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Reality check:
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/56290.pdf
http://www.entergy-arkansas.com/content/news/docs/AR_Nuclear_One_Land_Use.pdf

Solar uses huge amounts of land-per-MWh-- between 3 and 10, depending on who you ask, what technology, and how you measure; it also generally ignores the whole "peak solar output is very different than average", or the whole "this only works in places with a lot of room and a lot of sun". This isnt the solution youre looking for; want to save the environment, stop fighting nuclear.

Their argument, as laid out by House Republicans and libertarian organs like the Cato Institute and Reason magazine, is that the federal government shouldn't 'pick winners and losers' in the energy markets or gamble taxpayer dollars on renewable-energy loans to companies like Solyndra

Are they wrong? Harping on solar over and over when its pretty clear that the efficiency, price, and land usage just arent there isnt going to fix the issue. Solar is a good supplemental tech, but its not going to save the world, and dumping $500 million into one company that goes bankrupt really does deserve criticism. If the amount had been like $10 million, maybe we wouldnt be having this discussion.

The assumption has always been that, without heavy government subsidies, renewable energy sources like solar and wind power would never be able to compete with fossil fuels

That presents a long term problem, doesnt it? Fundamentally one of the issues is that you cant fight supply and demand-- not successfully. If fuel is significantly cheaper than solar, the government isnt going to be able to pay off the difference indefinitely; and if solar IS cheaper in the long haul, people will jump on board (which is why they do).

But the idea that solar companies cant succeed without government help is ridiculous anyways. Didnt Elon Musk help found a solar firm (solarcity) about thats going strong, apparently with no government help? I found out about this while looking him up for the tesla articles, and I was a little surprised-- heres a firm thats been around for quite a while, is doing very well, and apparently had no help from the government! They did try to get a fed loan guarantee, and it fell through, and they went to a bank (BoA?) and got their loan. I guess that doesnt really help the narrative that "poor solar firms cant compete without government help", which perhaps is why such stories arent reported more widely.

Your units are completely bogus, a first sign you have no idea what you are talking about. KWh is a unit for energy. Power, installed powered and the like is measured in KW.

Assuming you've just installed a 6.2KW solar array for $24K, I've got some bad news for you right off the bat. The average solar insolation for Florida is about 5KWh/m^2/day year-round, assuming the panel is oriented and tilted just at the right angle. Not all roofs are appropriate, but let's assume your installation was perfect. So each square meter of panel receives 5KWh of solar energy a day. Since panels are rated at a standard constant flux of 1KW/m^2, you would need 24KWh per day solar influx to generate that 6.2KW nominal power. Since you only receive 5KWh, your panel generates an average power of 1.3 KW, or 31KWh/day.

At wholesale electric prices (5c/Kwh) that's 1.55 $/day and at Florida electric prices (12c/KWh) it's 3.72. At a 5% standard annual interest rate, your 24K investment costs you 3.3 $/day, so you would be barely recouping your investment (at current interest rates things looks better, thank the fed, but also watch your pension account). The whole scheme is predicated on a powerful fast grid that can absorb your excess and cover you consumption when clouds arrive - maybe a pumped storage unit, the enormous cost of which your are externalizing.

Meanwhile, Palo Verde nuclear plant, despite being in the middle of nowhere, produces electricity at a rate of 2.7c/KWh, including it's capital cost at 5%. A modern plant with better cooling (lake/ocean) can go significantly lower. And that's total price, including operating, decommissioning etc. for a plant capable of generating baseload, with a dependable schedule. While you are barely covering interest at retail prices.

There's a place (Arizona, Mexico) and a technology (CSP) that can make solar competitive, but photovoltaics in Florida ain't it.

noone would be entirely off the grid. solar panels wont keep your house running with maximum power during cloudy days or nights... that being said... solar panels CAN decrease the cost of your energy bills by a lot... and this amount of money would easily pay the cost of solar panel installation over a decade or so.

Melbourne/AU - 4.5 kW at peak installed PV. Saves me about $1200-$1350/y in power bills. If I include the money I get back for the power exported to the grid, they pay themselves in 5 years.>/p>

The reason for which in US is much more expensive: there aren't enough authorized installers (I can't find that link now) - the cost of installation is roughly twice the price of the installed modules

The SEGS, a solar thermal plant in the Mojave Desert uses ground water from a rapidly depleting aquifer to run the condensers for their generating station. The NREL report about trough-based solar thermal energy lists the SEGS's water consumption as 1000 gallons (about 3.5 tonnes in real units) evaporated per MWh generated.

http://www.nrel.gov/csp/troughnet/faqs.html

Oceanside nuclear and other thermal power stations do not evaporate any water, they return seawater warmed by a few degrees from the condensers to the ocean.

I have serious doubts that 40% solar panels are ever going to be practical. The only practical application I foresee for 40% cells (generally these are triple-junction films) are for space applications, where they have little competition (in powering satellites that is, not for rocket propulsion).

Making multijunction solar cells is very difficult, and it generally requires very expensive materials (namely Indium) to reach these high efficiencies. It requires carefully tuning two important material properties of the cell's layers, namely that the bandgaps of each layer have to be optimized against the solar spectrum, and the materials joining each other have to match in terms of atomic lattice spacing. Additionally, the materials must have high optical and electronic quality, and the end result is that you're left with a small choice of materials.

