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Where are the 70% Efficient Solar Cells?
VernonNemitz asks: "Back in 1984 a patent was granted for silicon chip micro rectennas, which would convert visible photons into electricity in the same way that ordinary rectennas convert microwaves into electricity, at perhaps 70% or greater efficiency. Nobody could make such solar cells back in 1984, but we certainly can today, with sizes of antennas that would capture everything from infrared to the edges of UV -- and the patent has expired. So, where are they?" Currently the most popular type of solar technology is photovoltaics, however PV technology only has an efficiency of about 7-17%. With the potential gains claimed by the technology in the cited patent, has anyone even tried to build one of these units to see if it can live up to the given promise, or at least prove to be a technology than we should be exploring?
They keep me in the dark about these things :-)
All my previous sigs now look like this one, I wish they were permanetly recorded when used.
Anyone else get a sorta shifty feeling when they look at that word and picture the consequences of such an invention?
Any sufficiently well-organized Government is indistinguishable from bullshit.
What the US needs is a Manhattan Project for alternative energy to oil. Solar, wind, geo, fusion, whatever. Something but burning simple chain hydrocarbons and because the waste product is mostly invisible, pretending it doesn't exist.
Who elected George Bush anyway?
I don't think that rectenna is going to be in much sunlight.
I have know about this company for years. Lumeloid Solutions claims their technology is theoretically capable of efficiencies of up to 80%.
Also there was a story about 2 weeks ago, mentioning solar energy breakthrough using full-spectrum layering. Does anyone know anymore about this. I was unable to find it in Google News.
Nanotech material, once they arrive, will of course make 90% efficient material practical.
Planet P Blog - Liberty with Technology.
www.enthea.org
Why haven't you built one of these things? Chances are that's the same reason that they haven't yet been built.
The world power conglomerates keep these inventions from becoming reality. They have too much to lose by people not using nuclear|hydroelectric electricity or burning dead dinosaurs.
Trolling is a art,
Could it be that the effect in question has been patented for some other use? I'm not familiar with the patent quagmire, but multiple similar uses for the same physical phenomenon (light absorbtion into silicon) might be the issue...
Saddam is hiding them with his Weapons of Mass Destruction. Invade Now!!!
Hammer of Truth
This device may be fabricated upon a transparent slab by the deposition of one or more metal coatings in a known manner. The various rectifier elements are first prepared by opening appropriate windows in the metal coating utilizing an electron beam and suitably coating and doping the rectifying areas. An electron or ion beam cuts the shape and connections shown. The connections are completed after deposition of the insulating coating 9. The circuit is then the same as that shown in FIG. 1.
Assuming the applicant built a prototype and proved this device works, creating metal coatings in the exact thicknesses he mentions with the detail he describes is still something that would be very expensive to do now. That technology hasn't improved very drastically in the last decade or so.
to have any solar energy powering my home. If it ever became popular, do you think there would be solar tax? ah-haha!
--------
Free your mind.
Now that the patent has expired, there is once again an incentive for people to work on them. The 17-to-20 year runaway-inventions dampening effect has performed as designed.
GWB is a texan. Texas oil is a huge part of their economy. Texas oil makes cars go vroom, keeps power plants running, and heats people's houses on the east coast.
What would happen if all the major automakers decided tomorrow to start building electrics? GWB's texan constituants would have a cow. They would be trying to pass laws to outlaw them.
When it was clinton/gore presidency, everything was dumped into technology, the GM EV1 is a classic example of the innovations that occured under a goverment that supported research that would cut out our dependance on foriegn (read Iraq) oil. IIRC Clinton even made it a law that all US automakers would have to have an electric vehicle on the market by 2008, and that these cars would have to be built along strict goverment guidelines.
When Bush became president, he wasted no time in modifying the law. Current guidlines are on par with a golf cart with turn signals and mirrors. Fords paltry offering into this market is just that, a golf cart with mirrors and turn signals.
Sorry I turned this comment into a political rant, conspiracy theories aside, the fact that GWB would kill the alternative fueled car laws and go after Iraq oil is all the proof I need.
Who controls the British Crown?
Who keeps the metric system down?
We do, we do.
Who keeps Atlantis off the maps?
Who keeps the Martians under wraps?
We do, we do.
Who holds back the electric car?
Who makes Steve Guttenberg a star?
We do, we do.
Who robs cave fish of their sight?
Who rigs every Oscar night?
We do, we do!
Semiconductor photocells can easily be >90% effecient, but over a rather small range of wavelengths. This is due to the bandgap. An electron is freed if the electron gains enough energy from the photon(s) to overcome the bandgap. the energy of several photons can be combined to free and electron, but is lossy. If the photon has more energy than is required to free the electron, the extra will mostly be dumped as heat. The equation governing wavelength, energy, and Boltzmann's constant is
E=hw
Silicon is actually a rather poor photomaterial, being an indirect material, it's limited to about 60% effeciency at any wavelength. The electron must not only gain energy, but also move a slight bit within the crystal in order to reach the conduction band. Direct materials, such GaAs, being direct, can be > 95%
Perhaps the are other techniques??
I don't get a shift feelign at all. We are already direly close to Hubbert Peak, when oil demand starts to outstrip production. In fact Hubbert, himself an oil man, said that Hubbert Peak, even considering undiscoverd reserves (which is fairly predictable with satellite reconaissance) will come sometime between 2002-2009.
You can read about here on my website for more info. Some in the oil industry are thinking that peak will be hit within the next two years. This might explain our rush to invade Iraq.
Either way, as oil reserve dwindle and demand goes up, it will create a highly destabilized politic - and if you think the repression we've all been feeling lately is bad, it will only get worse... UNLESS:
We wean ourselves (QUICKLY!) off of Oil. The Hydrogen economy is just waiting in the wings. All of the technology is essentially there. The cost factors will become not only competitive, but cheaper and cleaner than oil, once we start migrating our energy infrastructure over to Hydrogen.
Lets hope this happens before we end up in some kind of nigthmarish Oil Fedual/Fascist Global New World Order.
Planet P Blog - Liberty with Technology.
www.enthea.org
I know this is a dumb question. I remember hearing the answer back in high school but I have since forgotten it. I want to know the total energy in sunlight. I know it varies widely depending on location and weather but an average or a range per square foot, square yard, acre or whatever would be interesting. I ask because I think some people overestimate the value. If you can produce a 1 inch square solar cell that's 100% effecient but it costs $1000, then it's never going to pay for itself except in space applications. The big payoff for solar cells will come when you can produce them for almost nothing and plaster them over everything. When that cool, one way billboard plastic wrap stuff that covers busses also acts as an 80% effecient solar cell, then we'll see more of this stuff.
Okay here's my problem with your argument:
If GWB is so concerned about keeping the Texas oil economy going and appeasing the Texas oil companies, wouldn't he want to avoid increasing the supplies of oil, especially foreign oil? If GWB annexed Iraq and started sucking out all the oil for US use, that would just tank the prices of oil and lower the demand for Texas oil.
Plus he's POTUS now, not Governer of Texas, he has more people to appease then just the Texans. (And if it was so easy to invent alternative energy he'd score far more points across the board then he would lose in Texas)
Bush & Cheney both sold off their stocks (at a loss at the time), to limit their conflict of interest with the oil companies.
It isn't GWB holding up electric cars in some oil conspiracy, it's the population as a whole - who collectively don't seem all that interested in alternative fuel vehicles or higher fuel usage vehicles. Then there's the money for whatever new infrastructure is required by alternative energy...
For a time, I lived in a so-called Texas oil town during the late 80's and early 90's. A family member worked on oil rigs there. The town itself was a ghost-town (and is much worse within the last few years) because the government paid the oil producers to shut down the wells. Texas oil is more expensive to drill, retrieve and refine than just buying tanker-full shipments of imported oil. If anything, the "Texas oil economy" probably revolves more around importing and off-shore drilling. Just a detail there for ya, "partner".
Do you have a URL for Bush's guidelines on electric vehicles?
The Tom Bearden and Tilley foundation projects are still up and running.
It's available, I know it is, I've seen many cars running on it, from a VW TDI, to even a Drag car. Those are the car's I've seen in person, not the one's I've read about. Like a version of the Speedster that Opal managed to get to 155mph using a diesel powerplant that averaged almost 95mpg for a couple hundred miles?
Hydrogen has some very significant prospects, but at present, it's to far off, diesel, and biodiesel are far more likely short-term replacements for Gasoline. The only problem with both is the public's long-standing dislike of diesel engines (they make a lot of noise, they make a lot of smoke...), and the current price of biodiesel (about 75% more then diesel in the US). Public awareness can be repaired (modern diesel engines are quiet, efficient, and reletively vibration-free), but it takes time and money. And since regular oil prices are going up very quickly, the second problem will reslove it's self in the next few years automatically.
Your proof is lame at best. If it's that easy to proove non-facts to you I have a few churches you should check into. Besides are you so arrogant as to think you figured out the "conspiracy". Wow, you'd better look out. After they find out you posted the real truth they'll track you down and soon there will be black helicopters around your house. I mean I can't believe it, right here on slashdot I've read the outing of the most well hidden government conspiracy ever!!!
Laughing at retards, in TEXAS
When it was clinton/gore presidency, everything was dumped into technology
Like the SuperCollider he dumped. You dumbass, you don't have a clue. Clinton did more long-term damage to real technological innovation (tax increases on research funds, cancelling the super-collider, fusion research, and all the other big science programs except the space station which he "internationalized") than any president in american history.
What would happen if all the major automakers decided tomorrow to start building electrics?
We would burn about the same amount of oil, and increase our use of coal.
We would burn about the same amount of oil, because you wouldn't be replacing very many gasoline powered cars on the roads; electrics are still too small and have too short a range to be useful for the majority of Americans. None of this is going to change until there is a dramatic improvement in the stored energy densities of batteries, and/or a reduction in the toxic waste produced in the creation and disposal of the batteries themselves. The last time I saw statistics, the sum total of all the "alternative fuel" vehicles sold in the world over any time period you choose to look it was LOWER than the increase in the number of vehicles in the world ... that is, even with increased sales, we continue to fall further behind.
We would burn more coal because electric cars need to get the electricity to recharge their batteries from somewhere, and the cheapest source of electricity generation (that can be built today in North America and Asia (and even Europe, I believe)) is coal.
