Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Intel would anyone want Intel Inside solar panels.
The sun is strongest on the outside(sorry...bad joke)
...can we overclock these solar panels or do they come with anti-overclocking protection built-in?
"Intel Outside"
Its all fun and games until someone loses an eye... then its just fun.
Solar panels take a HUGE amount of energy to produce, and don't have an infinite lifespan. They will end up not returning all the energy it took to actually make them.
Solar energy can power your home even during overcast, so that shouldn't matter for those living in Michigan or wherever. However, besides the fact that Intel isn't doing so well recently, solar panel fabrication costs more energy than they provide before breaking down, so solar panels aren't the way to go if the environment or global heating is your concern. They may be however when we want to prevent economic wars like Iraq, as Nobel prize winner recently said.
Fusion? Dipshit. Fusion is certainly clean ... certainly uncontaminated of any useful results after 30 years of research. It certainly is wasting your time, since it has wasted your tax money. Wake up. Big Science is a scam ... a hidden welfare system. Demonetize the welfare queens we call "researchers". If fusion was really so promising, it would also be lucrative for a company to provide, hence it would be worth investing in. Q.E.D.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
First big problem - why is is that Silicon Valley should do this, vice everyone else that already knows how to build solar cells and has been doing so for years? A few years ago, my aerospace company decided to go into the railroad car business, to "bring them in to the 20th century". Well, predictably, companies that have been building railroad cars since the Civil War turned out to know *far* more about it than we did, and our "improvements" were nonsense. This seems like the same sort of arrogance/hubris.
Second, and far more fundamental, *it takes far more energy to make a solar cell than it can ever possibly collect*. So, to build these renewable, "environmentally-friendly" solar cells, results in fantastically *greater* use of fossil fuels (mostly coal) or nuclear plants. And it's not just start-up costs - it's still a net big loser even with the entire life-cycle. The cell degrades before it ever breaks even.
And if you have to build nuke plants to make solar cells, you might as well send the energy directly to the grid and cut out the intermediate process.
I want to help the environment at least as much as anyone, but doing things that are conceptually faulty won't get it done.
Brett
Yes, you read that right. I hate to rain on the parade here with a dose of reality, but solar power is not nearly "clean" as so many seem to think it is. Yes, the sunlight itself is "clean", but the massive quantities of materials needed to collect and convert it to usable energy are not so clean. It turns out that solar is far and away more harmful to the environment that nuclear power.
Don't believe me? Go to my webpage, Ignorance about Nuclear Power is Killing Us and click on the link called "The Hazards of Nuclear Power" by Prof. Bernard L. Cohen. Then take a look at the table near the end of the paper.
Then direct everyone you know to the same link. Your help is needed to defeat ignorance.
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News