Further, since these cells are very thick and have to be fabricated with the highest degree of precision deposition to ensure high optical and electronic quality. I'm too lazy to reference them, but I'm pretty sure that all those record-breaking solar cells used Molecular Beam Epitaxy, which is ridiculously impractical for large-scale applications.

The last sort-of issue is repeatability. Most of the time, these reports merely cherry-pick the best result from a large batch of samples. This is far more problematic in organic solar cells - I don't think it's as large of a concern with inorganics.

So given these issues, I think it's reasonable to suggest that these types of cells will never be feasible for terrestrial applications. And for the record, the last time I checked (1-2 years ago), 3 groups claimed the world record of about 41%-43%, all using slightly different methods to test. It probably hasn't changed much since.

Personally, I'm a big believer in solar-thermal plants (essentially where sunlight is highly concentrated and stored at thermal energy in molten substances, making it easy to transport to a plant for conversion to electrical energy) which operate continuously, even through the night and are estimated to reach OVER 70% EFFICIENCY and operate at a pithy cost of roughly .06 USD/kWh. There are virtually no drawbacks to these technologies (that I know of, feel free to inform me). I have absolutely no idea why this technology isn't being adopted more, and can only assume that it's due to the lack of investment, partially due to heavy lobbying influence from the anti-progress energy industries.

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy#System_designs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_tower
http://www.nrel.gov/solar/parabolic_trough.html

There's nothing good about energy beets. We already know we can use algae, and that it is superior in a variety of ways.

Do not cheer this. There is nothing good about this. It is merely less evil than using corn as a fuel feedstock.

Correct and since bio algae is already certified at all levels and WSU/UoW received > $140 million in recent DoE money to expand moreso with the WSU research [jointly with Oregon State and others]: Bio Algae is here. http://www.tricity.wsu.edu/bsel/pnnl.html

Impacts The collective goal at BSEL is to move science to industrial processes in a manner that improves energy security, reduces petroleum imports and decreases the impact of fuels on the environment. PNNL currently has approximately 60 issued and pending patents in the area of biobased processing (30 issued US patents, 19 issued in the last six years). These have resulted in ten commercial licenses and license options. This work has also resulted in one R&D 100 Award Presidential Green Chemistry Award, and provided the basis for creation of a new company.

The advances at WSU, UoW, Oregon State and all the Public/Private patent pending research is probably one reason for this grant to do something alternative--they have to as the other areas are mature and highly patented.

$80 Million to WSU/UofW and later more: http://www.cantwell.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2011/9/biofuel-research-at-uw-and-wsu-to-help-power-the-economy

This is long overdue.

Then the BioJetFuel project of WSU with Alaska Airlines: http://researchnews.wsu.edu/environment/338.html

There's nothing good about energy beets. We already know we can use algae, and that it is superior in a variety of ways.

Do not cheer this. There is nothing good about this. It is merely less evil than using corn as a fuel feedstock.

Let's see some Butanol.

Let's see the money the US government spent on biodiesel research at Sandia NREL in the 1980s bear some fruit.

The C02 still gets generated as before, just now it can be more readily sequestered - assuming that you want to spend the money on that part of the equation.

It would be ideal for using technology our tax dollars paid to develop in the 1980s for turning carbon into algae. But, you know, HAHAHAHAHA

Did we watch the same video?

She specifically claims that Germany "gets more sun than us" then goes on and seemingly clarifies a bit, that "us" means east coast.

So let's stick with that for a moment. Let's pick New York state, because in all likelihood that's where the studio is, and compare climate to Germany.

It's a bit tricker than I'd like, because New York is listed in days and %sunshine, and Germany is listed in hours, but in the state overview for the US, Syracuse is listed at 2,120 hours.

So, Syracuse has the third lowest number of sunshine days, and the lowest percentage of sunshine of the listed cities in New York, but it still has 14% more sunshine hours than Zugspitze, which is the one with the highest number of sunshine hours in Germany.

Remind me again, how she's right about Germany being sunnier?

And let's not forget that one of the northernmost towns in New York is Champlain, located at 44;57N, whereas one of the southernmost towns in Germany is Oberstdorf, located at 47;25N. Or for the layman amongst us, Oberstdorf is located 274 km further North than Champlain.

This will obviously have an impact on the amount of energy you can extract from the sun, and wouldn't you know it - that's exactly what the lovely chart from the NREL shows as well.

But maybe I misunderstood her completely. Maybe she was referring to some other east cost - the east cost of Alaska doesn't exactly seem to be a sunshine state.

As someone else said earlier, for an expert she certainly seems ignorant. I'm not whoring myself out as an expert on the subject, and I could tear her argument to shreds with less than five minutes of fact checking. The only thing she seems to be an expert on, is telling the hosts what they want to hear.

Whether or not you like the idea of subsidising solar energy, I'd think you'd like to have the facts straight. Facts aren't political, unless you believe that reality has a liberal bias.

This is the problem in general. Not that it's on Fox News Channel, but that the hosts aren't interested in presenting the truth, but simply what supports their (or their employer's) views. This happens all the time, but we pick on Fox News a lot more, because they are so horribly bad at lying.

No, we have tons that we can't access due to environmental restriction. But we are gaining more access to oil as technology improves. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/13/business/energy-environment/report-sees-us-as-top-oil-producer-in-5-years.html?_r=0. This is partially due to shale reserves. http://abcnews.go.com/Business/american-oil-find-holds-oil-opec/story?id=17536852. We have even more if we can hydrofrack. In short, we will be fine energy-wise as long as people allow us to access it.