This is not to say that there aren't loads of technologies available to improve efficiency of fossil fueled vehicles, but most of them make vehicles MUCH more expensive (by almost any metric you choose) ... and the vast majority of people (Americans AND non-Americans) have little incentive to spend more when they can get the same capabilities for less, EVEN IF it would be to their benefit in the long run (why else would people be willing to lease instead of buy vehicles? It is far far more cost effective in the long run to buy than to lease ... ). Some of these technologies include hybrids, light composite frame and body materials, ceramic and aluminum engine blocks, high efficiency diesels, exhaust scrubbers, biofuels, superconducting electricity distribution grids, etc. etc. etc.
But none of them are perfect, and none of the forseeable technologies will eliminate our reliance on petroleum ... not even that "holy grail" of environmentalists, the "Hydrogen Economy". Hydrogen isn't free after all ... there are no large supplies of the stuff to drill or mine for, and there is none in the atmosphere to distill. You have to generate it by cracking water ... using electricity, that you have to generate by some other means. And currently, the only good way to do THAT is to produce the electricity using nuclear (which the environmentalists ALSO hate and also has a time horizon before the exhaustion of the fuel), hydropower (environmentalists hate this too) or fossil fuels ... and the inefficiencies involved in the seperation, storage, shipment, and sale of hydrogen currently would would require just about the same amount of fossil fuel usage as currently for the same energy extracted by the automobile (although we might be able to use different forms, such as more coal and less oil, and there would be far fewer plants to police). In other words, we'd be burning the same amount of fossil fuel to make the hydrogen as we currently burn to make the cars go in the first place.
There are no simple answers and very few real conspiracies, and I don't understand why otherwise intelligent people continue to believe that there are.
Hydrogen is only an energy storage mechanism. It is an attractive one to be sure but it is not itself an energy source. What to you propose to generate Hydrogen with once the hydrocarbon tap is turned off? To be sure, Hydrogen's role as an energy transport and storage mechanism will be important whenever oil does run out but that isn't what I'm asking. What fills the large petroleum shaped hole in energy production once it's depleted?
I suspect that once we have employed solar, wind, geothermal and etc to limits of any forseeable technology there will still be shortfall. Once it sinks in that the 15 minute hot showers and the SUV will are out, a new energy supply debate will ensue: When is the uranium going to run out?
Man, I gotta defend my post before I lose more karma :P
There's another post in this thread, the guy talks about how in texas the majority of money is made on oil import/export. I was going to say this, but since a texan beat me to it, give credit where credit is due.
Also to note, you are completely disregarding the fact that GWB knocked down the requirements for electric vehicles. Clinton MANDATED that the auto companies produce cars at least as good as the EV1, Bush lowered the standard to a golf cart. That was bush that did that.
Bush & Cheney both sold off their stocks (at a loss at the time), to limit their conflict of interest with the oil companies.
What about their uncles? Their dads? Friends? Other family members? I suppose they sold their stock too. Just because they sold off their stock doesn't mean they still wouldn't have conflicting personal interests.
It isn't GWB holding up electric cars in some oil conspiracy, it's the population as a whole - who collectively don't seem all that interested in alternative fuel vehicles or higher fuel usage vehicles.
Then why was there a waiting list for the EV1 when it first came out? I think all people are interested in is performance. I.e. will it go as fast as gas?
Then there's the money for whatever new infrastructure is required by alternative energy...
Fry's electronics in Sunnyvale CA has special parking spots for cars that use the EV1's charger plugs. Park your car, charge it up for free while you shop.
Actually the Texas Oil economy isn't about drilling for oil in Texas any more. The drilling companies get oil from other countries while drilling support companies sell equipment to the companies and foreign governments as well. Dick Cheney's old company Harken made money off of selling drilling equipment overseas. The complaint of the average unemployed Saudi against us and their own government is that the Saudi monarchy has granted concessions for American drilling companies to extract oil, and the American companies are bringing over their own American workers instead of hiring locally.
We would burn about the same amount of oil, and increase our use of coal.
Yes but rather than having millions of unregulated carbon monoxide spewing internal combustion engines on the road, we would have several power plants, goverment regulated, with all the best waste treatment technology availiable.
Ever seen a ghetto ass hoopdy with 10 kids spewin smoke goin down the highway? If all cars were electric the only thing spewin smoke would be the power plants, and it would be cleaner than what came out of the hoopdy's tailpipe.
Right... There's a soccer mom picking up her kids in a big giant suv that GWB made her buy. This is about our collective dependance on oil. Don't like what Ford is pawning off as an electric car? Blame Ford, the current standards for what constitues a "Car" are probably not much more than that golf cart either but you don't see them wasting any time on turning out ex(plorers\scursions) like they were going out of style. The first company that makes a serious mass market attempt will probably succeed provided infrastructure supports it.
Well actually GWB would gain alot and the companies his in with would to becuase alot of mideast countries won't let them in. So take over couttry put your companies in place and relax
If I'm not mistaken though, large generators of electricity (like coal power plants) will pollute less than using a gasoline engine to generate power.
If there was a way to instantly replace every gasoline-powered car on the road with an equivalent electric model, we would need more coal-generated electricity, but there would be less air pollution, due to getting all of those gasoline-burners off the road.
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
Cold Fusion.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
When it was clinton/gore presidency, everything was dumped into technology, the GM EV1 is a classic example of the innovations that occured under a goverment that supported research that would cut out our dependance on foriegn (read Iraq) oil.
Innovation my ass. The work the GM researchers did was excellent, and the GM EV1 v2 would have been even better. However, it doesn't change the fact that the EV1 program was all PR fluff, that was quickly flushed down the toilet once the cars started coming off lease (and this was before GWB was elected.) No EV1 was ever sold to my knowledge - because they were only leased, never sold. Now, how much innovation can you have when you take back the product that was supposed to be innovative? Toyota has done more for alternative fuels (RAV4 EV, which can be purchased, but only in California, and of course, the Prius) than GM's EV1 ever did.
IIRC Clinton even made it a law that all US automakers would have to have an electric vehicle on the market by 2008, and that these cars would have to be built along strict goverment guidelines.
That's news to me. Perhaps you were thinking about the California ZEV mandate instead?
I'm all for electric (I have a 1KW array I'm going to be putting up during spring break), but don't give credit where credit isn't due. After all, people started buying SUVs under the Clinton administration, and only now, are people turning against them (conservative christians and environmentalists alike now decry the excessive fuel consumption.) SUVs = terrorism is the new message. I never saw the Clinton-Gore people say that, probably because they were just as addicted to the oil/car industry as the Bush people are.
Saddam is hiding them with his Weapons of Mass Destruction. Invade Now!!!
:)
Maybe they are used to in the Star Wars project and so have never got onto the common market...
That would explain that weird light saber Luke has. Bet that Rummie's got one too
You're mostly right, but your details are incorrect.
- Environmentalists don't hate hydro. A few environmentalists hate all forms of hydro, and nearly all environmentalists dislike badly implemented hydro. A minor point worth knowing.
-Controlling pollution from burning fossil fuels at point sources (such as power plants) is easier than a distributed sources (such as private automobiles). In fact, it's profitable - those stack scrubbers pull valuable compounds like uranium and gold from the fuel (coal contains some amount of pretty much all the elements) which can be used or sold. Check it out, it's true.
-Also, you're forgetting natural gas. Most power plants being built today run on methane - which has gone up in cost by more than 400% in the last ten years or so. More power requirements = more methane demand = higher home heating bills. A non-obvious consequence of pure electric vehicles.
-Hybrid vehicles are not appreciably more expensive than comparable gas-only cars. My Prius will pay for the inital investment in less than three years, using today's real-world consumption and fuel cost figures (yes I did the math) and I usually keep cars for ten years or more. Your comments are pretty accurate for pure electrics, though - especially given GM's absurdly anti-social behaviour in regards to the EV1 and associated charging technology patents.
Incidentally, I don't care about the damn costs. My best friend, my grandfather and two uncles died of lung cancer and I live in an area that has the highest cancer rate in the US. I bought the Prius for the 90% pollution reduction at the tailpipe. Sit with a person you love as s/he screams and writhes in an agony that morphine can't control as s/he slowly dies, and you won't care about cost either!
Nonetheless, your conclusion is apropos.
What we need is not more efficiency but lower cost!
Who cares if you need 10 square feet instead of 1 square foot to extract a given number of watts? What we need is a solar power source that is affordable -- such that we can afford to cover the entire roof area of our houses for just a few hundred dollars.
The promise of low-cost amorphous silicon solar cells has been touted for over a decade now -- but *all* solar cells remain expensive if you want to collect any reasonable amount of power.
Forget efficient, gimme cheap!
wouldn't he want to avoid increasing the supplies of oil, especially foreign oil
Except when OPEC controls the supply - making your point moot.
Further, Russia's oil industry is entrenched in the Iraqi domestic Oil industry... and the expatriate (soon to be puppet) Iraqi leaders (in London) are already saying they will give preference to US (and britain -- shame on you brits) oil compaines if they are installed.
Lets not even talk about the coup in Venezuala && the Shell/BP/Esso supported 'strike' there at present.
I read the first sentence and that is all...
I can positively say the reason we haven't seen this technology is because the patent hasn't expired.
Take a look at any technology. Forbes had a 50 years/50 technologies thing-a-ma-gig last month. Check it out. All this cool shit. And you don't see it for... you guessed 20 years.
Unless companies can buy these patents, they do their damndest to make sure the inventor makes absolutely no profit.
I'm sure everyone can think of lots of examples.
I'm amazed nobody has mentioned the work of Martin Green at the University of NSW in Australia. For many years, Martin has held the world record for solar cell efficiency for more than a decade, continually pushing the upper bound. I believe the current record is around 30%, as described here. Martin was the recipient of the Right Livelihood Award, aka the "alternative Nobel Prize" in 2002, and the Australia Prize in 1999. He appears to be the Nakamura (world leader in the development of LEDs) of the solar cell world.
If GWB annexed Iraq and started sucking out all the oil for US use, that would just tank the prices of oil and lower the demand for Texas oil.
... so that you can think you're filling for $1.79/gallon. (based on the cost of drilling, wars, local goverment concessions to bring industry to the area, etc.)
t0qer's argument is correct, though, just not formulated quite accurately. It's not support for Texan oil. There really isn't any more Texan oil. What oil the US produces is mostly offshore or Alaskan, but even so it's small fraction of what we use.
Bush isn't trying to support pumping of oil; imported crude goes straight into the US petrochemical industry. Many of the refineries are in Texas, but even where they aren't, GWB is a friend of the industry. It's where he made his millions, and it's all he knows.
