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Sanyo Solar Ark and Giant LED Display
shokk writes "Those of us who have played with CrystalFontz and Matrix Orbital serial LCD displays for geeky messaging will get a kick out of the 77k+ LED Solar Ark by Sanyo (only 21k of which are using as red/green/blue combinations for the presentation display). Not only does this behemoth show off its fantastically huge array of solar panels generating 530,000kWh/year and its high efficiency white LED technology, but it also sports a non-chemical water purification system in a very Feng Shui way. Lighting to restrooms underneath is provided by fiber optic paths from the white LEDs in the giant display above." It's a small plant as power plants go (600 kilowatts, when many plants are hundreds or thousands of megawatts) but it was cheap to produce, aesthetically pleasing, and of course, non-polluting, so that Godzilla won't visit.
Solar energy is a pratically infinite source of energy, and we have not even begun to tap its potential.
Sooner or later we are gonna run out of oil, and solar is the future. this shows that we dont big ugly solar farms to get the same result
bravo to the Japs!!!
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody is looking - H.L. Mencken
Compare that attitude with Firestone's policy of deny and cover-up when people's lives were at stake
Free cell phone tracking
Yea right.If this is aesthetically pleasing, then see the Solar Sail, that one I could actually think of planting in my garden.
Something I've been thinking about lately...
When I was growing up (born in '64), superstition was still pretty widespread in mainstream society, such as rabbit's feet, black cat's crossing your path, "bread and butter", salt over the shoulder, knock on wood, etc. There were people who really took these things seriously: in fact, you might remember a twilight zone episode where some guy speaking about superstition matter-of-factly noted that many people believed in rabbit's feet (and then some guy piped up with "darn right" or something like that).
It occurred to me that these sort of things are almost totally dead, most likely caused by the homogenization of society caused by television and mass media.
Even astrology seems to have taken some big hits. I'm sure there are still some nutcases that follow it, but nothing like it once was.
One superstition, however, seems to be actually gaining prominence: Feng Shui. There are people who actually take it seriously. My wife has a friend (who's Asian) whose mother actually made her not buy a particular condo she was looking at because some Feng Shui witch doctor didn't like it. I've even heard some stories about dot-com idiots in the Silicon Valley who felt the need to blow big $$$ on Feng Shui analyses of their office spaces.
Not sure what the point of all this is, but I found it interesting.
[of course, I'm leaving out religion from this discussion of superstition, but that's another subject entirely. :)]
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
If you read on the solar lab front page, it says "let's think with us..." In that vein, I would like to offer a link...
engrish
It sounds great, and looks really snazzy but doing the math I am less and less confident in the potential of PV cells:
Max. power output: 630kW
Hours in a year: 8760
The main factor in this is a combination of the dirty manufacturing processes needed for solar cells, and their terrible return over their operational lifetime. We need develop cheap, long-lasting, efficient solar cells that don't create a lot of pollution during manufacture or else solar energy will remain merely a pipe dream.
One idea which has great promise is for us to put up power satellites. These satellites would collect the more concentrated solar energy outside the Earth's atmosphere, turn it into a microwave beam, and beam it down to collectors on the Earth's surface. Because of the enormous amounts of energy which would be harvested in this manner, it should be far less polluting than almost any other power generation method. The only real pollution would be in the form of heat pollution, but that can be taken care of with reflectors in space to lower the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth in that area, balancing out the heat added by the microwave beam.
Sapere aude!
They got bought up by Bridgestone some time ago.
Infuriate left and right
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"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Not that I'm in favor of lining the oil industry's pockets any further...
That was over-hyped media BS, and absolutely nothing more. Anyone with any experience in automotive sports, in particular, can tell you what happens when you run a tire outside of its spec. They blow, often catastrophically.
Ford was telling people to run the tires more than 25% below they're recommended inflation pressure because the proper safe pressure made the ride in these soccer-mom driven deathmobiles too harsh. If you look at how most street tires are manufactured, its very obvious that running at too low of a pressure will eventually cause a separation in the steel belts or braid in the tire, leading to weakening. It also puts too much strain on the sidewall, which weakens and eventually blows.
