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Solar Power Play
dpilgrim writes "While American power companies continue to chase vanishing oil reserves, the Japanese are once again a step ahead in innovation. Reuters is carrying this story about Sharp's new manucfacturing plant in the U.S. Sharp will begin manufacturing solar batteries stateside, and expects more than half its solar battery sales to be in the U.S. by 2004. Looks like a good use for that south-facing hillside on my property."
what the "news" here is. Haven't solar panels been available for quite a while now? Is the article's point just that Sharp is moving operations to the U.S.? Or is the point that Americans have a greater demand for solar power now?
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Me: http://www.robertdhill.com/
1) Cost.
2) Energy already travels from the sun to earth at the speed of light. You're not going to get it here any faster. Electromagnetic radiation travels through space without loss (save for interference from objects and gravity fields).
3) What if the beam of highly concentrated energy misses the near-earth target?
4) Where are you going to PUT the near-earth target?
5) Everything we use for energy today exists because of the sun (except for nuclear, anyways, but that's leftovers from some other star), so basically we're running on locally stored solar energy...
=Smidge=
The article says that Sharp will invest $3 million into their US plant, and with that they expect to corner the market.
I'm a little stunned. With that PUNY amount of money they can do that? It seems to me like everyone else must be completely oblivious to that market.
This is America, damnit. Speak Spanish!
I disagree, for two reasons. First, as everyone does, you're only looking at the supply side. In fact, we waste astronomical amounts of power, and talking about any energy source is rather silly before fixing our technology on the demand side.
Second, cheap PV would be financially attractive to the home owner. You don't need dedicated land except for high density housing and industrial demands. The main blocking issue for roof-top PV is not efficiency, but cost. We can get about 15% efficiency, but only at great cost. Very cheap, very low efficiency PV is currently running around 1% efficient. Some claim you need about 5% to be viable. I think this is high, at least for some markets. 3% could power a California home (mild climate) if demand-side leaks have been fixed.
It seems likely that the low-end designs will improve efficiency before the high-efficiency designs can bring their manufacturing costs down significantly.
This is really politically correct nonsense.
The environmental cost of producing (and later
discarding) rechargable batteries and solar cells
is vastly larger than the collateral costs of
producing power centrally, particularly if
the central production is nuclear. And there is
almost no petroleum-based utility electric in
the U.S.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
> Supporting preliminary research is not a damn good reason; it's a pretty damn poor one.
How else is preliminary research funded? Practically every new technology of the last century, from the food you eat to the computers you use, has been developed with public funding. Very few private organizations have enough of a cash buffer to fund these developments that have clear long-term economic advantages.
The key to bring photovoltaic cells into practical use is how you phase them in. Obviously, noone is going to fund a 756-acre power plant, but If you provide incentives for homeowners to build PV systems into their roofs, then the technology can slowly phase in.
This approach would work well in sunny climes like California, but the key is allowing the PV cells to plug directly into the grid. i.e: when the PV cells are producing more power than the home needs, they put power into the grid, when the home needs more power than the PV cells can provide, it sucks some off of the grid. The utility could then meter all of this and give people discounts on their electricity bill based on how much they contributed into the grid. With cheap PV cells this could become a reality, and there is an enourmous amount of area on rooftops in cities. Though the power provided by such a system would not really add up to much in the winter, it could make a BIG dent in power consumption in the winter.