It's not simple selfishness and wanting to pad his wallet. It's just that that industry is where he grew up. He's conditioned to think of it as central to US wealth and prosperity, the driver of the economy. In his mind, whatever is good for the oil companies is good for every American. He really honestly believes he's doing the right thing for all of us by suppressing alternative technologies and making war with Iraq.
Bush is not smart and worldly enough to see the bigger picture, or to take the long view.
Getting the Iraqi oil fields under a friendly regime means the US has more *control* over oil prices and fewer "bad guys" to worry about messing up the economics for his favorite companies.
It isn't GWB holding up electric cars in some oil conspiracy, it's the population as a whole - who collectively don't seem all that interested in alternative fuel vehicles or higher fuel usage vehicles.
Yes and no. US consumers don't want a wimpy EV1, for the most part. They want the bulk, power, and capacity of an SUV. Thus, the consumer is to blame.
But... The government spends many billions on petroleum research, exploration, and foreign policy to support the petroleum economy. The cost of just the first war with Iraq and the subsequent decade-long airspace occupation is estimated in the back hall of congress to be in the range of $100 to $200 billion. Billions more are spent every year to subsidize activities (research and exlporation) that benefit the oil companies. I've seen figures (can't find them right now) that estimate you pay $5 to $8 per gallon of gas in income taxes to support petroleum
Now... if over the last fifteen years the government had spent that same half a trillion dollars on electric, fuel cell, and hybrid vehicle research, don't you think we'd already have big powerful SUVs that don't depend on oil? We'd have a cleaner country, consumers just as happy, and fewer foreign policy messes. What if we'd been doing that since 1920? Shouldn't we start now so we're not asking the same question again in 2040?
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
I'll add to that. I live in Candada too. (Manitoba.) Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba are now in the depths of a drought that has cost far more, lasted far longer, and affected more people than the height of the dirty 30's. Global warming is serious. Right now it's 0 celsius. It should normally be -17 to -20. Its been like this for years and getting warmer every year. Scary stuff ahead. And yes you will suffer when farmers suffer.
If GWB is so concerned about keeping the Texas oil economy going and appeasing the Texas oil companies, wouldn't he want to avoid increasing the supplies of oil, especially foreign oil?
Because the oil from Iraq gets sold to Texas and California based companies. GWB profits from the foreign oil too.
Consider the possibility his texas oil supporters expect a war against Iraq will leave middle east oil wells in flames as the previous war did -- and then some, with large oil producing areas out of operation for years due to WMD use and Depleted Uranium use. Suddenly oil prices are up past US$40 a barrel and US domestic oil producers (his supporters) make a lot of money. Similar thinking could be applied to fomenting crisis in Venezuela -- again domestic oil producers make out well. Not to insist this is the case -- never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity -- but between links to domestic oil production and to arms suppliers, if you "follow the money" as any good journalist might, a war against Iraq may mean much money for his supporters regardless to harm to the average American or average world citizen. And regardless of the general US economic state, with spin doctors, heavy financial support from said beneficiaries of the war, and the tendency of people to rally around the president during wartime -- even if it is a war he pushed -- he is almost guaranteed reelection, despite the economy, due to financial backing from buddies profiting from "transactions of decline".
because texas oil companies make money from overseas oil. Look how Enron made money, it sure wasn't from pumping texas oil.
DOn't forget, it's not texans, but Powerfull texans that have nothing to gain from shanging the status quo.
However, I do not believe in a conspiracy. I gaurntee you if there was a an alternate source of power i.e. NOT oil. the people in these energy companies would find a way to Globally capitalize on it. That would be far more money, with less over head. If there was a conspiracy, I would look a OPEC.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Well my rectenna can detect Linux dragoons from 10 miles away, with 80% efficiency.
It isn't GWB holding up electric cars in some oil conspiracy, it's the population as a whole - who collectively don't seem all that interested in alternative fuel vehicles or higher fuel usage vehicles.
Bingo. Until I stop seeing soccer moms tooling around in Hummer H2s and Chevy Avalanches, I'm not buying into this shit that George Bush is "holding us back". Nothing short of legislation outlawing SUVs is going to reduce our oil consumption.
> GWB is a texan. Texas oil is a huge part of their economy. Texas oil makes cars go vroom, keeps power plants running, and heats people's houses on the east coast.
You need to stop having/using a refrigerator before you can preach to others about your environmentally friendly practices.
Then why was there a waiting list for the EV1 when it first came out?
They didn't make enough. What is your point, how long was that waiting list, a few thousand? what percentage of the US population is that?
I think all people are interested in is performance. I.e. will it go as fast as gas?
No all people are interested in is the same experience they get with their car now. Freedom to drive anywhere they want without worrying about fuel. When you can charge an electric in 5 minutes let me know, maybe I will think about buying one.
Fry's electronics in Sunnyvale CA has special parking spots for cars that use the EV1's charger plugs.
Westside Pavilion in L.A. and Santa Monica place have charge spots as well. Number of times I have seen them used? Zero.
Electric seems like a pretty dead tech right now. Long refuel time, short range. Why would anybody want one? Hybrids and fuel cells have much more potential.
Q.
" What the US needs is a Manhattan Project for alternative energy to oil."
reply:
"They should threaten their enemies with windmills?"
you are joking, of course, but if we didn't want to buy any oil or natural gas from Saddam or Ossama and their friends, they would be totally screwed.
If we had an alternative, we could just ignore them.
What if Honda developed a larger version of their hybrid powertrain, and gave you an avalanche-sized SUV that got 38 miles per gallon? I suspect that's five years away at most.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
Then there's a wide variety of other radioactive substances that can be burned in reactors. For example, breeder reactors can actually breed plutonium from the very common U-238 (U-238 is one of the most common elements in the Earth's crust), creating an almost infinite supply of fuel. Military breeder reactors work fine for producing lots of plutonium for atomic bombs. Research on commercial breeder reactors (basically the military reactors tied to turbines to power electric generators) was stopped by worries about arms proliferation (it is much easier to seperate Pu-239 from U-238 than it is to seperate U-235 from U-235 in raw uranium ore, thus makes it easier to get enough fissile material to crete atomic bombs), but could be re-started pretty swiftly if necessary. Which would not be for 50 or 100 years, as you mention.
Regarding 100 and 400 years of oil, my own best estimates are somewhat lower than that. My estimates are that we will experience shortages within 20 to 25 years, and that within fifty years we will have basically exhausted all economically accessible oil resources (i.e., there will be oil out there, but it will take more energy to extract it than can be obtained by burning it). However, hopefully by that time the current taboo regarding nuclear power will have eased, and we will be able to replace the lost petrochemical resources with synthetic hydrocarbons or other such creations. (Don't laugh, we use petroleum as feedstock for chemical plants because it's cheap, available, and readily "cracked", but there are certainly other feedstocks that could be "cracked" into various petrochemicals if necessary, including coal, for that matter -- after all, both the Nazis and the South Africans did it).
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Think about it. By 2005, shadows cast by all the flying cars will kill solar.
While in the end it is consumers who purchase SUVs, the situation is a bit more complicated than that.
Auto companies have to produce cars such that the average fuel economy of what they sell meets a certain federal standard. The car companies are notriously bad at doing this, but even though they ignore the law, promissing to make it up in the future (right...) they are always looking for ways around it.
Now light trucks are exempt from these regulations. But consumers outside of Wyoming (I love Wyoming btw) don't want to drive around in a truck, they like their cars. Enter the SUV. Very few people NEED an SUV, but the auto industry loves them because they are more appealing to consumers than trucks but are classified as light trucks for the purposes of federal fuel economy standards.
So the car company can put a big 'ole engine in there and not worry about the expense and bother of fuel efficiency. Now if only consumers wanted to drive a jacked up station wagon (which is what your typical SUV is, admit it.) Since station wagons are soooo cool...
But wait! That is what marketing is for, to tell consumers what to buy and what to want! So car companies market the crap out of SUVs since they are more profitable than cars and don't hurt their fuel economy averages. Bingo! SUVs are popular because consumers "want" them.
So yes you can blame consumers, but I choose to blame poor legislation that gave car companies incentive to make SUVs as well. While I'm at it I blame the car companies too. Especially Toyota for making a 4Runner with a removable hardtop up until 1989. Wish I still had that car, I mean truck...
Lasers Controlled Games!
I'm headed straight for fusion!
;)
http://fusor.net/
Just give me a little time to work out this one last bug...
[-- Trust the Monkey --]
aren't most (all?) plastics made from oil. better not run out.
Three guys strike up a conversation while riding the escalator up to the Pearly Gates (tm) of Heaven.
The first guy asks, "Hey, what did you do to get up here?", and the second guy says, "I fell out of a tree. How about you?" The first guy says, "Me? Nothing spectacular. Just old age."
"I invented a car that ran on saltwater, and got 500 miles per gallon."
Moral: Companies will milk their "current" technologies until every last penny that can be made from the idea has been made. They'll actively shitcan ideas on the back burner until their current cow dies from exhaustion. Its only when it becomes unprofitable that they move on to better technologies. Take electric cars and ultra-ultra long life lightbulbs. Have been around for damn near a hundred years. Same thing probably goes for efficient solar energy. Whats the point of developing it when you've got billions of people paying good money for coal, natural gas, hydroelectric, and nuclear power?
See you on the escalator.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
it's the population as a whole
No, its the media. The population merely watched TV and does what it is told.
I see alot of people here want cheap solar cells that can cover their entire roof for a "few hundred dollars". Are you nuts? Standard roofing materials (made from asphalt) aren't that cheap and all they do is keep water out!
Maybe the price needs to come down to a few THOUSAND dollars...with some government tax credits and utility savings, it might be worth it.
-ted
And it would only take about as much energy as we use in 15-20 years to build all those solar cells.
If we had decided we were going to be using electricity instead of running on oil for the rest of our lives then maybe we'd have electric vehicles that charge in less than 5 minutes. Technology requires funding for R&D. There's at least 1000 times more money being put into research to find new ways to dig up oil than there is being put into alternative fuel sources. Its quite pathetic how short sighted we all are.
However, the Clinton Administration did push for alternative work weeks, and telecomutting. Both of which are good for the enviroment.
People are truning against SUVs now, because the economy is bad. If the economy had kept growing, people would still be happly buying SUVs as fast as they can be made.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
w = f*2*Pi
h-bar = h/(2*Pi)
And not the other way around.
<shrug> The notation varies, but the idea is always the same. Don't get caught up in the particular names of particular variables...
We already went through this during the last big El Nino, then we (well, us in Manitoba anyway) had several really shitty/cold/wet years.