But, you know what? Its not Ford's fault either. There is one reason, and one reason only why these people were injured or killed: driver incompetance. A well-trained driver who is actually save behind the wheel knows how to maintain proper air pressure, knows how to control a car when a tire has blown, and most importantly knows not to jerk the wheel when you have traction on only one side of the vehicle. Otherwise you roll over and die, especially in a top-heavy truck like an SUV.
Hell, a number of published independant tests blew out the sidewalls on Ford SUV's and the cars stopped perfectly straight and in a controlled manner. An inexcusably poorly trained driver doing the exact wrong thing is the only thing that can lead to an accident in cases like that one. *Any* good driver knows that perfectly well. Its embarassing how easy it is for any idiot to get a license in the US, and people die because of it.
They do NOT die because of a non-existant policy to cover up a problem in a product.
As usual, the corporate website reveals little about its function, purpose, or use. It shows lots of pictures and a pretty little flash movie with writing all in japanese.
From the writing in the Slashdot article, I've gathered the following:
It has solar panels.
It has an LED display.
It has bathrooms "under" it.
So based on this information, the "ark" is a solar-powered advertising sign with bathrooms under it which are lit by LEDs. Are the bathrooms underground? Are they porta-potties? Why were bathrooms part of the design when they seem rather unrelated to the concept of advertising? Is the "ark" a prototype for a whole bunch of "arks" which are to be produced and distributed for home use? Or for commercial use? Or are they too huge/expensive for more than a few organizations in the world to use? OR, is it a one-of-a-kind tourist destination somewhere in Tokyo? Will it fit on your computer desk, or is it the size of a couple football fields? (I got a small incling of scale in the flash animation, because little flowers were growing on the ground below the picture of the ark, but you never know)
Is this another example of the increasingly-common marketing mimimalism that companies like to use to infuse an annoying hybrid emotion (composited from annoyance and curiosity) into their victims in order to spur them to voraciously seek out all information available on the product just to find out what it IS?
Or was there some hidden screen on the website somwhere that said, in plain english, "The Ark is a ______, built for ______, it will probably be used for the purpose of __________ by _______ or _________."?
You can run but you can't hide, except, apparently, along the Afghan-Pakistani border.
Solar energy is a pratically infinite source of energy
Considering that a solar cell typically requires more energy to manufacture than it can produce during its lifetime, I'm not sure I agree. On the other had, negative infinity is still infinite.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Um, what this does show is we still need _huge_ ugly solar farms to get results. An average fission reactor outputs 1GW. You need 2000 of these to replace one single fission reactor. Oh, and that's during daylight hours. Say 6000 of these to replace one reactor if you have to deal with energy storage and loss during non daylight hours. The only thing infinite about solar power is how much space you're going to need to build the plants.
Solar isnt the future, nor is wind. The future is fusion and the way until we get it is fission. There is no alternative.
I spent a good minute reading this story before I had any idea of what they were talking about.
Could he have at least said 77kw+? Solar Ark isn't very discriptive.
The use of the term "Feng Shui" is not necessary, and prettry much improper in this context.
Sheesh. Can't we do better than this?
- Electronic appliances are getting more energy efficient and still have a lot of potential to get more so
- Improved insulation reduces air-conditioning and heating costs
- A/C and heating usage can be reduced by the design of 'smart' buildings - for example systems control the heat exchange between the home and the outdoors ( for example in the case of cooling: opening vents at night to let the heat escape and closing them during the day )
- You could have your tiles replaced with solar panels and in the future you could even have transparent solar panels used in the windows.
- You can reduce heating cost of an isolated building by having trees near by since they reduce the amount of heat removed from the building by slowing down the winds acting on the building.