The IEA report[pdf] linked by the NY Times article says there's an abundance of gas, which I mentioned before, but does not provide scientific data or links to support the idea that the US can become petroleum independent never mind an oil export. And a lot of the gas being pumped now was made possible by fracking. Now the ABC report, which also says the IEA report does not provide data, does say shale oil can be recovered from the Green River Formation of Colorado and Utah. However it also says that large amounts of water required to recover the oil are needed. That presents another problem. The Colorado River is the major source of water for all 7 states in the Colorado River Compact. The compact was created in 1922 when the river's water level was above average, so the river is over tapped now. One of the states that gets water from the river is California, and the river does not flow through the state. Instead through a system of canals water is pumped to the Imperial Valley in Southern CA. And by treaty Mexico is supposed to get some of the water from the river, after all the river is supposed to drain into the Sea of Cortez or Gulf of California, which is Mexican.

And while CO2 emissions are lower burning natural gas than burning coal, oil, and gas, it still emits CO2. Also the IEA report brings up alternative energy sources saying renewable sources can provide one third of the US's electricity. That is half of what an article in SciAm said was possible in 2050. A Grand Solar Plansays Solar power alone can provide 69% of the electricity and 35% of the total energy needs of the US. Elsewhere a study, sorry I don't have a link right now, based on the Wind Energy Resource Atlas of the United States concluded wind energy from the Rocky Mountains alone can provide all the electricity for the 48 contiguous states. And that's just from the Rockies. The atlas shows other places in the US with abundant wind energy as well.

As you say "we will be fine energy-wise as long as people allow us to access it" applies to geothermal, solar, wind, and other alternative energy sources. Unfortunately NIMBYs block solar and wind throughout the US. Along the East Coast from Cape Hatteras to Cape Cod can provide significant amounts of energy. Using these sources, and increasing energy efficiency which the IEA report brings up, coal, nuclear, and petroleum can all be fazed out now. Not included here is natural gas fired power plants, that's because they are needed right now for baseline loads. Geothermal can be and is used for that also but can it supply all baseload needs? I don't know. And later storage technologies may enable mass energy to be stored economically.

Of course to bring all these electrical sources online requires the national electrical grid to be upgraded. While it will take Billions of Dollars, if not One Hundred Billion or more, US businesses lose about

Don't you think it would be easier to get it in your backyard, considering that the US has tons of it?

Tons of what? Petroleum? The US does not have that much proven reserves of petroleum. Supposedly what the US does have a lot of is Natural Gas. There are other sources that can come from our own backyard. What the US has much more of is sunlight and wind. According to the study by Southern Methodist University SMU Geothermal Lab project: Vast clean energy source confirmed by Google.org-funded geothermal mapping geothermal sources are capable of producing "more than three million megawatts of green power – 10 times the installed capacity of coal power plants today." Relatively clean energy sources, as there are none that are compleatly clean and non-polluting, can prove all of the US's energy needs. The biggest problem, well one of them, is with the infrastructure. U.S. solar power potential untapped as infrastructure is lacking. Yearly cost of U.S. outages: At least $119 billion. If the US is losing this much a year then it would pay to build a new smart grid. Then alternative sources would be able to contribute easier.

Falcon

Why guesstimate solar production? Use NREL's PVWatts application: http://gisatnrel.nrel.gov/PVWatts_Viewer/index.html
Click on your city. Click 'send to pvwatts'. Enter the solar system size in kW (default is 4.0). Click calculate.
Depends a great deal of where you live, of course, because energy prices and solar radiation vary quite a bit across the USA.

Assume an energy cost of $0.1/kWh. Assume an average of 12 hours of sunlight per day and a 50% of maximum average intensity.
$0.1/kWh * 1 year / 12 * 50% * 12 hours/24 hours = $0.01826
The monthly value that a solar cell generates is $0.01826/watt month.

Average capacity factor for solar in the U.S. is about 0.145. That is, a 100 Watt nominal panel will on average generate 14.5 Watts throughout the year after factoring in everything - night, weather, angle of the sun, etc. In the desert Southwest it's about 0.18 (0.195 in extreme desert regions), but for the country overall it's about 0.145. The NREL assumes a capacity factor of 0.17 for PV installations in the U.S., which are predominantly in the desert Southwest.

Your quick "12 hours a day, 50% max average" assumes a capacity factor of 0.25. Almost twice the actual value.

Correct for this in the rest of your math and you get n = 120, or 10 years payback. That sounds about right as the test cases I've calculated usually wind up between 7 and 15 years.

A lot of people think that we are utterly dependent on burning oil for energy for our modern existence, but this is patently untrue. One example of potential independence is biodiesel. I own two diesels (a car and a truck) and I put biodiesel into them when I can, but it costs significantly more than petroleum diesel. This is due to the tax breaks given to Big Oil, and the fact that no one is paying for the major externality of burning petrofuels, carbon dioxide. The US government proved at Sandia NREL in the 1980s that producing biodiesel from algae grown in open raceway ponds was not only feasible, but that it should be profitable with diesel fuel retailing at $3/gallon.

We could easily replace our diesel fuel consumption with only a relatively small amount of land. Unfortunately, virtually all the land not already in use that is useful for this process is controlled by the Bureau of Land Management, and they have approved only a tiny portion of renewable energy projects proposed for BLM land even when it is shown to be beneficial. What chance is there to undertake a massive project like replacing a significant portion of our diesel consumption with biodiesel from algae?