Hell, there was no Spring 2002 here - the trees didn't bud until well into June - THAT'S how cold it was.
Then again, in 1997 we had the 'blizzard of the century' followed by the 'flood of the century', but suddenly no one can remember any years with snow since they were a kid? Give me a break.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Hybrid SUVs are already being produced. Ford sells a hybrid Escape that you can buy today. It gets about 35 mpg I believe.
However, that's still wasteful considering that most people don't need an SUV and could get by with a Toyota Prius that gets upwards of 50 mpg.
All a matter of perspective I guess.
That's only half the equation.
Average Joe Consumer, whether he wants an SUV or not, maybe he's got 3 kids. Maybe he likes taking long driving vacations once in a while. If he bought your typical Luxury Sedan that was big enough for the job, he'd either get one with a really crappy engine (think of the 80's Chevy Impala with that peice of crap 3.8l Buick engine - uck!) or, for the V-8 option (to pull his boat or camper trailer), he'd end up getting totally screwed by the extra tax imposed by CAFE. So the only option for the features he wants is an SUV.
And because Car Insurance companies have us bent-over as well, Joe Average drives that SUV to work every day, because even if he could afford to then buy a little fuel-efficient commuter car for going to work, leaving the SUV sitting in the driveway, he's gotta pay insurace for BOTH vehicles. Even if the SUV is just sitting in the driveway 90% of the time, ONLY used for vacations.
(If you ask me, any given person has only ONE ass, so he can't sit in two cars at the same time, and should pay for insurance as he drives).
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Thus, the consumer is to blame.
Another way to look at it is from the perspective of the consumer. You watch TV to learn what options you have for buying a car and everything in the media today tells you to buy gasolina. But Q: where does the energy in oil come from? A: the sun.
The Sun bombarded the Earth with radiation many millions of years ago until plants and animals started growing and living. Then they all died, and we came alone and dug them up to burn 'em and drive around in our SUVs. Now think about this for a second. Oil is a limitted resource that takes hundreds of thousands of years to create, although we can now make synthetics. But being a limitted resource that makes it more valuable than the money we pay for it.
Here's how it works. It costs us some time from our limitted short lives to make that money. Then we take that money and buy oil with it. That Oil took hundreds of thousands of years to make, far more time than we'll ever have the luxury to trading for money. It can never be replaced and we will eventually run out. One day don't you think our great great grand children are going to ask us what we were thinking when we decided to burn it up in smoke? We can use it today to make plastics and various other things, enough for everyone... think about it. There's enough oil today to make plastic keyboards and monitors and TVs for everyone. But there isn't enough oil to last more than 100 years with our SUVs, then its gone.
So as it is right now we know that one day we need to switch from oil to some other form of energy. We know that oil is very valuable for its unique chemical properties. But we're unwilling to make the logical conclusion that we should fund the research to find alternatives and switch to them ASAP to preserve as much fossil fuels as may be required by the human race some time in the unforseeable future.
But who knows maybe a big hunk of rock will come flying down out of the sky and kill us all tomorrow. But we're so egotistical we'd still probably look for someone else to blame. What frustrates me is this all seems like common sense. But its not like society was ever based on love.
Part of the reason may be that a staement of 70+% rectenna efficiency is based on microwave frequencies at which the antenna portion of the rectenna can be made very efficient over the bandwidth of the incident microwave energy. For optical rectenna's in addition to the difficulty of making small scale antenna elements, there are the additional considerations that the solar spectrum is spread across a wide bandwidth, and that material properties will not provide the same results as metals are much less conductive at optical freqeunceis than at microwave frequencies.
Heres the skinney.
i was involved with SMUD's greenergy programm.
1) PV cels are the answer, i read this pattent and its physically impossible now or in the future.
2) why are PV cells sooooo expenxive.
a) demand ( there are not enought people buying PV cels to drive down the costs)
b) production ( there arent enough production companies making them, ie no price wars)
c) profitability ( threre isnt allot of money to be made in the PV industry)
2) heres the solution.
if you own a home
a) contact your local power companie, ask if they have a green energy alternative. they will subsidise part of the cost involved with installing solar panels.
b) take some equity out of your home and install solar panels, eventually they will pay back the loan and intrest. if fuel goes up it will make your hose verry attractive.
c) by law if you pruduce more energy than you consume the power companie has to buy the excess energy from you. ie you will be getting a check from your power companie.
d) if you are buying a home, see about having the instalation of solar panels added into the cost of your home. on the average it is about 20K to have an adequate solar system installed. subsidized its about 12K.
if a large amont of people did this the price of solar panels would drop through the floor.
the problem is its like intel making a new chip and only having about 100K people they can sell it to, a celeron would cost about half a million dolars.
...has anyone even tried to build one of these units to see if it can live up to the given promise...
Yeah I built hundreds. They work almost as well as patent application says they do. It is the main power source for my secret volcano island. I keep the main solar plant next to the living head of Mr Ed #3(US1985000809949). I'm trying to find Wilbur's head (US4666425) too but I think it probably rotted away by now. That's okay though, after I finish populating my island with Unicorns (US4429685), me and my evil cabinet will be ready for plan Milli Vanilli.
Remember folks, you can believe everything you see a patent for just like you can believe everything you read on the internet.
~~ What's stopping you?
I see a serious theoretical difficulty here that may explain why the optical rectenna was never built.
Sunlight at the earth's surface has a power flux density of about 1 kilowatt per square meter. To convert that to an electric field strength, we take the square root of the power flux density times the impedance of free space, 377 ohms. This gives 614 volts/meter.
Yellow light has a wavelength of 570 nm. That means the electric potential over that distance is only about 350 microvolts. This is approximately the voltage you'd see at the terminals of a 50 ohm half wave dipole, and it's far below the voltage needed to switch a rectifier. Silicon rectifiers take about 600-700 millivolts of forward bias to begin conducting, even if one could be constructed to work efficiently at optical frequencies. Germanium takes about 300 mV, and silicon Schottky diodes take about the same.
It is not possible to construct a diode that doesn't require a forward bias, otherwise we could rectify the noise from room-temperature resistors and convert ambient heat to useful work. This is specifically prohibited by the second law of thermodynamics.
The original inspriation for your sig: T. S. Eliot said, "Bad poets imitate. Good poets steal."
this guy from Reunion made a draft about a production and dispatch of rectenna-powered electricity. nice images.
anyone knows if this looks like real-serious stuff?
take a few physics courses on thermodynamics and you'll find out why it must be bullshit
I like things that are sweet and not things that are lame. --
What about a parabolic mirror focusing sunlight on the hot end of a sterling engine hooked to a conventional alternator? Anybody got any sort of numbers on that?
Mirror technology is pretty efficient for photon capture and when you reflect a few square meters of photons onto a few square centimeters of metal (the hot end of the Sterling engine) you gotta be generating a boatload of heat. Sterling engines are close to theretical maximum thermal to mechanical conversion efficiency. And Alternator technology is pretty well developped over the past 100 years.
I don't have the physics chops to run the numbers, but this seems like it would work pretty efficiently and electricity production would scale quite nicely.
The global power elite depend on the energy industry in large part to perpetuate both their impending and imposed economies. The only alternative technologies that will ever be pursued are ones that rely on maintaining a producer/consumer dichotomy to the profit and ends of the controllers. You will *never* see efficient solar cells, flywheels or home windfarms unless a private individual pursues it (and manages to stay unmurdered). You will see hybrid engines, fuel cells and alternative manufactured fuels, as the current controllers shift their assets and focus to the production of electricity and soy (which has been happening since 1998).
Any technology that enhances freedom most likely also decreases profits for somebody, and if that somebody is significantly monied, and not in a position to profit from the introduction of the technology, you can bet it will be suppressed. If it emerges anyway, it will be attacked and beaten down into a form where it can be capitalized upon.
I'm sure some of you are involved with OSS because you see it as an effective counter to this tactic (which it may well be, time will tell - the next ten years will be interesting). Unfortunately, as material is not software, it is improbable that any such solution could be implemented in the real world, as the means of production for most complex devices are prohibitively expensive and therefore easily controlled.
And for anyone about to say that Drexlerian assemblers will change everything, I have a question: whom do you think will invest the amount necessary to pursue the creation of the first? Those who control the resources to do so will never, and will actively seek to deny existence to any, because the creation of *one* would threaten - in the extreme - the control of those resources and the base of accumulated power. You may see some nifty aerosol products and smart clothes and new kinds of paint emerge from study in the nanotech interdiscipline, but believing the Drexlers and Kurzweils in the face of the world socio-political structure today is idealist optimism in the extreme. I ask you cattle to consider your history at the farm, and to understand that precedents have been set; the farmer may feed you and pet you and massage your teats from time, but he will never facilitate or permit your opening the pen door. Wake up!
NewScientist.com has a nice write up on a new type. "It should allow solar cells to jump in efficiency from today's best of 30 per cent to 50 per cent or higher."
I think that this refers to the patent issued to Alvin Marks. Marks proposed conducting a signal from such an optical antenna "along a length of wire" to a rectfying site. It just doesn't work this way - see my webpage at specifically the link "How This Idea Developed". Light interacts in wave antenna fashion immediately adjacent to quantum confined electron sites.
Gerald C. Huth, Ph.D.
Ojai,CA
In Soviet Russia, solar cells patent -you-!
For optimal efficiency, you need materials that react to the different wavelengths of light. A newly discovered material does this and makes efficient solar cells a real possibility. See http://www.lbl.gov/msd/PIs/Walukiewicz/02/02_8_Ful l_Solar_Spectrum.html
n l-aud111802.php
or read the press release http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2002-11/db
Plants stored energy from the Sun, then died and were burried for a long time. That energy still came from the Sun. If we can just figure out a way to go from plants to oil more quickly, we can plant fields and basically they would be giant solar pannels.
I think it is a good idea, anyway. The only energy that is not solar is geothermal and nuclear.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
according to this report, full specturm might be possible soon
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/solarcell-02m.html
do you think oil got its energy from? We're burning comnpressed plant and animal matter, all of which stored energy from the sun before being crushed into oil. Solar -> hydrogen just normalizes our energy demand with currently available resources, since in the status quo we're burning fuels stored over millions of years. --M
He got the North Koreans to give up their nuclear program, he got Saddam Hussein to stop starving his people and lining his pockets with proceeds from smuggled oil, he stopped Osama bin Laden from building a world-wide terror network, and he even got those worst of enemies - the Israelis and the Palestinians - to agree to a final, lasting peace.
What? Last year you all were complaining about global cooling. Make up your minds, this is a planet, not a McDLT.