The are probably other methods, but you should get the general idea.In France I have seen some old stone houses where the owners open the shutters at night and then close them during the day. Walking in at noon you would have thought that you were in a cool cellar. No electric A/C need there.
Another example is in Egypt ( I think it was there ), some of the houses have a small tower on the roof, with slates all around it. The effect is the wind passing through it draws out the warmer air in the house. No electric A/C need there either.
This goes to show that sometimes tomorrows technology is actually a case rediscovering what some cultures have been using for centuries.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Not that much radioactive waste is made. I see no problem with setting aside some hole in the ground somewhere (where it can't get into the water), and putting up a sign saying: "This is the nuclear dumping ground. Don't fucking go in here because you will die."
Or else we load it up into spaceships and shoot it into the sun. Of course we would first have to do a lot of research and design to make sure that the spaceships don't explode in the atmosphere and spread radiation everywhere.
If you want to coat your roof with solar panels and stick windmills on your backyard, by all means go for it. Maybe if you can get a decent setup with good batteries and are lucky enough to have a decent amount of wind/sunny days and such you might not even have to buy any power from the power company anymore.
Myself, I will keep getting my power from Indian Point 3. And you never know, maybe when we get fusion power you will be able to build a small one in your basement and pour some deuterium in every few days, who knows?
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
Besides, with processes like sol-gel you can almost make solar cells in a bucket, and cure them in an oven.
Nuclear energy isn't a viable alternative either, not until we come up with a good way to dispose of nuclear waste. The chance of it getting into the environment accidentally is bad enough, but with the possibility of terrorists getting their hands on it and spreading it around on purpose, the attendant risks and security costs make nuclear a non-starter. Not to mention that nuclear energy shares one of fossil energy's problems: it's running on a non-renewable fuel. When they dig up the last of the uranium, what then?
If you want a real innovative solution, how about a solar chimney? It combines the best parts of wind and solar power to give us cheap, clean, reliable energy 24/7/365.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
This web site does not describe the process they used to fabricate the solar cells. If they use the same old cheap process as usual, their cells slowly release arsenic in the environment. In 10 to 15 years, the cells will be too porous to be useful and so worn out they'll have to be scrapped.
Which of course will release all the arsenic still trapped in them.
I really don't know what's this legend about the semicon industry not polluting. Between the huge water use and the nasty chemicals, any semicon plant is a drain on resources. And solar cells release contaminants, so it's not an environmentally acceptable power source either.
Between a nuclear plant and a field of solar cells of the equivalent power, the latter would be by far the worst source of pollution.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
I see a VERY big problem with that. Every terrorist nut-job in the known universe will come out of the wood-work to dig up some nice nuclear waste to make 'dirty bombs' with, and then irradiate all of our major cities, making them unusable. So any nuclear dumping grounds will need fences, alarms, guards, etc, UNTIL THE END OF TIME.
Very expensive, that...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
PV panels are so extremely inefficient it isn't funny. To make things worse their power ratings which people look up all the time are based on some ricidulous test conditions known as STC (standard test conditions). The STC that panels are rated under based on the amount of sunlight hitting the panel per square meter, the temperature of the panel itself, and the mass of the surrounding air. The STCs are 1000 watts/square meter, panel temp of 25C (77F), and an air mass of 1.5 (which is slightly above sea level). The ratings of panels based on the STC are measured in their output wattage. Amorphous silicon panels are the cheapest but least efficient with 4 to 6% efficiency. Under STC thats 40 to 60 watts per panel. Screen printed poly and mono crystaline panels are about 10 to 11% efficient and cost a bit more than amorphous panels. Laser grooved buried grid (LGBG) panels cost the most but have the highest efficiency of about 13% but in some cases as high as 15%.
While those efficiencies might not seem so bad recall the STC. Real world conditions are not nearly as pleasant. Typically due to dust and air pollution you're only seeing really 800 or so watts/square meter of sunshine unless you live in the mountains. Solar panels are also either dark blue or black so they retain a good deal of heat which affects their output voltage trmendously. Shadows and the angle of the Sun during the day are also going to cause output drops.