Our own federal government has already shown that replacing diesel-based fossil fuels in transportation with algae is feasible, and it is likewise our own federal government that prevents any such projects going forward, largely through the Bureau of Land Management. Would anyone like a tax break on oil production, while we're here?

A lot of people think that we are utterly dependent on burning oil for energy for our modern existence, but this is patently untrue. One example of potential independence is biodiesel. I own two diesels (a car and a truck) and I put biodiesel into them when I can, but it costs significantly more than petroleum diesel. This is due to the tax breaks given to Big Oil, and the fact that no one is paying for the major externality of burning petrofuels, carbon dioxide. The US government proved at Sandia NREL in the 1980s that producing biodiesel from algae grown in open raceway ponds was not only feasible, but that it should be profitable with diesel fuel retailing at $3/gallon.

We could easily replace our diesel fuel consumption with only a relatively small amount of land. Unfortunately, virtually all the land not already in use that is useful for this process is controlled by the Bureau of Land Management, and they have approved only a tiny portion of renewable energy projects proposed for BLM land even when it is shown to be beneficial. What chance is there to undertake a massive project like replacing a significant portion of our diesel consumption with biodiesel from algae?

Our own federal government has already shown that replacing diesel-based fossil fuels in transportation with algae is feasible, and it is likewise our own federal government that prevents any such projects going forward, largely through the Bureau of Land Management. Would anyone like a tax break on oil production, while we're here?

You made references as if I was in Europe. I'm not. Read the first two letters of my name, or my sig for a better hint of where I am.

Heh, talk about coincidence- I'm in Fairbanks. In any case, I didn't want to make any allegations. As far as I knew you had an unhealthy obsession with Harry Potter, or 'AK' were your initials. I normally pay no real attention to sigs.

After that, let me let you in on a little secret. I'd bet there are more PV panels per capita in Alaska than Nevada.

I know of 2 installs here in Fairbanks. I'm willing to bet there's a lot more down in Nevada, even per capita, though the remoteness and low population density which makes our electricity bloody expensive makes PV attractive here, at least in the summer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_consumption The EU has more population and lower oil consumption. Thus savings measures will have a greater effect in the USA than Europe. Thus, EVs *should* be adopted in the US before Europe.

You live in Alaska and you don't know that there are more uses for oil than simply burning it in automobiles? I use approximately equal measures in my truck and house! If I had a family and the house was occupied more I'd be seriously looking at wood.

In any case:
Fewer cars? False. Though if you include 'all' 4+ wheel vehicles, we take the lead again(though it's still around 75% as many vehicles per capita).
Fewer miles? 14k km(9k miles), vs ~15k miles, though latest DOT is closer to 13k. So about 50% more. Your earlier assumption of 8k km was therefore only slightly above HALF of what the statistics actually say about average driving over in Europe, and is still less than if you misstated and meant miles. Plus Americans are driving less as well.
Better Economy: True, but I never disagreed with you there. On average, US vehicles use 32% more fuel. Still, Europe averaged €1.59/liter vs USA's $3.85. A US gallon is 3.79L, And 1 Euro =$1.28. Making European gas $7.71/gallon. Adjusting for the average superior mileage of European vehicles, they're still falling behind at $5.84/gallon equivalent. Raise prices that much and Americans drive less.

Again: My statement was merely trying to state that EV adoption should be quicker over in Europe.

1, The battery is the single thing that drives the cost of an EV higher than a traditional gasoline vehicle.
2. An EV driven less doesn't need as large of a battery.
3. A denser average population also means that potential charge points are also more common.
4. The cost of fuel is far higher in Europe

Conclusion: Small EVs should be quite popular over there(if they were 'almost' economical in the USA), but they're not, so they're not really that close yet.

Most of the land in Alaska has no access to any utilities at all.

True; though if you want water it's more 'dig a well' or 'drive into town once a week/month to fill up a big tank in the back of your truck' and most of our population IS collected around population centers where utilities(at least electricity) is available.

Still, just to fact check:
Alaska: .1 MWp. 723k people, .00014 MWp/person. Only 10 registered installs?.

Ok, right, you can still use coal... but add the post-combustion treatment to reduce pollution and ways to grab the CO2

I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, or at least to take a look back at the USDOE's Aquatic Species Program, in which the gas output of coal plants is filtered through algae ponds, sequestering up to 80% of the CO2 output while improving algal growth rates. There are probably hundreds of opportunities of this type out there, like collecting methane from sewage ponds, which using AIWPS simultaneously offers extremely low-cost and high-effectiveness sewage treatment while using "traditional" plumbing and sewage connections. And of course, for those of us who live too far out into the boonies for such connections, there's direct composting toilets, like Van Lengen's Bason Toilet which with a greywater system can eliminate the need for a septic system and the accompanying maintenance.

Basically, if it's not about pond scum, it's about shit... and pond scum.

OK, it might take more energy to make a solar panel than we'll ever get back from it, but ...

Will you JUST FUCKING STOP spreading this lie? The energy payback time for photovoltaic modules according to most studies is between 1-4 years, depending on the material and manufacturing process used. Their technical lifetime is 25 years or more.

(I know I'm late to the party and hardly anyone will read this, but this is for the three of you who will.)

To be fair there is a very high correlation between bio-fuels and food. Any plant based fuel source is going to compete with food for land, water, fertilizers and pesticides.