I don't know about you, but I don't thing I could imagine much uglier than thousands of square miles of solar panels blotting out the light and totally destroying the ecosystem that existed underneath.
Your Mileage May Vary. I know somebody who owned a Mustang and delibrately bought a POS car he never drove. He claimed that this decreased his insurance payments since the insurance company assumed, as you so eloquently put it, he only had one ass and can only sit in one car at a time, so they took the average of the two cars.
He was single. It may be that the insurance industry assumes that a family with two cars can use both of them at the same time (one for Him to go to work, one for Her to go to work)
The problem with today's power grid is that it's so heavily centralized -- from the beginning, power plants have become relatively larger and larger, with relatively fewer of them. The key to widespread adoption of alternatives like solar energy is not for existing power companies to build huge solar installations, which is all that will work with the existing grid. It's for power companies to be able to buy back power produced by their customers' solar panels, microturbines, fuel cells, or whatever -- distributed power generation. The problem is that they don't have the infrastructure to be able to do that -- ie, switching and metering equipment -- nor are they interested in changing the status quo. Wired magazine had a good article on this awhile back.
...is that they only work when we don't need to turn the lights on anyway.
Maybe things are different for you in your area, but I live in central Ohio, where most "soccer moms" drive minivans and sedans. Sure, there are those few who drive Excursions and the like, but they are definitely in the minority.
Personally... I need to have 4x4 in the winter. Without 4WD, I'd be stuck at home for days (weeks) after a snow storm. Anyone who lives on a hill knows what I'm talking about.
But we need to outlaw SUVs, you say. That means I can't have a vehicle that works in the winter simply because you think that by banning all sport-utes, America's energy problems will be (minimally) allieveated.
Brilliant!
For those rectennas, can you make a diode that works at 300 GHz? make it at nano-scale? in the millions per square cm? If so, please do.
Now... if over the last fifteen years the government had spent that same half a trillion dollars on electric, fuel cell, and hybrid vehicle research, don't you think we'd already have big powerful SUVs that don't depend on oil? We'd have a cleaner country, consumers just as happy, and fewer foreign policy messes. What if we'd been doing that since 1920? Shouldn't we start now so we're not asking the same question again in 2040?
No, actually I don't think we would have that. This is a classical mistake - equating rate of spending money with the rate of resulting technological progress. One could argue, with exactly the same logic that you are using, that if we had invested all that money in medical research, we would all live forever. Or, we could argue that if we invested it all in telekinesis, we could all transport ourselves with no energy at all!
In other words, your argument makes a very dangerous assumption: more money can solve physical problems in a given period of time, regardless of whether they are ever solvable, or if they are solvable without the appearance of another Einstein.
Actually, governments and lots of private industry interests have spent huge amounts of money on alternative transportation energy systems. The reason is the potential enormous profits.
For exmaple, if a company could come up with a viable battery technology for electric cars, the other advantages of electric cars (very low cost and very low maintenance, outside of the battery; very good performance; mechanical simplicity) would cause them to fly out of the show-rooms! Everyone would wnat one, and everyone would buy one, and the car makers would immediatebly build a zillion of them.
With those sorts of profits at stake, the issue isn't the lack of investment, it's the difficulty of the technology!
The only good weather is bad weather.
whould that work?
Lifes a game play to win!
A bit off topic, but...
i ntertie
New thin film solar PV panels are in production. Thin film cells are not very efficient, but can be produced cheaply -- giving the enduser the most watts/dollar. Learn more here:
http://www.pacificsolar.com.au
"Traditional" PV kits are also available. Many US states offer good incentives or rebates on home PV installations, and grid intertie kits allow users to sell surplus watts back to their utility company. Learn more here:
https://www.altenergystore.com/cart/kits2go.html#
Any Slashdotters "hot rodded" kits like these?
Cheers, c0mpil3r
Hmmm. The electric field of EM radiation is transverse (perpendicular) to the direction of propagation (i.e. wavelength) so the potential difference doesn't build up in that direction.
The problem here is likely timescales: light has a VERY high frequency (10^17 Hertz roughly, if I did my math right). At that frequency one doesn't push the electrons back and forth like a kinetic particle in the usual diode treatments so much as one excites interband transtions, which is how a regular solar cell works.
Curtains for windows?
Having one centralized solar farm would almost guarantee the project's failure. Because..
1) One geographic source means that one heavy cloud day would eliminate all production.
2) Once the electricity is produced, you have to send it over transmission lines to the load (customers). Too much energy over one set of lines will melt it.
3) Build more transmission lines, and your local communities will complain about all the electric lines in the area, driving down the local value.
4) Natural disaster. One hurricane, tornado, hail or earthquake, and you've broken all of the glass in the whole plant.
So, the key to PV is decentralization. This means many many installations spread over hundreds (to thousands) of miles) at about 1 station per square mile. Each one would need its own DC to AC converter (to put energy on the grid), not to mention voltage regulators, plus telemetry so you can get the reading from the devices, all of which drives up the costs.
I bought this house and you know I'm boss
Ain't no h'aint gonna run me off
Asia and Europe are free to fund these technologies.
Oh wait, you are in fantasy land where the US has to invent everything.
Isn't that the real reason behind the global warming scare is that environmentalists were having trouble convincing people and corporations to stop polluting so they had to come up with something absolutely horrendous.
From: http://www.iowacorn.org/ffvs.htm
The following auto manufacturers are currently producing vehicles that can be operated on E-85 fuels:
Ford Motor Company
2002 Models:
Selected 4.0L Explorer (4-door)
Selected 4.0L Explorer Sport (2-door)
Selected 4.0L Explorer Sport Trac
Selected 3.0L Taurus sedans and wagons
All 3.0L 4X2 extended cab Ranger pickups
2001 Models:
All 3.0L 4X2 extended cab Ranger pickups
Selected 3.0L Taurus LX, SE, and SES sedans
1999 and 2000 Models:
All 3.0L Ranger pickups 4WD and 2WD
Selected 3.0L Taurus LX, SE, and SES sedans
1995-1998 Models:
Selected Taurus 3.0L sedans
General Motors
2003 Models:
All 5.3L Vortec-engine Avalanches
2002 Models:
All 5.3L Vortec-engine Suburban, Tahoe, Yukon and Yukon XLs
Selected 5.3L Vortec-engine Sierra and Silverado pickups
2000 and 2001 Models:
All 2.2L Chevrolet S-10 pickup 2WD
All 2.2L Sonoma GMC pickup 2WD
Daimler Chrysler
2000, 2001 and 2002 Models:
All 3.3L Chrysler Voyager minivans
All 3.3L Dodge Caravan minivans
All 3.3L Chrysler Town & Country minivans
1998 and 1999 Models:
All 3.3L Dodge Caravan minivans
All 3.3L Plymouth Voyager minivans
All 3.3L Chrysler Town & Country minivans
Isuzu
All 2000-2001 Isuzu 2.2L Hombre pickups (after Dec. 1999)
Mazda
Selected 1999 and 2000 Mazda 3.0L B3000 pickups
Mercury
2002 Models:
Selected 4.0L Mountaineers
2001 Models:
Selected 3.0L Sables
My cat can eat a whole watermelon
Another dumbass.
Oil has not been a major part of Texas's economy since the 80's.
Utopia morons like yourself haven't a clue what it means to live in the real world.
Good ideas are one thing, but developing and marketing a product that will have anywhere near the efficiency of oil is WAY beyond your comprehension.
Here is the point which you probably don't care about. The equation can be written:
E=hv (where v is the greek letter nu)
or
E=h_bar w (where w is omega, and h_bar is h-bar an h with a cross on it, like you would cross a t).
v is the frequency, in Hertz, which is cycles per second. w is the angular frequency, in radians per second. Since there are 2 pi radians in a circle, you multiply v by 2 pi to get w. (E.g. you will go through more radians per second than you will cycles).
Anything measured in Hertz (Hz) should be a frequency (v), not an angular frequency (w). Sadly, this is not always the case. This is kind of an infamous problem in physics. The conversation goes something like this:
Person 1) Hey look my data looks just like yours, but there is some offset.
Person 2) Oh ya? Is it a factor of 10?
Person 1) Nope but about 2/3 of that...
Person 2) Oh you aren't using an HP 228a are you?
Person 1) Um, ya sure am.
Person 2) Oh well then w is really v.
Person 1) Doh.
Best to check if you need to know the answer to within a factor of 6.3 or so.
Cheers,
Greg Wood
a war on terrorism? How can we end a war on a method?
Let's say you illuminate this device with a green laser, of wavelength lambda 500nm. Knowing the speed of light we can convert wavelength of the electromagnetic wave to frequency: F = c/lambda For this wavelength light this frequency is about 600THz. This means that our 'rectifier' must switch on and off in femtoseconds. This is just plain impossible today, by a factor of like 1,000...the fastest semiconductors are up there in the 100's of GHz. There are additional practical problems: 1. real sunlight is incoherent; the 'voltage' waveform to rectify will not be a sinusoid but just 500THz-ish noise. This would reduce the effectiveness of the resonance of the antenna 2. real rectifiers need *some* forward voltage to work. Assuming semiconductor rectifiers, it'd probably be real hard to generate potential of a fraction of a volt across such a tiny distance, without extraordinarily intense light. So basically this patent is a crock of BS. Though it would make a good EE PhD quals or interview question to explain why...
Batteries. Millions and Millions of tires. Millions and Millions of miles of asphalt roads. Less air pollution? I doubt it.
Most electrics use either Lead-Acid (really cheap), NiCd (cheap) or NiMH (good efficiency and cheap). Lithium is just too expensive, although it does have the potential of pushing electrics over that fine line that is performance.
Fuel cells (especially methanol-fueled ones) probably have the most potential for clean, high-performance, convenient cars at the moment. Compressed hydrogen is obvious, but poses an explosion hazard during a collision.
Now, for real science-fiction fare, there is talk about using stabilized metallic hydrogen (now that metallic hydrogen has been verified to exist) as a fuel source...
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
What in the hell is a hoopdy?
If that description was correct then the amount passed should remain constant, but take two polarized filters and rotate them, you get a gradual change from dark to light. My guess, neither is correct, however, polar-solar may be describing a different phenomenon than polarization.
With the kids in the extra back seat the the way-way back of my Durango, you can barely hear them yelling at each other to "stop it" and calling each other names. With the radio turned up just a tad it's even better. That's a real advantage for parents looking to retain their sanity.
Another reason that SUV's sell is that you have the hauling power of a station wagon without having to drive one.
