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How much energy will it take to create these wind turbines?

The last ROEI, Return on Energy Invested or the length of tyme wind genies need to run to produce as much energy as the energy needed to make the genies, was something like 5 years. Given that there are still Jacobs wind turbines still running after 50 years after the last ones were made, that's a pretty good ROEI.

Ditto for the network connecting them to the people who want to use the electricity.

That's the biggest problem to suppling enough electricity everywhere, almost no matter the source of energy. MIT's "Tech Review" published the article "Lifeline for Renewable Power" going over this. Basically HVDC, High-voltage direct current, transmission lines would have to be strung up to distribute electricity from where it's produced to where it's used. It would also require a smart grid. Even without HVDC lines strung up, the power outages or blackouts in the Northeastern US/South Eastern Canada a few years ago showed the power grids need to be upgraded.

Falcon

Pure bull, if your read the EPRI studies EPRI specifically states the cost in building a windmill must not be part of the equation, that is production costs are not included because if the production is included windmills never recoup there cost. A windmill farm does not produce enough energy to fire the blast furnace that is used to make e-glass (fiberglass). That is why china is going Nuke, plans for over a 100 nuclear power plants to make fiberglass, they also use gas and oil to fire the furnace which this report knowingly ignores.

oil companies have replaced The Elders of Zion or Rothchilds

Except Rothschild is Jewish and was in oil. Rothschild Investment Trust controls Royal Dutch Shell Oil.

The margin for survival in the deserts is MUCH lower.

Which is one reason, though by far not the only one, I oppose the border fence in the Southwest.

I'm actually kind of sick of east coast people deciding that that deserts of the west are completely expendable for their own gains, but their native local habitats are not.

Yea, that really pisses me off about the environmentalists on the East Coast. Offshore from Cape Cod to Cape Hatteras there are excellent cites for wind farms, however NIMBYs there fight against them. Especially Kennedy.

The only real energy solutions is probably a mixture of "alternative" fuels that don't compete with food crops, solar/wind, tidal, nuclear, and conventional fuels, as the region demands

Agreed but I'd add one thing, "Rebuilding the Power Grid. Not only build a long distance High Voltage Direct Current infrastructure but make the grid smart.

Falcon

Economically you've got it all wrong. Nuclear power wouldn't be used if not for massive subsidies but wind, which does get subsidies as well, does not get anywhere near as much. In a world without subsidies wind could survive but not nuclear power.

Far lower than building windmills and their acompanying grid infrastructure requirements to get the power from the wind centers to where it needs to go.

If anything was learned during and after the blackout in the Northeast it was that the electrical grid had to be upgraded and made smart. So the cost is there whether or not wind is used. According to the article "Rebuilding the Power Grid" in "Tech Review" "Grid-related power outages and problems with power quality reportedly cost the nation $80 billion to $188 billion per year."

Falcon

Luddite civilization into the stone age, and then complain about the lack of affordable power. Californians are the worst at this -- in the US, anyway.

No, I think the East Coast beats California in NIMBYs. While CA has wind and solar farms operating now, and have been running for years, on the East Coast NIMBYs do everything they can to stop wind farms off the coast from Cape Cod to Cape Hatteras.

Placing that many turbines in very remote areas is going to be ridiculously expensive to run transmission lines to

The Tech Review article "Rebuilding the Power Grid says "Grid-related power outages and problems with power quality reportedly cost the nation $80 billion to $188 billion per year" already so the grid needs to be rebuilt anyway.

we need to take a serious look at MODERN nuclear power, especially with re-using the waste,

I'll support reprocessing the waste we have now but I don't support building other new nuclear power plants. We have enough potential energy from geothermal, solar, and wind to power the US. The wind potential in the Rock Mountains alone is enough to power the 48 contiguous states. And other ares for wind as well as the west coast for solar and that's plenty of energy. Until energy storage is worked out natural gas fired and nuclear reprocessing plants could provide the baseload.