Algae does not compete with food for land, water, fertilizers, or pesticides, and the USDOE proved the technology in the 1980s at Sandia NREL. You grow it (in theory) on desert land currently owned by the BLM using seawater (or any other non-potable water, really) pumped in from some distance. Wastewater is put back into the aquifer, but now inland, so everyone wins. The waste parts of the algae from the process are fertilizer.

The municipal sewage is not an energy source in itself.

The municipal sewage is an energy source, powered by poop.

So, feed the algae on sewage, let it 'harvest' the lipids and oils needed for biodiesel, then harvest & process the algae? Should be good for a couple mil in development studies...

We've spent the money already, take a look back at it.

Geothermal - great if you live near steaming hot springs and are basically sitting on an inactive volcano, not so great if you aren't

This is not true in general and not in Japan specifically because the entire region is geothermally active. New enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) can extract electrical energy from temperature deltas far lower than traditional dry steam plants. They don't even have to be on land: offshore subsea geothermal plants would work quite well especially with a cool flow of ocean water to supply the cold side of the delta. There is very little of the US that could not generate power with EGS. Google mapped them for us. Quote: "Potential for the continental U.S. exceeds 2,980,295 megawatts using Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) and other advanced geothermal technologies such as Low Temperature Hydrothermal. " This is 3/4ths of domestic consumption in 2011. We don't even have to look for them - typically EGS thermal sources are found incidental to other mineral exploration, and ignored even though most of the work is already done at that point.

Since these resources are completely safe, nontoxic, natural, carbon-free electrical energy resources that cost even less than nuclear energy it would be irresponsible to engage in any increase in risk or carbon generation whatsoever before all of these resources were fully exploited.

As both baseload power and on-demand power EGS also offers the potential to mitigate the variability of other clean resources in a way that even nuclear can't. The persistent thermal resource in a given area is limited, but over a long time base so on surges in need can over-extract thermal energy for many years before diminishing returns diminish the resource locally for a while. This makes them the perfect complement to PV solar and others.

There are other things we could do to improve the situation without the toxins of carbon or the risk of nuclear, like encouraging shallow geothermal heatpumps for home heating and cooling, and extracting electricity from the thermal deltas of manufacturing, but EGS is a really big bucket to serve our energy needs in a realistic way and your dismissal of it in this way is offensive so now I'm going to reciprocate.

One chief objection to nuclear is that we have many hundred reactors worldwide of the Fukushima disaster designs. And every one has 40 years worth of spent fuel stored in an elevated pool on top of the building that could be destroyed in some way - many times the design load of fission byproducts for these pools now, and dozens of times the fuel in the reactor vessel. After cooling for a time this fuel is supposed to be moved to safer dry cask storage. But casks cost money and the operators are skinflints and it's cheaper to have the pools recertified for more and more spent fuel packed tighter and tighter and not ever move any to the casks. But density is the bugaboo of nuclear fission: the tighter you pack these rods the more they encourage each other to fission. So now our national production capacity for these casks is 3% of the need, and one brick of C4 on the bottom of one of these pools could lead to a meltdown outside of the containment leading to a vast wasteland of hundreds of square miles of American Exclusion Zone that can't be occupied for 100 years - among other things - for each of these reactors. Certainly there is evidence that this occurred at Fukushima to some degree. On that very day the dumb bastards trusted to operate our nuclear plants should have been cutting P.O.s for casks - and that

Sorry, link to the PDF with the water per kwh generated statistic.

http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/33905.pdf

And I won't [provide a reference] for the simple reason that you'll just claim my source is invalid.

Maybe because you know yourself that the source is invalid? What kind of argument is this?

I have yet to see a proper counter argument based on independent data from somebody with an EE degree (solid state physics will do as well).

Well, I do have a Masters degree in solid state physics, a Ph.D. degree in spectroscopy, and I work in the semiconductor industry. But I do not claim that I have in-depth knowledge of the economics of the solar-cell industry. Your statement that it depends on air pressure (separately from the amount/quality of sun light) makes no sense to me. The performance of GaAs cells is not relevant in this discussion because they are not used to compete with conventional power plants.

I have no idea where I read the analysis in 2003, but this is what a minute of Google provides today:

• US DOE: What is the energy payback for PV? - Energy payback for current thin-film modules is 3 years (including frame, mining, transportation, and so on) "Based on models and real data, the idea that PV cannot pay back its energy investment is simply a myth"
• Energy Payback of Roof Mounted Photovoltaic Cells with an overview of different estimation methods, and discussion of how to account for the human labor involved. Most estimates are a couple of years, but indeed, there are estimation methods that will lead you to large values, e.g. if you assume that single-purpose concrete structures have to be erected to mount the PV cells, and that it is a one-off project involving a large amount of engineering.

The USDOE already proved at Sandia NREL both that special strains of algae are unnecessary and that you don't need a special bioreactor to make algae for biofuel economically viable. What is needed is cooperation from the government. Since I have essentially written this comment dozens of times, I finally broke down and made a referenceable explanation of why burning oil is stupid and unnecessary.

Consider looking at population through the prism of a world without fossil fuels and other natural resources.

They look a lot healthier.

These fossil fuels pretty much make modern agriculture what it is today.

Yes, toxic and destructive.

It is hard for us to picture a world in which human beings become less capable and have less technology because it is not something we have observed in our lifetimes.

