system can pay for itself in 7 years, thereafter power is "free". Some good websites are:

• Home Power
• Solar Today
• CREST

Some background is here. "Ken Stone discussed how the United Stirling engine and parabolic dish system was taken out of moth balls and revived. He announced that there is now a new company that appears to be getting into the Stirling engine field with the old United Stirling engine designs."

I've seen a lot of people panning this idea as completely unfeasible, but I think they're overlooking some potential here. For instance, in Atlanta they are looking to create an beltline of railway circling the city. They would use existing tracks that originally served as a trolley system. The problem is there are portions of the proposed route that seem problematic. In some places, there are slight gaps between the existing railines. Other rails are used by commercial rail periodically. This transport vehicle would help solve those problems. I would imagine there are other locales that would benefit from a machine like this. In fact, it kind of reminds me of the bus system they have in Curitiba--but with rail capability!

As much as I'd like to support Ethanol fuels, I'm afraid that I can't. The problem isn't so much in their use or energy density, but rather the difficulties in producing them. You see, it takes a *LOT* of land to grow the grains needed for Ethanol. Some calculate as much as 137.5 million acres to produce the 103 billion gallons necessary to meet current consumption rates. Given that the number of farms is currently at 2,158,090, you'd need to add about 64 acres of land for each farm in the US.

Hmm... on second thought, that doesn't actually sound *too* bad. That's still a significant increase over current production. And all the vehicles would have to switched over. I have to wonder if we have the land for this? The amount of land farmed (~1 billion acres) has not changed since the 1930's. We'd be talking about a 14% increase in the amount of land farmed today. Not to mention that the numbers I just gave includes ALL agriculture, not just grain.

I'll have to ponder it a bit more.

Brazil in the early 80s developed a technology to make cars run on ethanol that is distilled from sugarcane (just like cachaca). It might not be as clean as a hydrogen fuel-cell, but it's quite a bit more efficient, and very stable technology.

I have never, ever, heard of a speaker bracelet, and can't imagine why one would search for it. [...] Bracelets have nothing to do with speakers.

True, but necklaces do -- years ago I heard about a product, I believe was called the "Bonefone" (Google doesn't have much to say about it, apparently the product died but there are some references to it), which played music through your collarbones.

I always chuckled when I read about it, because I remember a "Mr. Fonebone" who was always getting in trouble in Mad Magazine, back in my youth...

Funny thing is that we need much less energy to achieve these tasks in Europe (according to this message the factor is aproximately 1.67). So obviously, there must be much potential for saving energy in the US.

Also, your claim that fluorescent lamps cause headache is complete nonesense. Modern energy-saving lights do not flicker. The only thing one has to get used to is that the light is somewhat "whiter" than from ordinary lamps.

And what definately causes cancer is nuclear contamination (whereas to claim that for energy saving lights is ridiculous). Maybe the risk of a meltdown in a nuclear plant is very low. But considering the amount of damage such a meltdown can cause, it is still much too big.

For a USian it is easy to say that Chernobyl is not much of a problem, since it doesn't affect you. We Europeans however still suffer from the consequences, although we were several thousand kilometers away. For instance, since it is now autumn the local newspapers still publish what kinds of mushrooms should not be consumed due to high contamination.

I would recommend you to read some literature about the issue before glorifying nuclear power. Fiction books like Fall-Out (Die Wolke) and The last children (Die letzten Kinder von Schewenborn) should be a must-read in every school (as they were for us some 10-15 years ago). True, such books are fiction, but based on known facts about the effects of a nuclear meltdown and the laws that take effect in such cases.

I also remember a German TV production which demonstrated what would happen (based on the current laws on this issue) in case of a meltdown in Central Europe. The film was never shown in Germany (probably censorship) but I had the chance to see it in Sweden. It was very shocking to see how citizens will be treated if they happen to be in the 100km-zone of a nuclear meltdown.

Sebastian

Using natural gas for home fuel cells is a decision made of convenience. Most homes already have natural gas service (or, at least the capability for service), which makes it just that much easier to get a hydrocarbon fuel cell set up in one's abode. When migrating to a new technology in something as fundamental as home electricity, ease of conversion is paramount to acceptance. I imagine that if home fuel cells ever become commonplace, more consideration may be given to efficiency, safety, and international economics than convenience, and perhaps we will see one of the many other existing types of fuel cells in use that don't depend on hydrocarbons (or maybe even something yet to be developed). Who knows? But natural gas isn't the only way to go.

Yes, assuming you live in the USA (I don't know about resources in other countries).

There is good solar radiation data at:


http://sol.crest.org/solrad

This will give you a lot of good data on how much solar energy you get where you live. This info is web-based and free. As for wind power, I was able to get vast amounts of historical wind data from the National Climate Data Center. At the time, you had to buy the data (it was cheap) and ftp it. I think they offer quite a bit of it free via the web now. They are at http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/


I hope this helps!

Isn't it funny how often things that Americans call impossible are implemented successfully by other countries.

Japan (where I live) has profitable mass-transit. Near my home are two competing rail lines, JR and Nishitetsu. Nishitetsu (AFAIK) has always been profitable, and JR (now restructured) has returned to profitability.

