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Is the Future of Silicon Valley Solar?
Noryungi writes "In this provocative article, Brian McConnell argues that Silicon Valley, instead of staying in the saturated IT field, should apply its resources (including its chip-producing plants) into Solar Power/Renewable energy. Intel branded Solar Panels, anyone?"
"Solar electricity can be produced by means of photovoltaic arrays (based on the photoelectric effect discovered by Albert Einstein) or by using conventional heat engines whereby solar energy is used to power a turbine. Solar heat is simpler still, requiring only a blackbody and a mechanism for storing and transferring heat"
Einstein didn't dicsover photoelectric effect, he has EXPLAINED it (and earned a Nobel Prize for it).
Intel and AMD both still run their own production facilities. In fact, Intel makes sure that the layout of the fabs is identical, so that production parameters are transferable from one fab to another. As a result, their fabs are designed for producing microprocessors, and making major changes in this general alignment would be rather difficult. IBM, on the other hand, runs a more diversified system of fabs.
You are probably confusing this with companies such as ARM. They are merely a chip design and intellectual property company now, however in spite of the "merely" this is still an enormous economic asset in today's tech arena.
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
FYI, this is already done in a way, as far as Intel helping to build solar panels goes.
Astropower is a US solar panel manufacturer that gets many of its solar cell silicon wafers through recycling programs with Intel. TI, etc. See here. They basically take bad/test wafers, clean them up, and use them for silicon solar cells.
I'm building a 100% solar home and already have a kW of capacity installed, and went with Astropower for several reasons, the above included.
The article goes on and on about how Silicon Valley can capitalize on the solar energy business (and other forms of high-efficincy energy production). There are a couple new and exciting renewable energy companies in the valley.
The first order of business for an energy consumer should be to minimize energy consumption. The economics are simple: a reduction in demand will reduce costs.
Many people are shocked when they learn that it's very easy to save $1000 in energy costs a year by spending less than $100 and an hour's worth of time. This guy and this guy seemed to do just about nothing for 50% energy savings.
Even though it's always exciting to look at the state of the art in the energy business, it's more useful (but less exciting) to look at how it impacts you personally.
You don't have to live off-grid to make use of solar power. You already have electricity piped in from generating plants... solar is a supplement to that, to cut down on the need for additional power plants and lines to come in to growing areas. There are some areas that the electric company has realized its cheaper to get a lot of their customers to install solar than it is to build new power plants to supply the energy they'd use, and also with excess energy being sold back to the grid, it helps produce some of the electricity for them, out in the areas that consume the power.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
The article had no mention of Cypress Semiconductor, one of my poorer performing investments. Cypress has, in the last few years, made more news as a customer of photovoltaics than as a vendor. Powerlight has been converting/adding PV power to bay area buildings for over 10 years. But Cypress has a PV subsidiary ..so I am not dumping their stock just yet.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Using these wonderful cells to power fluorescent lamps, set up the lamps to shine on the cells. Electricity out, no power in. Perpetual motion!
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Actually, solar panels last decades without deteriorating significantly._ new.htm l
Also, the payback myth is just that - a myth:
http://www.otherpower.com/otherpower_solar
I have 6kw on top of my house, and I expect they will probably be working even after I'm gone. I'm only 34 now.
It also sells electricity back to the grid during peak consumption times. Perfect.
Get your facts straight; Google all you want for other studies, but I like the one at
NREL.
There's about a dozen others saying about the same thing; energy payback within about 4 years, production lifetime of about 25. And no reputable study saying they don't make their energy back in their lifetime....
As quoted in Home Power Magazine
Some skeptics of solar energy claim that it takes more energy to make a photovoltaic module (PV) than it can ever produce in its lifetime. The truth is that PVs typically recoup their embodied energy in two to four years. According to an article published by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), today's single and multicrystalline modules have an energy payback of about four years, and thin-film modules about two years. Most PV modules in the field are made from hyper-pure crystalline silicon. Purifying and crystallizing the silicon consumes the most energy in making these PVs. Thin-film PVs are made from considerably less semiconductor material, and therefore have less embodied energy in them. Most of the energy consumed is in the thin-film surface. The aluminum frame on any PV accounts for about six months of its payback time. Solar energy is an amazing technology considering that PVs go on to produce clean, pollution-free energy for at least 25 to 30 years after they have achieved payback.
For more information on energy payback, see the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's Web site (www.nrel.gov) and Karl Knapp & Theresa Jester's article titled "PV Payback"in HP80. --Eric Grisen eric.grisen@homepower.com
Also, concerns about lifetime and hail resistance are red herrings. Most panels are warranted for full rated output for at least 20 years and most have performed well beyond those timeframes. Also all panels are UL tested to meet UL hail resistance specifications (which I believe covers hail up to 2" in diameter).
Finally, no one bitches when a gas-fired generator fails to recoup its energy cost of manufacture--it requires billions of additional therms of natural gas over its operating lifetime to produce electricty and never pays back its manufacturing energy cost. It is disingenuous to ask that only of solar (and odd since solar can actually do it!
Or at least, not yet.
r y2.cfm ?section=about&level2=box2
The achilles heel of any current alternate energy deployment is the reliance on the grid to act as the "energy backup" when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing. Unfortunately, we don't have a two way grid; nor is it smart enough to safely handle multiple energy sources being fed up into it from unplanned nodes (like your house for example). The current solar and wind systems out there can get away with it because there aren't many of them. Having to bring up "peaker" power stations on calm or cloudy days actually increases the pollution production of the combined "clean energy"/grid system considerably.
Batteries are still way to expensive and damaging to the environment to allow a significant percentage of consumers to go off of the grid entirely.
I presented a paper on distributed grids in Stockholm a few years ago. In the course of this gathering I had a chance to talk with one of the energy authorities from Denmark. Denmark gets 20% of it's power from wind farms. They were having a lot of trouble controlling the energy flows. Smart distribution is essential. Safe energy storage is also required to scale the system.
Fortunately, the US government is already working on these issues. Some things worth looking at:
The Grid 2030 conference we had two years ago:
http://www.electricity.doe.gov/about/boxsto
The Gridwise Council:
http://www.gridwise.org/
It's also interesting to note that the most efficient technology we have for power production we have right now is co-generation, and the most environmentally friendly and economical large scale power systems are nuclear. Hmmm.
-- Loudog
Second, and far more fundamental, *it takes far more energy to make a solar cell than it can ever possibly collect*.
While this rumor has been circulating for a number of years, it is not even remotely true. Depending on what PV technology is used and specifics of geography and geometry, it takes anywhere from 6 months to about 8 years for a solar panel to produce the energy required to make it. This is very well established. The panels themselves have expected lifetimes of 20-30 years.
The cell degrades before it ever breaks even.
Not only does the cell not degrade before it produces the energy required to make it, it lasts so long that its lifetime is essentially unknown. Other materials in the PV module degrade, but as I said, expected module lifetimes are 20-30 years; in fact, manufacturer warranties are generally in the 20-25 year range.