No, it is not difficult. All we have to do to picture such a world is look at history.

However, it can happen, and currently we have no mitigating plan to deal with the dwindling availability of fossil fuels.

You are either a liar or grossly underinformed. We have numerous plans to deal with this situation, all of which have less environmental impact than using fossil fuels.

Once fossil fuels become too expensive for agriculture, we could all be in big trouble.

We could be, if we were very very stupid. As long as you avoid monocultures which are only necessary to enable machine cultivation, you can produce more food per acre using sustainable agricultual techniques such as actual organic farming, which doesn't just mean you use what's on the USDA Organic permitted list. It means (among other things) that agriculture is treated as the cyclical thing that it needs to be for sustainability. Currently the food is turned into fertilizer in our guts, and then we flush that down the toilet and to a "waste treatment plant" where feces is wasted. We don't even need to give up flush toilets, only sewage treatment plants as they are currently implemented.

As well, we have long since developed the technologies for sustainable biofuels to replace our transportation fuels, including biodiesel which could cost-effectively be made from algae today and butanol which BP and DuPont have been suppressing through their shell company Butamax, though they do not even own the complete technology (and though the technologies involved were developed at a public university, and partly funded with tax money.)

Further, we have long been able to produce viable solar panels. Taking PV solar alone, the panels can easily repay the energy cost of their production in just a couple years now, but even back in the seventies a crystalline panel that lasts 20-30 years could repay its energy cost in just seven years. That means that if we had built even PV-solar farms (let alone theoretically more efficient thermal plants) back when we first gained the technology to create them, they would have produced net power for at least 13 years, and maybe 23. And here I'm not even getting into hybrid solar panels which are both PV and water heaters, which not only convert substantially more solar energy into a useful form, but which also operate more efficiently and even have a longer life due to being cooled.

Solar power is not the only bulk generation technology available to us, either. The romans were using windmills to pump water into aqueducts using an Archimedes' screw and there's no reason we can't be using them today to produce far more of our power than they produce today. Indeed, we can combine them with elements of the petroleum technology that you love so well, and use the structures we normally use to site oil wells to place windmills offshore where they produce the most constant power. And then there's nuclear, which we could wrin

Desert: No water to pump in.

Well, that was an astoundingly stupid thing to say. You can use seawater. We build pipelines to move oil across nations, why not seawater? Answer, because of people like you with limited vision.

Assuming it's a coastal desert, which most aren't, that's a nonstarter, because you can't just randomly pick and choose a water mineral mix and have it work with these optimized algal species

Again, that was an astonishingly stupid thing to say, because we already know that picking and choosing specific algae is a big fat waste of time and that if you just put some water in a pool and stir it in a circle the best algae for the water and local weather conditions will just show up and colonize it out of the air.

If you need me to tell you're saying stupid shit again I will do so, but perhaps you want to familiarize yourself with the decades-old research done on this subject before you post another comment, instead.

Why do you want to put them on a cornfield instead of letting them swim in the ocean or placing them into the desert

Desert (n): Any area in which few forms of life can exist because of lack of water, permanent frost, or absence of soil.

You didn't really think that one through very well, did you?

Who didn't think what through very well? Oh, I guess that was you.

As for your former concept, well, there's quite a few reasons why most companies are trying to grow them in enclosed vats.

Yes, because the BLM will grant a permit to mine coal or drill for oil, but not to build a solar plant, or to use the technology that we developed at Sandia NREL in the 1980s. It's not because it's necessary or even desirable, it's because they've been forced into a corner because our government pays subsidies to big oil but actively prevents alternative energy technologies... which is also basically a subsidy for big oil.

Your car can theoretically run on algae fuel. In practice, it won't. Imagine replacing our cornfields, all of them, with fancy-schmancy algae incubators, and all the maintenance and labor that is going to require.

Why would I do that? You can grow algae on seawater pumped into the desert using solar thermal.

We can get to about 20% of our current fuel consumption if we convert all of our corn to ethanol

What does that have to do with anything?

if I give algae a 5x efficiency advantage

You mean, if you just pull numbers out of your ignorant asshole? Now I see where you were going with your last bullshit statement.

We can't grow it in open ponds, because there will be weeds that compete, birds that contaminate, never mind the loss of water to evaporation on that scale

The USDOE proved at Sandia NREL in the 1980s that you can grow it in open "raceway" ponds and further, you don't even have to put algae in them to get started because it will just naturally colonize the ponds. Further, they were trying to show that you could use specially-selected algae to improve efficiency, and failed — in fact, the best algae to use in any given climate is whatever naturally colonizes the ponds. This will produce the most oil in a given period of time. Birdshit is completely irrelevant, unless you are pouring it in by the bucketful it's not going to substantially affect the Ph and we don't care if it's safe to eat. The loss of water to evaporation is an asset if we're pumping the water into arid regions.

Plants are not very efficient converters of solar energy -- today's photovoltaic kicks their ass.

The difference being that you have to make the PV panels, and it takes three years for thin film or seven years for crystalline PV to pay back the energy cost of its production. That's pretty good, but it's not as good as algae which has much lower initial energy investment.

Be careful, also to avoid confusing capacity with what you need for the usual case.

Most cars don't get 400 miles on a fill-up if you don't drive them carefully, but most EVs get nowhere near the advertised maximum range in typical driving, and my car does get 400 miles even if I drive with my foot stuck way in it a lot of the time, throwing it through the corners and so on, and I live in hill country. Because my car can be refueled from a can, I can go someplace, park it overnight where I can't recharge and still drive it the next morning. Most people are going to want this functionality from their cars in case they need it.