There's cases of using reflectors to increase the sunlight intensity on panels to increase their output. This causes you a lot of headaches however. Increased sunlight means a higher cell temperature which lowers your efficiency and output voltage. Adding active cooling just makes you entire system less efficient because power is being immediately used to cool the panels.
PV panels also require some nasty chemicals and most PV manufacturing plants are dirty monstrosities though many are getting better about the chemicals used. If you factor in all of the energy required to make a single solar panel though you're going to end up with a crappy cost/return ratio. Fossil fuels have good return ratios because biological and geological processes have been doing all the work of making the energy contained in the fossil fuels over millions of years. If you want to use the Sun to get power look into solar thermal rather than solar electric.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Yes, there is a lot of energy coming from the sun that we can potentially harvest. The main problem is the terrible efficiency at which the current collection methods operate.
Imagine if we could build organic solar collectors that would sequester CO2 as a side-effect and only require dirt as a raw material. Retreiving the solar energy would release much of the CO2, but net-net, there would be reduced atmospheric CO2 at the end of the process (they might create more dirt as a by-product). A potential downside is that they might take twenty years to achieve maximum efficieny, but if the process is pipelined, we'd have a constant supply each year.
Oh, wait...
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
We already have come up with several good ways to dispose it; the first and foremost is: Dont. Use it again. Current fission fuel is used to about 1% when it's decomissioned for efficiency. It could easily be reprocessed, used in a breeder reactor and used again. Eventually you'll get 'spent' fuel but in far far lower amounts for the amount of energy gained. And we're not going to run out of nuclear fissile material any time soon, especially if we reuse the fuel. Even so, it's just a stopgap until fusion gets here.
The solar chimney project is interesting, and I've run across if before, but still, the thing is 5km wide, and 1km high. And again, you need 5 of them to replace a single fission reactor (if their 200MW output is 24/7/365, which I doubt, rather like an average of 50MW average, which would make it 20 of them to replace one plant assuming 100% efficient energy storage). We might as well build glass domes over most cities to capture waste energy. Again, it ends up being interesting, but not practical.
Read this and tell me that hypochlorous acid isn't a chemical.
Hmm. The description on the Sanyo web site sounds pretty close to swimming pool chlorine generators. They essentailly use electricity to genreate chlorine from good old NaCl.
I think using chlorine to purify the water is a good thing. That waterfall wouldn't be nearly as attractive if it was flowing with raw sewage.
Well... there's about 530,000 minutes in a year, thus, it produces 1 kWh/minute, or 60 kWh/h... which equals 60 kilowatts. So, it's not a small power plant -- it's a tiny power plant.
Little extra zeros tend to change the value of the number :-)
Pigs are domesticated animals created by humans. They've been bred for thousands of years to provide garbage disposal.
IANAPF (IANA pig farmer), and I could be wrong, but I don't think your typical food pig has been modified by humans all that far from your typical wild pig. Not like wolves -> dogs.
I tend to doubt that pigs were bred for "garbage disposal", unless you mean that they are efficient at eating scrap-waste and making themselves into food. Personally, I look at pigs as a vital source of bacon and pork ribs (*smack* *smack*). :)
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
The fact that you find pig tasty is also proof that eating dogs is a reasonable responce to certain conditions. Once humans decide to eat something, they learn to like it. The smell of dog revolts you and is tasty to others. The smell of pig revolts me.
I think the thing with dogs is more emotional than anything else. I never smelled cooked dog, so I don't know if it would revolt me or not (probably not, to be honest, I like meat -- a lot).
Jim Rome probably said it best one day: "I'm not going to eat the guy who brings me my slippers. I'm not going to eat the guy that protects my family". And that's really what it comes down to. Dogs have been bred to be "man's best friend" and be a useful part of the family. Pigs have been bred to be eaten, although some have pigs as pets, but then, people turn just about anything into pets.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.