-- Good judgement comes with experience. -- Experience comes with bad judgement.
Try pulling 80,000 pounds over the rockies with battery power. Nothing like a utopia. Unfortunately until somebody comes up with a REAL world fuel that will replace oil we are stuck using oil.
And yet another reason that they are popular is for saftey. You are much more likely to kill the other guy when driving an SUV, as opposed to an economy car, in which you are more likely to die. Unless of course you have a Durango which has terrible crash test results. Or if you happen to roll your SUV since it is designed for low speed off-road driving rather than the freeway. But there certainly is a perception of safety. I certainly enjoy the high vantage point. It makes me feel safer at least.
Lasers Controlled Games!
bring every nutcase out of the woodwork. Welcome to the club.
This argument always irks me. For one, it's obviously rather self centered. Fine, whatever. But the bigger issue is this: What happens when *everyone* is driving SUV's? Well, buy an even bigger SUV! Scary!.
has anyone even tried to build one of these units to see if it can live up to the given promise, or at least prove to be a technology than we should be exploring?
Well, I started, and then I got a grant from Shell, BP/Amoco, and Exxon to help GM, Ford and Chrysler build an SUV that got 3 miles to the gallon for safety... too much gas on board could lead to fires.
The world won't end in darkness, it'll end in family fun, with Coca-cola clouds behind a Big Mac sun.
I call this the arms race.
Things have not been moving along quickly because the project is underfunded and understaffed, and sorely in need of decent facilities. Dr. Marks is constantly looking for ways to rectify this - but up to this point, things have not gone well.
Little known facts: Alvin and Mortimer created one of the first polarizing companies - a strong competetor to Polaroid. Mortimer is currently working in 3D movie technology.
I tried to make the fact that it is self centered (and flawed) obvious. I guess I did a poor job of that.
Lasers Controlled Games!
If there really were a better way to go the japanese would have come up with it. Korea would have come up with it. Singapore? Germany? These countries are absolutely desperate to bring new cheap forms of power, so much so that the supposed 'power producing elite' would not be able to stop the progress of new ideas.
Ah, my appologies. I'm just very afraid that most of America thinks that way.
- 'my being a dumbass' - disagree. Dumbass.
- Sun got its energy from a large cloud of hydrogen; formation of matter; blah blah blah - Agree. So what? The sun generates energy through a fusion reaction which is not related to our current energy crisis and dependency on oil. Bringing up the creation of our sun doesn't in any way shed light on the formation of oil, why our oil supply is finite, or how it relates to the collection of ambient solar energy as an alternative supply source.
- Hydrogen is an energy storage mechanism - Agreed. For our use we would be converting energy from electricity to hydrogen through electrolysis or some (hopefully) more efficient mechanism.
My primary point is that we're currently using stored solar in the form of squished plants and dinosaurs. We're running out of that stored sunlight buried in the ground in the form of petrofuels stuff, and had better find a way to collect and store this energy on our own. Whether it's solar, geothermal, hydro, wind, or nuclear we'd better get off our asses soon, or we're fucked as a civilization.JMO,
--Maynard
You know those lines on solar panels? It could be that a single-layer solar lense loses energy from converting wavelengths orthogonal to those lines in to energy.
It could be that this new technology is doubly layered, letting through all the wavelengths orthogonal to the top layer down to the bottom layer; each layer turning in to energy the wavelength orientation that's most efficient.
DownUnder we are looking at a diffrent technology wind and solar,
if it ever gets built... Read about it here
For general information to all interested: I am part of an independent research team that has been working in collaboration with Dr. Alvin Marks for the past 3 years to develop Lumeloid Technology. The primary reason for slow commercialization has been negligible amounts of funding. New efforts are in the works with grants being submitted to the Maine Technology Institute for a sustained full time effort in the state of Maine. Luckily the material inputs for this technology are extremely low cost, otherwise we would not have been able to sustain efforts to date. As I stated earlier, funding is the major obstacle to progress. Investors are fickle, for example, a major deal with TYCO industries was lost when company officials saw their stock prices falling and decided clean coal technology would be more profitable in the near term. We are going to make this technology a success; regardless of the funding situation you will see this technology within 5 years, adequate funding will only speed up progress. Our conservative goal is to reach wholesale prices of $1 per watt. Any individuals interested in assisting with finances are welcome. Proof of concept has been established, and technical obstacles identified. We are in the progress of raising a minimum of $1.5M for new research facilities, supplies, equipment, tooling, and salary to sustain a 3 year full time effort to move Lumeloid and related technologies into the marketplace. Even secured funding in amounts nearing $250,000 would catapult this endeavor forward towards commercialization. Our team's mission is to make Lumeloid a reality, enabling society, the environment, and the economy to benefit from low cost, efficient, ecologically correct photovoltaic technology. For additional information, I can be reached through email at jacob.pelletier@umit.maine.edu p.s. Many individuals referred to the rectenna patents. These are outdated and their shortcomings known. The new material by the trade name of Lumeloid is a plastic thin film utilizing nano-antenna structures.
Ethanol is a bit of a sham solution. It seems fine at first glance, but when you look under the cover, it in fact requires much more energy per gallon to produce than many other energy sources. The majority of ethanol fuel is derived from corn, and the quantity of energy expended in the tilling & harvesting, etc. of that corn exceeds by far the energy expended producing most other fuels. Usually this expenditure is in the form of burning other fossil fuels in tractors & combines.
The motivations for the promotion of ethanol seems to be to provide a subsidy to corn farmers under the guise of an alternative fuel source so as to not encurr the wrath of international trade organizations like the WTO.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
I think you mean Nanu-Nanu-tech material.
The real cost of gasoline [http://www.icta.org/projects/trans/rlprexsm.htm]
From their estimates, it is between $5 - $15 per gallon.
I think this article is a couple of years old, but it still just as relevant today as it was then (perhaps more so...).
As a side thought, how much does gas cost outside of the US, and what impact does this seem to have?
Mobil, Shell, Texaco, Gulf, etc will prevent this from becoming a reality.
1. Bad signature
2. ?????
3. Profit
I suspect a big reason why this technology was never fully developed back in 1984 is because the technology wasn't there.
Remember that, if you're building an integrated circuit the old-fashioned way, your feature size (for example, the width of a conductor) is at most the same as the wavelength of light used to prepare it for etching. Until recently, nothing over low-ultraviolet light could be used, and therefore the features were relatively large compared to the wavelength of visible light. An effective antenna designed to utilize visible light frequencies would require features at least an order of magnitude smaller than the frequencies it's meant to absorb.
Or in other words, they couldn't do it.
Today we're able to create integrated circuits with features less than 150 nanometers across, so these optical-frequency rectennas are now feasible. Whether they're practical is another matter; remember, you'd need to use the latest fabrication techniques to get features that small, so manufacturing would be expensive.
I am currently powering my computer from a rectenna that captures the energy derived from unsolicited SubSeven and SQL port packets.
8-).
-- Terry
Ad hominem attack = "I don't have a cogent response". HTH HAND
I'm not sure where you got the 7-17% figures. According to the UNSW Centre for Photovoltaic Engineering (who have held the best efficiencies for as long as I can remember) 24% was acheived in 1994.
Why they're right next to the flying cars and anti-gravity boots!
"It's where he made his millions, and it's all he knows"
only partially true. W never made a dime in the oil business. daddy's friends bailed his ass out every time. and as for him knowing anything, well, that's highly debata-table. (as Dumbass would say it)
I'm good with numbers -
Where are the cheap solar panels?!?!? I'm looking into a solar system for the top of my camper. The whole system is gonna cost $4000 to cover the roof with panels. Most people only use one panel. I want to be able to depend on the solar and not buy a generator. At the point in solar development that the panels would be much cheaper. Computers have really come down in price.
Has anyone ever thought to make use of these
in harnessing gamma radiation freqs???
It seems like it would produce alot more energy
with alot less of a nuclear reaction occuring.
The only issue that I have come up w/ in doing
such is that the photo elec. would break down
in such a extreme environment.
I think you could protect the PE from BETA
by using some sort of aluminum shielding but I
am not sure how you could shield from ALPHA or
if it is even neccesary.
You could also theoretically divert the BETA
radiation to create a stream of electrons.
I guess if you were able to create some sort of
shielding dense enough in protons it would push
the ALPHA away and attract the BETA and hopefully
let the gamma pass through to the PE device.
Any thoughts?
"...that would cut out our dependance on foriegn (read Iraq) oil..."
The US does not depends directly on Middle east oil. They get all the oil they need from Texas, Alaska, Mexico and Southamerica.
only about 3% of the oil consumed in the US is from middle east. However, Europe and Japan depend on the oil from middle east.
The war on Iraq is more a matter of world control than anything else. When a guy that controls the wolrd largest military, the largest military budget (larger than the sum of the next 10) says he wants to be "the police" of the world - ignoring UN - and that he will not tolerate anyone who attempts to compite with the military might of the US. Even further, that that state is gonna get the boot. That can only be scary. Now, if you take into account the history US foreign policy, that can only be terrifing.
According to a enquiere, over 80% of the world population recoginze the US as the largest threat to their way of living. Read some news outside the US and you'll find out that the rest of the wolrd thinks the US, in its present course, is a threat to both its people and the rest of the world. its a threat to mankind.
--note- the US, by its own definitios of terrorism, is the largest terrorist in the world. And it is the only country found guilty of terrorism in an international court of law (because of Nicaragua). It would have been found guilty twice (Balcans), but they vetoed the trial.
Just take a look at what he is doing to improve social equity (tax cuts for the richs), at your freedoms(any number of patriot acts), at the eviroment (withdraw for the kyoto pact) etc. etc.
And the sad thing, the only people who can do something about it, is the americans. The same people who don't care how bush came into power, or what he is doing, because they are too terrified of foreign ghosts to see the real threat.
The large generators pollute less until they (unlike Joe Citizen) leverage their nearly-unlimited pocketbook to push for rules that allow them to buy up old cars and crush them for pollution credits. Oh, wait! That's already happened...
I've read an article about it in NewScientist two years ago. In short, researchers blasted a piece of silicon surrounded with a certain mix of gasses with a femto-second laser pulse. This produced tiny spikes on the surface (silikon looked black because of this)
More infoThey said at the time this could produce very efficient solar cells, then everything went quiet.
Anyone heard about this technology? It looks closer than these antenae.
People talk about alternative energy sources, but how about energy recycling. we waste a lot of energy in carrying out a certain work. for example when water is pumped to an overhead tank, we can place a dynamo at the pipe outlet and try generating some energy(anyway the water is going to get into the tank. so this is energy comes free!!!)
does anyone get this????