If you have anything else ignorant to say, I'll be here.

We run a datacenter in a LEEDS Platinum building...

http://www.nrel.gov/news/features/feature_detail.cfm/feature_id=1505

Here is a proposal posted on the National Renewable Energy Lab's website ( http://www.nrel.gov/hydrogen/pdfs/development_solar-thermal_zno.pdf ). It discusses in further detail the process by which ZnO is decomposed into Zn metal and oxygen, using the Zn metal to react with water to form ZnO and H2 gas.

Here is an article from work being done at NREL ( http://www.nrel.gov/hydrogen/pdfs/development_solar-thermal_zno.pdf ). Condensing Zn vapor from the ZnO decomposition can be done by rapidly cooling. They seem to claim that the reaction of liquid Zn metal with water gas favors the production of ZnO, not zinc hydroxide.

Oriented or tracking panels produce only around 20-30% more energy than flat horizontal panels, when averaged over a year over most of the USA. This because much of the insolation is diffuse. NREL has maps that show the measurements at http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/old_data/nsrdb/1961-1990/redbook/atlas/

solar panels still never even come close to putting out energy that comes close to the energy used in manufacturing the panels

Hmm. I wonder what I'll turn up if I google "solar myths".

Myth #5: Making solar panels takes more energy than it could ever produce.

A report by the National Renewable Energy Lab shows that solar photovoltaic panels actually payback the energy used to produce the panels in 1 to 4 years depending on the type of panel. Because solar panels last at least 30 years, PV systems will provide at minimum 26 to 29 years of pollution-free electricity for your home!

Source

Seeing as this breakthrough is as yet not even on the NREL RSS feed... http://www.nrel.gov/news/press/rss/rss.xml I reckon either somebody is "talking out of school" which likely means this technology will indeed show up in production in some other country other than NREL's source of funding first or it does not, indeed, exist.

Still, one can always hope that Big Carbon's throttling grip may one day be broken...or even act upon that desire: http://cleanenergy.harvard.edu/

Check out the new Optical Cavity Furnace.

I used to work for "Big Solar" (well, the third-largest PV maker on the planet).

Since you worked for a PV maker, you are surely aware that modern solar panels recouped the energy expended in their creation in two to four years, making the next 18-23 of their service life 100% energy-positive.

Or to put it another way, for every unit of energy spent making a solar panel, we get 5 units of energy back. That's a win.

Good thing we proved the technology as Sandia NREL in the 1980s; the conjecture was that the process would be profitable by the time diesel fuel reached $3/gallon, but nobody has spun it up yet. This is possibly due to the fact that the only place you can get enough suitable land cheap enough is managed by the BLM, and you can get permits to mine coal or drill for oil, but heaven help you if you want to build a renewable energy facility.

If you produce the biofuel from algae grown in raceway ponds and capture [up to] 80% of the CO2 output of a coal or oil-burning turbine plant in the process, then it can be considered to be part of an overall "greening" strategy to fill the interim between the modern age of gas-guzzlers (well, more like diesel-guzzlers in this case) and the future age of tiny drones that plant explosives in your sinus cavity — as it will let you produce the fuel with a more or less carbon-neutral process.

The notion that solar cells produce less power than they take to make is pretty outdated if it was ever true to begin with. Look at
this pdf from the DOE. The only kind of solar cells that dogma might actually apply to are high efficiency ones used for applications where cost-effectiveness isn't the point, but rather absolute effectiveness.

You're right though, fossil fuels (for example) are an actual energy source when compared to typical current photovoltaic solar panels which use more energy to produce than they'll generate over their lifetime (and that's before the conversion losses). The typical solar panel you see on a rooftop is really more a coal burning panel.

Now you're making things up. According to NREL, back in 2004, the time needed to generate the amount of energy used to produce solar panels was about 3-5 years or less, depending on the type of panels ( http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35489.pdf ). The financial payback time (time to recover the dollar cost through savings on your bill) without subsidies is longer because you're paying for more than manufacturing energy, and because the competing technologies are both subsidized and are also larger, more established industries.

According to Murphy & Hall ( http://dx.doi.org/10.1111%2Fj.1749-6632.2009.05282.x ), the EROI for PV is 6.8. That means it takes one unit of energy from somewhere else to result in 6.8 units of electricity from the panels. Compare that to natural gas, which has an EROI of 10, which means it takes 1 unit of energy from other sources to get enough gas out of the ground to burn for 10 units of energy. This comparison doesn't take into account that the "energy returned" is in the form of a finite resource you have to burn in the case of gas. In other words, with 1 unit of natural gas, you can generate 6.8 units of electricity by using it to build PV, or you can get around 0.4 units of electricity by burning it in a turbine, after deducting the amount needed to get another unit of gas out of the ground. For comparison, the same source says that nuclear power has an EROI of 5-15, and coal is higher at 80. Again, this doesn't take into account that you're using the fuel itself.

Nothing against research into solar energy, just when you find people deploying with current technology onto their rooftops (or window panes) and announcing their "helping the environment" or that they have a "carbon neutral" energy source or that what they're doing makes economic sense is laughable.

In terms of environmental impact, grid-tied solar power makes sense with today's technology (or 10-year old technology for that matter). In terms of dollar cost for putting it on residential roofs, maybe you don't save money without the subsidies. For the window film, who knows.