Falcon

How much energy will it take to create these wind turbines?

The last ROEI, Return on Energy Invested or the length of tyme wind genies need to run to produce as much energy as the energy needed to make the genies, was something like 5 years. Given that there are still Jacobs wind turbines still running after 50 years after the last ones were made, that's a pretty good ROEI.

Ditto for the network connecting them to the people who want to use the electricity.

That's the biggest problem to suppling enough electricity everywhere, almost no matter the source of energy. MIT's "Tech Review" published the article "Lifeline for Renewable Power" going over this. Basically HVDC, High-voltage direct current, transmission lines would have to be strung up to distribute electricity from where it's produced to where it's used. It would also require a smart grid. Even without HVDC lines strung up, the power outages or blackouts in the Northeastern US/South Eastern Canada a few years ago showed the power grids need to be upgraded.

Falcon

If you don't 'get it', then see the movie Gattica:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/

We are rapidly sliding down a slippery slope of discrimination based on genetics...choosing the superior race and all that, and choosing sex, hair and eye colour are just the beginning of such nonsense. I really don't care what someone's eyes or hair colour are...everyone is beautiful and priceless and EQUALLY important! What is with idiots wanting to select eye and hair colour? Lunacy of the first order. I don't care what colour my baby's eye and hair colour are, or anyone elses. Such appalling narcissism, prejudice (blue is better than green, let's say...WHY? Is white skin better than black? Is muslim better than jewish? Et cetera, ad infinitum.) You idiots choosing baby by sex, hair and eye colour: get over yourselves...anyone doing this is nothing other than a eugenics fool, leading to prejudice against 'degene erates' (see the movie).

And as we reach the $100 genome level, and companies/universities, etc. start deciding that only those with the proper genes will be hired/admitted, etc. (blue eyes, blond hair, Germanic race...sound familiar?), you may find yourself being discriminated against a lot sooner than you think. (Has already happened, so some attempts at meaningless, unenforceable, feel good laws against genetic discrimination are starting to make an appearance...mainly to improve lawyers' bottom lines, of course...justice has nothing to do with it.
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/22112/

Only the expense and time involved in sequencing has protected people from genetic discrimination...those 'problems' are soon going to disappear, when it will become very cheap (e.g. $100) to find out all the genetic secrets that an HR dept/insurance companies/etc. screening new applicants, etc. would want to know. Gattaca society is rapidly approaching. They also show screening based on genetic characteristics of embryos in the movie.

I'm not forgetting. What transmitters are there between 500 MHz and 10 GHz? Digital TV. Low power cellular phone transmitters; that's what "cellular" means, many low-power transmitters. The tiny power of Wi-Fi. From 3 GHz and up there are only cordless phones. With a small antenna expect picowatts, not microwatts. The Slashdot story says it is possible to get 50 million times more power than a picowatt, 50 milliwatts.

From Wikipedia: "The maximum power for DTV broadcast classes is also substantially lower; one-fifth of the legal limits for the former full-power analog services."

Fraud -- A deliberate deception to try to get an unfair or unlawful gain.

This Slashdot story says it was submitted by "Al" of Technology Review. I wonder if it is a paid advertisement. It in fact it is an ad presented as a story, that is deception.

In my opinion, this Slashdot story is sensalionalistic nonsense that appears to try to take advantage of the average person's lack of knowledge of radio waves.

Reasons to be skeptical: 1) There is often very poor radio and television reception inside buildings in cities. That's partly because the buildings contain metal reinforcement. There is very little power from electromagnetic radiation.

2) In normal circumstances, a small antenna could never deliver 50 milliwatts of power. It is more likely that a single transmitter will deliver picowatts to a small antenna. A level of 50 milliwatts is a million times what would normally be expected.

3) Nothing changed. The physics of electromagnetic radiation and of reception by antennas has been understood well for decades. There was no new discovery, and none was claimed.