I don't think they make money on ticket sales, just like San Diego does not. It is easy however to make money from the concentration of people that you have in your major stations. Play Railroad Tycoon, it's the same concept.

For example, Tenjin station (The Nishitetsu hub in Fukuoka) is rented out to advertisers on a daily basis for HUGE sums of money. The whole station goes to one advertiser who puts up gigantic (50-foot) posters in the high-traffic areas. (Today's display was for Boss Coffee. See how well that works?)

Another good way to make money is to build a department store on top of the station. Most big stations in Japan have 7-8 stories of stores above, and 1-2 stories of stores below the train station. Naturally, they're always full of people.

Another good source for creative mass-transit is the Brazillian city of Curitiba. Can't say if it's profitable, but it is successful.

Stirling engines are remarkably efficient at generating electricity. Whisper Tech has developed a system that can generate sufficient power for a home. The US-targed units run on natural gas, but they are not manufactured in sufficient quantities to be cost effective (US$12,500). We have to start somewhere, eh?
Some studies have been done using a parabolic dish or trough to drive a Stirling engine. I have investigated buying an old satellite television dish with tracking motors to track the sun. All I would have to do is paint or cover the dish with some highly reflective substance. That part is fairly cheap. I can't find the Stirling generators used in the article above. None of the Stirling engine producers seem to be selling engines to the open market.
If anyone knows where to buy a commercial solar thermal-electric Stirling system, I would like to see that posted here.

A few years ago, Ben Rosen (yes, that Ben Rosen) started Rosen Motors, which was once at www.rosenmotors.com but that now looks like that URL doesn't belong to him anymore.

He had nifty ideas for gas-turbine-generator/electric-motor hybrid automobiles with high-RPM flywheel regenerators in the trunk, but, you can guess, it didn't pan out as a feasible place for Ben to bet his future. So he downsized the dream and now makes his way selling some of the most efficient fossil-fuel-burning electrical generators the world has ever known, under the name Capstone Turbine.

Google spits out a few gobbets, too:
Speculation, speculation, speculation, and capitulation.

--Blair

Is much higher than you would think. Solar is often singled out by skeptics like this because the panels DO require a large amount of energy to make. However, more common energy sources suffer from similar problems. It takes a good deal of energy to search, drill, ship, refine, ship again, and distribute gasoline, for example. Do you think driving all of those trucks around the country loaded down with tons and tons of oil, running refineries, searching out new drilling locations, setting up drilling equipment, and cutting through the rock is energy efficient?

According to this article, the actual cost of gasoline once the tax breaks the oil companies are given are added back in is around $15.14 per gallon. Ouch.

Nearly every source of energy suffers loss in production like this. If you're going to apply that standard to solar, apply it to other sources as well.

They produce enough extra juice they actually sell it back to the local utility. Note the bill/resource usage for February, 2000 posted on the main page. If this can be done in a latitude as far north as Maine, it should be viable for most of north America. The only real factor involved would be cost of building and upkeep.

-Pastey

clinko writes:

This Article from Carnegie Mellon Talks about how lead based battery cars would be bad for the enviroment.

Ohh, man. I hear this too much. I've been participating on the Electric Vehicle Discussion List for over a year now. This topic comes up every now and then, usually in some editorial or article in the news. Lead-Acid batteries of starter battery size or greater are one of the most recycled manufactured products extant today. Forklift batteries are often rebuilt instead of recycled as well.

Lead-Acid batteries can also be fast-charged. The limiting factor is mostly the supply current! EV drag racers are dump-charging their small high power-density battery packs from large banks of more traditional "flooded" golf-cart style batteries, with currents in excess of 150A. They'd go higher but they don't have to. Discharge currents are up to 1400A in some cases. Quarter mile times are steadily dropping.

Of course, we'd like more energy density, or as we like to say it "miles per pound", out of the batteries. Nickel Cadmium batteries are currently a good solution, though they cost quite a bit more up front. Their longer cycle lifetimes do, however, make up for much of the difference in cost over the life of the batteries. SAFT is a good source for them.

These high power density batteries are interesting in that they will probably allow a lot more companies to make viable hybrid cars since the high charge/discharge currents will enable dumping many amps into an assist motor for rapid acceleration. The solid-state construction also lends itself to secreting the batteries all over the car, giving much more freedom to the styling designers.

As for immediate safety concerns, the spill from a wrecked lead-acid battery EV can be safely neutralized with baking soda and/or simple water dilution will eliminate most of the immediate danger. Gasoline is much worse!!!

Whew, that's enough for me today...

-cajun

True, though I doubt houses use 100 amps 24 hours a day!

Most current and new houses, and appliances (yes, PCs are guzzlers, but Netwinders and Laptops aren't) are based on the assumption of cheap power. Off-grid solar houses of today use MUCH less power, which is obvious when you consider the solar panel cost of driving the typical energy-inefficient house of today.

Some solar installations are designed to supply high peak power through more batteries -- it's not unusual for a solar home to be able to power all typical shop tools, but maybe not all at once. Ideally one can use "the (solar) grid" to supply the high peak power demands.

I'm no expert so check it out: Home Power Magazine, www.crest.org, Nation Renewable Energy Laboratory.