Solar panels are not carbon-neutral, but they generate about 90% less greenhouse gas emissions than the conventional plants they displace, which are primarily coal- and gas-fired.

http://www.nrel.gov/docs/legosti/fy98/24190.pdf has all the relevant figures and conclusions.

You really have no idea what you're talking about or you're just pulling numbers out of the air.

The USA receives an annual average of ~6-7kWh/m2 per day, let's call it 6.5GWh/km2 per day, or ~2.37TWh/km2/yr. In 2008, the USA consumed ~ 4156TWh of electricity. 4156/2.37 = ~ 1754km2 will on average will receive enough total solar radiation to supply our electricity demand. Assuming a very generous 50% conversion efficiency (for a very high temperature concentrated solar thermal plant), you need 2x that much space, so we're at 3500km2. But that doesn't allow for access roads, the tower itself, etc, so let's add another 10%, and we're at 3850km2.

But wait, that's the annual average, we need to to produce that much all the time, so we need to use the average in the month with the least sunlight (Dec or Jan), and that's not 6.5kWh/m2/day, it's about 3kWh/m2/day. So it's now we're at ~8340km2. But we're not there yet, We need at least 20% excess capacity to allow for extended periods of low production and emergency maintenance, so now we're at ~10,000km2. Let's assume all scheduled maintenance will occur during spring/fall when solar radiation is higher and demand is more moderate.

The United States has about 9.8M km2 total area (including Alaska). 6.76% of that is water. That leaves ~9.14Mkm2 of land. But Alaska doesn't receive enough solar radiation to make plants there sufficient, we have to remove it's 1.72Mkm2, leaving 7.42Mkm2. So, 10,000km2 is about 0.133% of that land.

But we're not done yet, electricity is only 4156 of 19,841TWh total energy consumed in the USA, so we have to multiple that ~ 10,000km2 by 4.77 so now we're at ~48,000km2. ~ 0.6% of the land in the continental US. Looking pretty good, right? We're not done. 50% efficiency is only the efficiency of the turbine, it doesn't count the losses in the mirrors, heat loss, inefficiency in capturing the solar radiation, etc.

So, lets look at an actual CSP tower. The eSolar 46MW tower, assuming it manages the full 46MW 24hr a day (which is unlikely, but we'll ignore that for now), produces 1.1GWh/day, approx 73% the 1.5GWh/day (3GWh/day @ 50% efficiency) assumed above, however, that tower uses 8.1km2 to produce that electricity, so it's not 73%, its 9% of the efficiency estimated above. So now, that 48,000km2 needs to be about 10x as large, and now we're at 480,000km2 of ~6.5% of the land in the continental US. That's more area than California, and about 2/3 the size of Texas.

And that's assuming you can build all your energy storage capacity into the same space. It also doesn't account for growth in energy usage. Efficiency of conversion is critical to making solar (either CSP or PV) viable.

Alaska is pretty crappy for solar.

http://www.nrel.gov/gis/images/map_pv_national_lo-res.jpg
http://www.nrel.gov/gis/images/map_csp_national_lo-res.jpg

And not great for wind

http://www.nrel.gov/gis/images/US-50m-wind-power-map.jpg

Alaska is pretty crappy for solar.

http://www.nrel.gov/gis/images/map_pv_national_lo-res.jpg
http://www.nrel.gov/gis/images/map_csp_national_lo-res.jpg

And not great for wind

http://www.nrel.gov/gis/images/US-50m-wind-power-map.jpg

Alaska is pretty crappy for solar.

http://www.nrel.gov/gis/images/map_pv_national_lo-res.jpg
http://www.nrel.gov/gis/images/map_csp_national_lo-res.jpg

And not great for wind

http://www.nrel.gov/gis/images/US-50m-wind-power-map.jpg

Solar panels take 8-10 years, in direct sunlight in most ideal locations available to simply produce the energy required to manufacture them in the first place (maybe a year less in a desert).

"Energy payback estimates for rooftop PV systems are 4, 3, 2, and 1 years: 4 years for systems using current multicrystalline-silicon PV modules, 3 years for current thin-film modules, 2 years for anticipated multicrystalline modules, and 1 year for anticipated thin-film modules (see Figure 1)." -- says the US Department of Energy. They cite references, too.

This is basically a reprisal of the optical rectenna, and it's already been pointed out that the hardest part isn't rectifying THz radiation, which requires only nanolithiography-sized antennae, but creating the diode fast enough to turn it into DC.

The above link details the status of optical rectennas as of roughly 2002; They managed to get an efficiency of 1% in the near-infrared (100THz) - the diode just didn't exhibit the asymmetry and nonlinearity needed. I'd bet that to make anything happen efficiently at optical speeds, they'll have to somehow create a diode that's based on atomic behavior rather than the bulk electron fluid.

Hydrogen is NOT green - not until they find a "green" way to produce it. It is NOT an energy SOURCE (like fossil fuels, and nuclear), it is an energy CONVEYOR. I wanna save the planet as much as anyone, but as long as fossile fuels are used to generate the hydrogen, it actually makes more sense to just burn the stuff in an internal cumbustion engine. /me waits to get modded down :-/

Sorry, let me also add this as a reference:

http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35489.pdf

It's the one I felt was most unbiased (not done by a solar cell manufacturer for example.) It's done by the US department of energy.

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