Here you go.

...but this isn't exactly new, even on phones.

From this article, "Building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV) have been around since the late 1980s, Warner says, but only lately have they begun to see some success with large commercial and residential developments. Recent advances in flexible thin-film photovoltaic materials--such as those sold by United Solar--are allowing manufacturers to more easily integrate photovoltaics directly into the roofs and facades of buildings."

Damn kids and their new-fangled "clouds" anyway... Why in my day, if you wanted clouds you damn well hiked you ass up a mountain! Regarding the electricity "rant", I wonder if that's what the people in Texas were thinking when they put Texas on their own electrical grid.

There's also the FAWN project (also on /.)

Cores-per-die is not a valid metric, not with emerging prototypes that could drastically change how web content is served.

Oh, the soooo naive slashdotters...almost as bad as the general sheeple and joe/jane sixpack.

First, see the movie Gattica. There are already court cases of genetic discrimination. It's going to get worse...despite all the nice sounding laws to the contrary.

Why? Well, what protects you at the moment, is the huge amount of time and money it takes to do a sequence.
(i.e. about 2 months, and $100,000 at the moment.)

This 'problem' is going to disappear. What do you think insurance companies, employers, HR depts, governments, etc. are going to do when it only takes 8 HOURS and $100 to do a sequence? Guess what, it's happening...:
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/20640/
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?ch=specialsections&sc=tr10&id=22112

Or just google "$100 genome"
It's going to get much, much worse, far, far sooner than any of you believe.

Oh, the soooo naive slashdotters...almost as bad as the general sheeple and joe/jane sixpack.

First, see the movie Gattica. There are already court cases of genetic discrimination. It's going to get worse...despite all the nice sounding laws to the contrary.

Why? Well, what protects you at the moment, is the huge amount of time and money it takes to do a sequence.
(i.e. about 2 months, and $100,000 at the moment.)

This 'problem' is going to disappear. What do you think insurance companies, employers, HR depts, governments, etc. are going to do when it only takes 8 HOURS and $100 to do a sequence? Guess what, it's happening...:
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/20640/
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?ch=specialsections&sc=tr10&id=22112

Or just google "$100 genome"
It's going to get much, much worse, far, far sooner than any of you believe.

Check out their forums for all of the complaints. It's pretty brutal:

It's curious that the user with the 'no track pad support' problems never got back to the forum with the model name. From the screenshots it does seem to do what it says on the tin :) And according to the article HyperSpace taxes the processor and memory far less than does Windows, so why would that particular Acer be running hot ??

Check out their forums for all of the complaints. It's pretty brutal:

It's curious that the user with the 'no track pad support' problems never got back to the forum with the model name. From the screenshots it does seem to do what it says on the tin :) And according to the article HyperSpace taxes the processor and memory far less than does Windows, so why would that particular Acer be running hot ??

Actually at peak, they register ~7kW between them all (as read off the converter directly). Figure the desert boosting that to ~10 and we end up somewhere in-between at 86,400 * 6 or half a million panels.

That's 4460/mile, or roughly 1 every 14 inches as the guy below said. Figure 5 lengthwise across the track and it's easily possible, but you'd have to use those new-fangled light-concentrating panels to make it even vaguely financially viable, rather than my old-fashioned ones :)

Simon.

BTW, there was an update to the previous Wolfram Alpha vs Google post here. The author tried some of the searches suggested by Slashdot readers.

You are still going to run out of gas eventually

Then what you need is some way to convert coal to methane.

Make hay while the sun shines. Boliva should establish the resource fund and take gringos' money as long as it lasts. In 10 years, the carbon nanotube ultracapacitors may blow lithium storage out of the water. Any leftover from mining 5.4 million tons of lithium would still treat a lot of bullet-resistant glass and bipolar cases... Schindall [2006] said. ``Then in 10 years, you begin to see the cost crossover point," when capacitors become as cheap as standard rechargeable batteries. Still progressing: http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/research/4252623.html, 2008, http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/21938/?nlid=1646&a=f, 2009

But no doubt a slow, intrusive Bolivian governement will then blame their lack of further sales on los norte americano diablos.