The earth is already largely covered with solar panels, in the form of the oceans. The oceans convert solar energy into thermal energy, which manifests itself as the temperature gradient between the warm surface waters and the very cold depths There have been proposals to tap this energy by pumping cold water up from the bottom of the ocean and using it in conjunction with warm water from the surface to drive a heat engine. In many parts of the world, this process would actually produce positive net energy. (see http://www.nrel.gov/otec/what.html). I think it has been estimated that several hundred power stations operating on this principle, located in the tropics, would produce enough power to meet current world needs (Sorry, can't remember where I saw this estimate, which may be already out of date). The environmental cost would be a drop in water temperatures of 2 to 3 degrees Farenheit over a large part of the ocean's surface, enough to cause fairly catastrophic climate change. I guess you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.
IIRC photovoltaic cells cost more energy to produce than they can ever produce in their economic lifetime. So they are only in use in places where another source is unavailable (satellite) or impractical (superflat pocket calculator) Is it still the case ?
Actually, he didn't make millions in oil -- his track record there is pretty bad (ever hear of Harken?). His substantial profit came on the sale of the Texas Rangers baseball team and associated stadium lease. Can't disagree that he's very warmly disposed to the energy biz, but that's probably more due to family ties (GHWB made his bones in oil), personal friendships (Ken Lay, et al), and politics (follow the campaign contributions).
I want my flying car! 70% efficient solar cells would be useful to charge the battery, though...
$G
-- $G
Calling all engineers...
n s. htm
Check out these plans to run a car on tap water.
It may sound crazy, but most of the elegant inventions are based on simplicities.
The engine, exhaust has to be rust proofed.
http://www.spiritofmaat.com/archive/feb2/carpla
1) There are regions that are clear better than 99% of the time. They're generally called deserts.
2) Buried Superconducting power lines, anybody?
3) Bury them. See number 2, which are installed underground anyways. After a certain distance, you'd hook them up to the existing power lines.
4) Build in a stable area. Because of #1, you aren't building it in hurricane or hail area, and tornado's aren't very likely either. And if it's in an earthquake area, you just build the stems in a way to resist earthquakes. It's not like you're build skyscrapers here, and you can (want) to build each panel a fair ways apart (at least for mirror arrays, they need a path to the central tower)
I've seen images of a few mirror + central tower generation plants. The mirrors are computer controled to reflect light to a central tower, converting water to steam to power turbines. Solar power this way is a definate option, as you can build lasting mirrors.
I don't read AC A human right
...and solar plastic (70% efficient) would be good enough for me. You could literally cover loads of buildings/ structures with it. If it was flexible enough you could coat the insides of curtains/blinds with it. When you close the blinds/curtains to keep the sunlight (glare) off the TV/computer screen they could be generating power for you.
Even Homer Simpson knows this plan doesn't work:
"Lisa, in this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"
Help find a cure for Gidget.
In which case the population is still to blame!
"You are watching Fox!"
"We..are..watching..Fox."
I don't know about the $8 per gallon to support the entire petroleum industry, but according to the British government the security cost of middle eastern oil is $1 per gallon. Almost all of this cost is paid by the US, but the Europeans, Japanese and everyone else reaps the benefits.
Might be worth reminding them the next time they launch into an anti-american tirade.
11 "funny" comments in a row. And now to make this comment topical: arse.
I did my PhD on polarization effects, so know a bit about them. Whether I can explain in layman's terms is another matter, but here goes...
Light may be considered to act as both a particle and a wave, but for our purposes we'll stick to waves.
Imagine looking at an unfiltered, unpolarized light source. The light is travelling towards you but each little bit of light is a wave which may be orientated up and down, or side to side, or anywhere inbetween, as it travels. (I'm ignoring what is known as circular polarization for now.) You can consider a polarization filter as a grill. Only the waves which line up with the grill will get through intact. Waves which are partly aligned will pass through the amount that does line up. Waves which are at right-angles to the grill will not get through at all. The light which does not get through is absorbed. If you take evenly distributed unpolarized light, which is what solar cells pretty much get from the sun, then you can only get 50% of the light through into linear polarization with a single filter. You can change one polarization into another efficiently, but the initial conversion from unpolarized to fuly polarized causes 50% loss.
However, a 50% polarization followed by an 80% conversion within the solar cell still gives you an overall 40%, which is much better than current cells.
Here's something to think about: If you shine light through 2 polarizers which are crossed at right-angles then no light gets through. This is because the light coming through the first polarizer is all aligned at 90 degrees to the orientation of the second polarizer and is hence completely blocked. If you now add a third filter at 45 degrees between the other two then you start getting light through. Adding a filter has increased the amount passing through. Explaining why, I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.
This sig is a figment of your imagination.
Or, we could put them on the roof of our houses... There are already big black rectangles there.
Why should these get centralized? Keep the power infrastructure as it is, powered primarily by flow from the solar panels placed on every home on the grid. Every house charges when it can, feeds back energy when fully charged, draws from internal batteries when the sun is obscured, and draws from the grid when the batteries are dead.
Many people already do this - I just helped install one. 70% efficiency photocells would make the house I just installed gather and "bank" 3-5 times it's own expenditure in energy.
It's be nice to have one on the roof of a hybrid gas/electric car (or in my case, a gas/electric truck, once they get around to it). Gas consumption would certainly drop considerably.
I don't know who those folks you refer to that make knee-jerk, thoughtless reactions are, but if you're listening to idiots, that's your own fault.
But we need to outlaw SUVs, you say.
No, no, no. I certainly don't think that. What I said was Americans aren't interested in lowering our oil consumption because if they were SUVs and trucks wouldn't be the top selling vehicles. The only thing that could break that habit is legislation. I was just stating making a declaritive statement. I never advocated for it though.
I put some in my perpertual motion machine, right next ot by cold fusion generator and electromagnetic gravity nullifier.
The range is a bit wider than 7-17%. The amorphous silicon cells typically used on houses and in cheap devices like handheld calculators are typically around 5% or lower. In contrast, during the 2001 American Solar Challenge, there were two teams with space-grade Gallium Arsenide arrays, at 24% and 26% efficiency. Interestingly enough, they were small Christian colleges who apparently knew the right people. The winning University of Michigan team, which apparently had a million dollar budget, and exceeded it, couldn't even afford something that high grade. So there is higher stuff out there. It's expensive as hell though.
On a side note, the second place University of Missouri at Rolla team only had a 14% efficient array, which places their power output near the bottom of the open class. The lesson here is that we could save an awful lot of money by learning to do more with the energy we already have available to us.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
If the majority of consumers adopted photovoltaics as an energy source, wouldn't that create an immense amount of reflected light on the surface of the Earth? If so, it is possible that the reflected energy would affecting daytime weather patterns and possibly even create cloudier conditions or augment global warming.
We live in a small 5th wheel trailer. 90% of our energy required to watch TV, run computers, etc. comes from solar power. Our heating needs are supplied by propane (catalytic heater). It cost a couple of shades over $3K for our solar outfit, which consists of two Kyocera 120 watt panels on the roof. The output is fed into 6 T125 Golf Cart batteries, which can drive a 2000 watt inverter for our AC needs. Rarely do we have to plug in. Unfortunately, the truck that we have to haul it does burn diesel, but I don't have to commute and we try to park within walking distances of a small market. Getting solar energy is great!
Americans LOVE higher fuel usage vehicles - like SUVs.
Eat at Joe's.
The NPR program,Earth and Sky, had this report on power from space. http://earthsky.org/Shows/Latest/
Dublin;
.sig really intrigues me. But then, provocative statements always do. :)
Your
You imply that you've given a great deal of thought to all of the open source/closed source conflicts. I'd love to open a dialog with you to understand your position.
If you're interested, contact me at:
jsmilan at visi dot com
Thx
There already is a SUV/truck that gets far better fuel mileage than the standard gas version. My last truck was a Ford F250 Diesel, and I would routinely approach 30 miles per gallon, (although a proper World Standard 4.54L gallon, not that bastardized 3.9L thin you yanks seem to like), and that was city driving!
I realize that Diesel's not the cleanest furl in the worl, but I also suspect that not much research has been put into rectifying that either.
What the hell's wrong with golf cart style cars anyway? Most city driving is done at speeds of less than 60 km/h, (that's 37 mph to those of you who refuse to get on the Global Standard for measurement), with one person in the car, carrying only a few packages.
Maybe more golf cart style cars is just what the doctor ordered. Do they have the Smart Car over here yet? I know DaimlerChrysler is working on getting the Mercedes A Class over here. How about something like the VW Lupo as well? Europe and Japan have scads of ultra fuel efficient cars, and we're missing out! These cars might suck on the highway, but then, that's not what they were designed for.
As I also mentioned in another post, I believe Diesel is a hugely untapped alternative in North America. It got a really bad rap back in the early 80s when GM, being the money grubbing scumfucks that they are, applied shoddy, stopgap engineering to get a Diesel out on the market ASAP. All those poor saps who bought one of those Olds Diesel 350s don't know what they're missing by driving a proper Diesel.
I'm with you that there are no simple answers, but I think the one that is going to take hold is hydrogyn, and I think that more efficient solar panels are critical to hydrogyn's success.
You're right, it does take electricity to create hydrogyn from water. We have to get that energy from somewhere, but I think everyone agrees the best solution here is not to extract energy from fossel fuels, only to store it in fuel cells, but to use renewable energy sources such as solar energy. If we are only 15-30% efficient in capturing that energy now, there is an enormous opportunity here for improvement in cost per unit of energy. Imagine if panels were efficient enough and cheap enough that it was feasable for land owners to install panels that feed the grid as a source of income. Imagine the possibilities for impoverished nations to take adavantage of their solar exposure and become suppliers of the world's hydrogyn market, but neither of these can happen unless there is enough research and government and public support to make panels dramatically more efficient and economically feasable.
Due to thermodynamics, there is a theoretical maximum efficiency for converting light into electricity. I don't know what it is, but I'm pretty sure that it's less than 50%, and I thought I heard it was around 35%. The best cells today are in the high 20s. Perhaps somebody more familiar with the subject could weigh in.
In short, if you hear somebody claiming such outragously high numbers, they are either idiots or out to separate idiots from their money.
You are much more likely to kill the other guy when driving an SUV, as opposed to an economy car, in which you are more likely to die.