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

Go watch the freaking video and then regret ever posting that comment.

http://www.technologyreview.com/video/?vid=290&a=f

This isn't some small scale local building installation we're talking about here. These are bought in bulk in a billion dollar installation. Your also assuming that panels are still prohibitively expensive due to the technology being relatively new, and the shortage of silicon.

Both are becoming non-issues.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/20702/
http://earth2tech.com/2009/02/23/solar-prices-drop-deeper-discounts-expected/
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009478.html

Any new technology is expensive when it's new. As adoption increases, production costs go down as does the time it takes for return on investment.

Latest estimates show panel prices dropping by 40-50%. What was not cost effective in 2000 is easily becoming so in 2009.

They forgot the actual link.

Acrylic rapidly becomes yellowed when exposed to ultraviolet, and especially under very high-intensity light, even if it has anti-yellowing chemicals added. This article, Applications and Limits of Polycarbonate and Acrylic Lenses, explains "... yellowing is a sign of degradation of the plastic molecule. Heat and ultraviolet act to break the molecules. This surrenders the intrinsic strength of the material as the molecular structure no longer consists of long intertwined chains but fractured segments. This may be reflected in reduced strength of parts with formed surfaces as these surfaces tend to localize stresses."

The article, A Cheaper Solar Concentrator, referenced in the Slashdot story says, "With a flat bottom and convex, mirrored top, the [Morgan Solar] optic receives the incoming barrage of light at a concentration of about 50 suns and amplifies it to nearly 1,000 suns before bending the light through a 90-degree angle."

The article does not explain how there is a concentration of 50 times before the light reaches the optics. The article is wrong in using the word "amplifies". The correct word would be "concentrates".

To have a 1,000 times concentration, the area of the optics must be 1,000 times larger than the area of the solar cell. That delivers 1,000 times the heat, also.

Morgan Solar's investors page says, "Morgan Solar was incorporated in June 2007 and is currently well funded by a start-up investment from our angel investor and Chairman, Eric Morgan." Apparently the company was funded by the inventor or someone in his family. It says, "Our plans call for securing our next round of investment funding by Q1 2009. If you are a venture capital company or a potential partner-investor interested in exploring investment opportunities with our company, please contact us."

Was a Slashdot editor paid to allow this story? Did Slashdot profit? Was Technology Review paid to run the story? I think that articles about companies that are soliciting investments should have a statement about whether or not someone was paid.

I'd like to point out that the current toll pass systems are vulnerable to cloning.

http://technologyreview.com/Infotech/21301/?a=f

Which article did you read? The one linked in the summary says the method is fast, and it makes no mention of encryption.

Well, this article claims that it is too slow @100Mb/s for ISP and law enforcement use. And it is defeated by encryption.(yes, that is the same article that is linked in the summary!)
FTA:

Even if the legal framework were to allow the technology, it is not quite ready to go. Tests of the system, details of which will be published later this year in a book called Advances in Digital Forensics V, showed that it was effective at detecting 99 percent of illicit files, but only at speeds of 100 megabits per second.

That's too slow for commercial or law-enforcement purposes, according to Anderson. Schulze agrees: "One gigabit per second or ten gigabits per second are required today to monitor a network." He also says that it is unclear whether the system might produce false positives, incorrectly labeling legitimate files as illegal.

Another drawback is that the system cannot cope with encrypted files. "Today, about 25 percent of BitTorrent traffic is encrypted," says Schulze. If such a tool became widely used, then anyone with something to hide would almost certainly switch to using encryption, he says.

[emphasis mine]

Admittedly, this was all on the second page of TFA, but it is there.

Here, I found it: "Ten emerging technologies 2008"

But the real problem with voting is the One Vote, Plurality wins counting system, which drives out third parties and means that in a multi-contestant election, the winner almost never gets a majority. This is known to be a bad system. It may indeed be true that all voting systems may have problems, but one vote, plurality wins has very bad problems.

There are much better counting systems-- approval voting is simple and easy, for example, and much much better. Range voting also has a lot to say for it-- mathematically it's similar to approval, but hey, if you can rate your local restaurant on a scale of 1 to 5, you can learn to rate politicians the same way.

you have problem of transmitting power from where you can produce it, to the place where it needs to be employed

HVDC, High Voltage DC powerlines can transmit electricity log distances.

Also, you still need some way to ensure a stable baseline of power - power that you can count on producing a minimum amount, all hours of the day or night, every day of the year. Coal, oil, nuclear, and geothermal offer that

As you say geothermal can provide at least some baseload as can natural gas. Geothermal provides power in California. Geothermal provides 13,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity. One geothermal power plant on the Big Island in Hawaii provides 25% of it's electricity. And in New York City geothermal energy is used to heat homes.

Finally, have environmentalists considered the impact of the land use necessary to produce electricity on the scale our nation needs using solar and wind?

Actually now many environmentalists now support nuclear power.

How many birds will be hacked to death by wind turbines

Cats are now a bigger threat to birds than wind turbines. Actually it was some of the older wind turbines that killed a lot of birds. Today they're made with bigger blades that spin slower, it was the fast spinning blades that killed birds.

Maybe bird migrations will be confused by all the glare from PV panels?

Birds are already confused by the windows on buildings.

Where are the UK, France, Germany, etc going to build their solar and wind farms?

Much of Germany has good potential wind energy. A German town is going 100% Renewable Power.

Falcon

Direct link please!

Try this one: http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/21971/page1/.

Replace page1 with page2 to get to the second page if you have further problems :)

Soundproofing seems far more relatable. Wrap something in an acoustic cloak, and it stops being there acoustically, and inside is perfect silence.

Direct link please!
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/21971/?a=f

Garbage javascript broke for me and the page didn't get past a white page.

Small plants are more expensive to build, more expensive to maintain, and intrinsically less efficient.

False. This obvious "invention" was available in the public domain through all the debates about wind power, in which monopolists claimed that only one wind speed could generate power for any given turbine. Not to take away from the team that has finally brought it to market, but neither an electronic switch nor variable resistance are novel concepts. The only reasonable explanation for this taking so long is industrial conspiracy, illegal collusion. The Third World can do it. Expense is not the reason that we have not.

Coercive monopolies for utilities guarantee that we use over-priced and obsolete technologies, nullifying the presumed benefits of "economies of scale". Only residential, user-owned solar and wind power will solve the United States' energy problems, which stem from the petroleum oligopoly and local utility monopolies. Nuclear power is for suckers, and our country's corporatist GOP "leadership" diminishes our credibility and negotiating power on nuclear energy with un-chummy countries like Iran and Pakistan, in addition to the pollution and fraudulent deception of US "customers" who are deprived of options by government collusion with petroleum corporations and Bechtel, the largest recipient of US nuclear tribute.

I suggest you read some recent articles on lucas technology.
it yields much more information than just the size of the cell.
the recorded quantities are transmission holograms of the cells, which contain the phase and the amplitude information of the cells.
so it is quite powerful to even detect small bacteria such as e. coli.
I am not sure where you got the impression that it can not do any better than 15 um.
it can easily go down to a micron. FYI.
http://www.rsc.org/publishing/journals/LC/article.asp?doi=B813943A
http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/21439/
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/121401991/abstract

...without all the fucking ads and stuff:
http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=21840&channel=computing&section=

I think we can see their real purpose described in the linked article:

Whitesides holds up his group's latest development: a square slightly thicker than the other samples, covered in a grid of yellow, greed, red, and blue dots.