Some recent studies disagree with this belief. You are actually not much safer in an SUV than in a well-made compact (think Honda Civic, Toyota Corolla), and less safe than in a larger import. The safest vehicle for its own occupants is a minivan, which incidentally is usually roomier, more comfortable, and more efficient than an SUV.
This, plus the fact that as you say, an SUV is more likely to kill others (the only vehicles worse in that regard are actual pickup trucks and sports cars), mean the proliferation of SUVs on the highways has actually made everyone less safe, including the SUV drivers.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
And regardless of the general US economic state, with spin doctors, heavy financial support from said beneficiaries of the war, and the tendency of people to rally around the president during wartime -- even if it is a war he pushed -- he is almost guaranteed reelection, despite the economy, due to financial backing from buddies profiting from "transactions of decline".
You mean guaranteed reelection like his daddy, who was beaten by a philandering idiot from Arkansas?
Ford sells a hybrid Escape [hybridford.com] that you can buy today. It gets about 35 mpg I believe.
That's funny, looking at the link you gave and going to the FAQ they say it will be available to retail customers in mid-year 2004. But, I heard a news story the other day that said the hybrid Escape program was being cancelled.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
Which is why my post also said:
But there certainly is a perception of safety.
I also mentioned several examples of them being outright dangerous to their own occupants. However auto companies trade on the public's perception of the safety of a gigantic SUV.
As for minivans, they are interesting from a safety point of view. They have the same high center of gravity that SUVs have yet they roll over less frequently. This might have more to do with how the two vehicles are driven and percieved by their owners than with the abilities of the vehicles themselves.
Back to my marketing point (from a previous post), it is very hard to make minivans cool, even to people who need a minivan. That is one of the big reasons for the success of the SUV. It has many of the benefits of a minivan with the additional "cool factor" that people feel they need when spending tens of thousands of dollars on a vehicle.
I certainly agree that the proliferation of SUVs makes everyone less safe. If all passenger vehicles (as opposed to work trucks) had to be included in the fuel efficiency calculations together with cars all of this would change real fast. But it won't happen.
Lasers Controlled Games!
If they're that parsimonious about getting ripped off, then they ought to be checking odometer readings.
Tell me, who doesn't defraud their insurance company by saying "I only drive this car to and from work 15 miles a day" when it's really 30-40?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
> US consumers don't want a wimpy EV1 [...]a vev/rav 4ev_0_home/index.html
> They want the bulk, power, and capacity of an
> SUV.
>
So get one (at least as secondary car):
http://www.toyota.com/html/shop/vehicles/r
Looks cool too and you have your own charging station. Pricetag's a bit steep but there it is anyway!
If they are so desperate why don't they put more funding into the research? Its has always been my impression that Japan has been after oil almost as much as the US. These countries don't want clean energy, they want cheap energy and they'll use oil to get it. Its laziness, lack of creativity, whatever you want to call it. But it is not progress.
Uh, no... Is it a child's fault if you don't educate 'em? The people are like children, ignorant of the world around them. It is not their fault that the media they trust flat out lies to them or doesn't give them all the facts.
But go ahead, blame the population. Blame them to death, if that'll make you feel better. It does nothing to help us fix the problem.
Why do otherwise intelligent people continue to believe in things that seem silly or impractical?
"Why?" you ask? Because somebody has to.
Too many people in history and especially now-a-days elimated the far-off possibility just because it seemed impractical. The problem with doing this is that by simply eliminating from your mind and speaking out against the possiblity of the options with low-probabilities of occurance or requiring high amounts of effort such as "alternative fuels," you elimate any hope for the alternatives to happen; and all but insure that things will remain the same.
I was recently engaged in a conversation with my father who now believes that war is now inevitable and that peace in the Middle East will never happen. He still does not understand how by himself eliminating the even the slim possiblity for peace in his mind he is contributing to the problem of war on this world.
Dare to dream, young one. You're really all the hope we've got in this world.
-AP
A CANDU and a PWR both burn the same fuel(s): U-235 and some part of the plutonium they breed. The PWR requires enriched uranium because the light-water moderator absorbs too many neutrons to sustain a chain reaction without it. A CANDU eliminates the neutron absorbance problem using deuterium (heavy water) instead, so it can get by with natural uranium (AAMOF, a CANDU can burn "spent" PWR fuel).
And the Manhattan reactors were graphite-moderated, not D2O-moderated IIRC.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
- Texas is a net importer of oil these days.
- Major automakers don't build electrics because gasoline is cheaper at the pump and much more convenient for long or irregular trips.
- Cars like the "Think" are dinky and expensive because they are low-volume production items. Low-volume production cars are expensive for the same reasons.
- Detroit makes (or re-badges) cars like the "Think" and the EV-1 rather than hybrids because government policy demands ZEVs, and not even the Honda Insight is a ZEV.
The right question to ask is "What policy changes will fix the perverse incentives and give us the optimal result?" The answer is not simple, but given the situation of the USA it is going to incorporate some mix of the following:- A carbon tax, harmonized with the rest of the industrialized world. This will promote wind, solar and nuclear and devalue coal and oil (and natural gas to a lesser extent).
- Duties on imported goods from nations which have not implemented the carbon tax, so as not to create a perverse incentive to produce goods less efficiently in nations not under the regime.
- A risk tax on petroleum in particular, because so much of it comes from nations which support terrorism and/or are dictatorships (including Venezuela for all intents and purposes). This will make gasoline cost quite a bit more at the pump.
- A large reduction in taxes on e.g. wages, so that net purchasing power of the average consumer doesn't change much... but the incentives change a lot due to the difference at the margin.
- Programs to use all fuels more efficiently. I know for a fact that we can squeeze twice as much out of a gallon of petroleum or a cubic foot of natural gas, it is just a matter of doing it. If the marginal cost goes up a lot, everyone will be looking for ways to do just that and you will see results.
One of these days I hope to have time to lay out all the facts behind the positive assertions like that last.Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
You just repeated everything I said, except put it more elequently.
BTW did you watch dateline NBC last night? Did you see all those middle class families in Ohio standing in line for bread? Thank you GWB for letting MORE h1b's and green cards into the country instead of hiring locally. I hope america wakes up and impeaches his ass.
It's no longer the homeless and degenerates standing in line for a handout, it's everybody.
In addition to the emmissions, there are also the costs of exploration and refining which are often given tax breaks, the military costs of involvement in areas of "national security" around the world, and all sorts of really-hard-to-pin-down subsidies and incentives. All forms of energy production have things like this, but the "alternative" forms tend to be much less heavily subsidized in this indirect manner.
So what's the ratio of people that have to pull 80,000 pounds over the Rockies?
So that small number of people would prohibit the conversion to electric vehicles how?
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Just look at all the aluminum cans we toss in the trash every year... Did u know we (the USA) import all of it. And considering how much energy goes in to extracting ore, just think of how much energy we could save every year by just recycling our cans. FORGET these new technologies that don't exist or possibly never will. Encourage everyone to recycle!!!
Not to mention that South Korea is the world's #1 builder of ships, the #5 builder of automobiles, the #3 builder of computer chips, the ... well, you get the gist. They are a modern technological nation. They could build an atomic bomb if they had the desire to do so without any help from anybody at all, just as India did under much the same circumstances (using a CANDU reactor much like the ones that South Korea owns, by the way). But they don't have the incentive to do so, because the United States has a few sacrificial goat troops stationed on South Korean soil -- thus insuring that if North Korea tosses nukes at South Korea, North Korea will get swiftly fried by massive U.S. retaliation.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
I don't think it's accidental that the major automakers are exploring alternative technologies in a major way. They can see the writing on the wall too. Luckily oil fields don't just "stop" producing. They slowly dribble out. This will give time to find alternative sources of energy. There will probably be some disruption of economic life in the meantime though.
BTW, Montana or Northern Idaho are lousy places to wait out the Oil Wars. Someplace rural in the Southeast is probably preferable -- long growing season, plentiful rainfall, does not get inordinantly cold at night. The only downside is all the rednecks. Better rednecks than skinheads tho, in my opinion.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
On the other hand, we have exhausted what can be done with those technologies. We've steamed pretty much all the oil out of the older oilfields we've applied the new techniques to. Those fields are basically exhausted. There is no "magic bullet" that will allow us to extract more oil out of those fields, because the oil just ain't there anymore.
I could go dig up some facts about the total amount of oil extracted from the continental U.S. since the beginning of the oil industry, and how few years that would have lasted at our current oil consumption levels, and how our oil consumption levels continue going up, but this thread is dead by now so ...
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
As for minivans, they are interesting from a safety point of view. They have the same high center of gravity that SUVs have yet they roll over less frequently.
I think a minivan's COG is considerably lower than an SUV's. Look at the difference in ground clearance. A minivan is typically just as tall, but the height is in the interior of the vehicle, not underneath the chassis. The engine, transmission, seats, passengers, fuel tank, etc., are all closer to the ground in the minivan.
Once or twice I've had to make emergency maneuvers in my old Dodge Caravan which would have sent an Explorer tumbling across the road. I'm pretty sure they're inherently less prone to rollover. Not only that, but minivans are more likely to crumple and absorb collision forces, whereas SUVs, being built heavily like trucks, will transmit the forces into the passenger area.
Back to my marketing point (from a previous post), it is very hard to make minivans cool, even to people who need a minivan. That is one of the big reasons for the success of the SUV.
Yes, absolutely. I have a friend who recently bought a Sequoia. He said he wanted a big vehicle since he and the wife were planning to start a family, but he 'wouldn't look cool in a minivan.' Which is rather funny, because among the guys I hung out with back in the day, he was always the leading candidate for 'Least Likely to be Accused of Being Cool.'
But apparently the marketing works. Myself, I can't see how having bigger tires, smaller doors, and a higher step up into the vehicle make it more 'cool'. In fact, soccer-moms look absolutely ridiculous hefting their 5'2" frames into a gigantic truck, but apparently don't realize it....
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
This is no longer true! Ethanol produces between 4 and 10% more energy than it consumes:p df
http://www.usda.gov/oce/oepnu/aer-813.
There are other problems with having a roof that consists of solar cells as well. When the current public library in my town was built it was fitted with solar cells. Unfortunatly, these solar cells had an unexpected side effect: They trapped moisture underneath them causing mildew to grow. (wich is not a good thing, especially in a library where mildew can damage and destroy books) making it nessisary for the solar cells to be removed.
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
see www.astropower.com (APWR), as far as I can tell it is not a division of Exxon Mobil, and it is growing pretty fast. The real problem with PV cells was always economy of scale... God knows there's enough useless desert and enough sunlight to power up the world.