They should just make a CAPTCHA that requires strong AI to crack

The impression I got from this Technology Review article is that your CAPTCHA will eventually happen. But a business using one of these might eventually run into a disability discrimination problem if the system confuses real people of below-average intelligence with bots.

An article in the October issue of MIT Technology Review [1] stated that only 24% of the energy in gasoline is turned into kinetic energy - the rest is heat. So that simply means that the hydrodgen engine has the same efficiency as the gasoline engine. Unsurprising really. More ramblings on this and similar mis-information from the auto industry in the October issue of Oil IT Journal[2]. [1] http://www.technologyreview.com/ - logon required [2] http://www.oilit.com/corporate/4php/4c_makemonthly.php?year=2008&month=10 "On gas guzzling, CO2, horsepower and 'green' ... "

Briefly

Sun + Water = Fuel With catalysts created by an MIT chemist, sunlight can turn water into hydrogen. If the process can scale up, it could make solar power a dominant source of energy. Take a peak. http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/21536/

sorry for replying to my own post. clicking anon...

in further news, butanol production goes from bench scale to pilot plant
http://www.technologyreview.com/business/21602/?a=f

"A waterproof MP3 player built for bright beach days is the first device with a color "e-paper" display, meaning it has no backlighting and thus can be read in direct sunlight. The display, from Qualcomm, consists of two layers of a reflective material. Some wavelengths of light bounce off the first layer; some pass through and bounce off the second. Interference between the two beams creates the color, and electrostatic forces control the distance between the layers."

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/21561/?a=f

...Blogger cofounder Evan Williams, who owns Twitter's parent company, Obvious.

@dom nice work on obama/iphone!

This link says the cylindrical shape contributes to better solar absorption throughout the day, and offer less wind resistance. Looking at the picture in the article, they seem to be more like half-cylinders. That'd make sense, that while geometrically they don't have their face optimally pointed towards the sun at some optimal point during the day, they're continually pointed at the sun with some constant exposed amount of surface area.

Here's one that lets the voter verify their vote after the election, using crypto: http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/21225/?a=f

How can "the 5 most laughable terms of service on the Net" not include mention of websites that claim in their TOS that you can't link to them without permission?

For example: "You may not ... , link to, ... any content except as expressly permitted by the copyright laws, in this Agreement, or in the Site's Permission Services section."

For other examples, see dontlink.com

Kinda looks like a Cyrix. We won't be seeing any all-Chinese Alienware boxen anytime soon.

The funny thing is that they're made in China by a Swiss company, then rebranded Chinese. Ya'd think that they'd want to do it the other way around. Must be a national pride thing -- China's motto is "Ours is crappier than yours, but we have so much damn more of it!"

... may take a while to grow, though.

Quote: "which might take a few years in tropical climates and several decades in more temperate locations".

CC.

Normally I don't post on here, but when people are talking about how the power they are gathering can't be stored permanently I am reminded that we (humans as 'we') just achieved a near 100% effiency rating at splitting Hydrogen and Oxygen from water due to the catalysts that have been discovered by MIT. This was covered on Slashdot recently and I found a Science journal about the topic. To quote: "Researchers have made a major advance in inorganic chemistry that could lead to a cheap way to store energy from the sun. In so doing, they have solved one of the key problems in making solar energy a dominant source of electricity."

1st Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/21155/?a=f
2nd Source: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/oxygen-0731.html

Let's get that technology out to everyone! The source of the electricity isn't as important as the fact that it will stay in the form of pure hydrogen and pure oxygen for years, centuries, probably longer. That means you have natural batteries because now have methods of taking those sources and making them into usable electricity.

Now around Jupiter you're pretty much out of luck, but there's no way NASA's ever using one of these guys on a deep space probe. Data rates are a bit worse than even a first gen iPhone :^)