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What Gore Didn't Say About Solar Cells
AmericanInKiev writes "Computer World posted a piece on Al Gore and his claim that solar cells will improve at the same rate as microprocessors. Vinod Khosla on the other hand has expressed disappointment that the doubling rate for price/performance of PV is 10 years rather than 18 months for transistors. Which of these two has the facts on their side?" Before anyone has him inventing the Internet again, note that Gore's claim as related in the article is much milder than that Moore's Law applies to solar cells per se -- namely, he's quoted as saying "We're now beginning to see the same kind of sharp cost reductions as the demand grows for solar cells." An optimistic statement, but not a flat-out silly one.
...it's the best news for the development of this kind of technology imaginable.
You can't get (smart, institutional) investors on board on the promise of likely/possible breakthroughs in technology. However, if you can demonstrate that the price per kilowatt-hour will be competitive with fossil fuels in the reasonable near future then you will get the level of investment required to finally take these technologies mainstream.
I believe we are already at that point. Here in Australia we suddenly have wind farms and novel renewable energy projects appearing IRL all over the place when previously they were often announced but rarely built.
Read Pynchon.
It would seem the choice of attacks against Mr Gore would be strawman arguments. Does that suggest that people are finding it hard to tackle his views directly or fairly and so have to resort to such ridiculous attacks?
(I actually know very little about Gore, this is really just a question based on him being the target of such things so often)
"Think about what happened in the computer revolution," Gore said on NBC's Meet the Press program recently. "We saw cost reductions for silicon computer chips of 50% for every year and a half for the last 40 years," he said.
That's Moore's law to the inth degree. True, we didn't assert that Moore's law applies to PV, but He 's asking a nation to embrace an energy policy based on this comparison.
It's the only way we can stop global warming!
It's not global warming anymore, it's climate change.
That way we have a name that describes both global warming and global cooling, so that either way we have an excuse to increase regulation.
Granted, he never said "I invented the internet", but it's not hard to get that from "I took the initiative in creating the internet". What he presumably meant was something like "I took the initiative in starting programs that ultimately led to the creation of the internet", which is sort of what the following sentence more vaguely tries to say. But just the flat-out "I took the initiative in creating the internet" does read like a claim that he, well, created the internet.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Gallium is vastly superior to silicon, in much the same way as it is as a semiconductor. Cost is a problem, though If we assume that all superior semiconductors are superior in solar cells, graphene should prove interesting once it matures. At present, solar technology that converts light into heat (solar heaters, solar stoves) are much more efficient than devices that convert light into electricity. Since heating and cooking consume enormous amounts of power, there may be ways to use this type of implementation to reduce the demand for electricity in the first place, rather than to inefficiently provide for that demand. Such methods aren't terribly portable, but neither are houses, restaurants or public baths. So long as you can store the heat without too much loss, reducing demand would seem the most sensible way to solve the energy problem.
In parallel with solar methods for reducing demand, there is the question of energy wastage. I've already mentioned heating water is a big consumer of electricity. The heat required to raise water even one degree celsius is enormous. Most coal, gas and nuclear power stations have staggeringly large cooling towers in which water is converted to steam and released into the atmosphere for that very reason - turning cold water into steam requires a staggering amount of heat, which reduces the temperature of whatever they want to keep cool. Very elegant. Also very wasteful. Rig the cooling towers to a pipe system and you've the biggest, hottest hypocaust ever made. The water is still carrying the heat away, so the towers still work as intended, all you are doing is making that heat available for domestic and industrial use rather than pumping it into the atmosphere.
Spent nuclear fuel also emits significant heat, it would seem more logical to recycle the fuel rods as water heating devices than dump them somewhere and ignore them, although preventing contamination would be extremely hard. Hard is not impossible, however, and it seems better to try and solve a hard problem (and risk succeeding) than to do nothing and face impossible energy demand problems year-after-year.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
This is very typical of Al Gore and many of his ilk. While he is busy flying around in private jets and having his Lincoln idle for 20 minutes, he doesn't seem to have a clue about economics. I read a great series of pieces on how much many of these "green" technologies really cost. The site was http://www.economicefficiency.blogspot.com/ This was the same site that had "Hybrid Hummer Hums."
I'm with you on nuclear.
But my Prius performs perfectly well, thankyouverymuch. Of all the criticisms I've heard, yours is among the strangest and easiest to debunk.
It's important to remember what you imagined/pretended he said so you can write a response to that instead of what he actually said IRL.
anata sekai o kakumei surush ga nai deshou? Anata no susumu michi wa yoi shite arimasu.
Whoa there, this statement IS NOT a fact. Public works projects can help a slumping economy, but only if the public works project is needed, and absolutely helps expand the economy. There is more to it than that, but creating jobs does not necessarily expand the economy but can result in simple wealth redistribution. For example, if the government hired 10,000 people to dig a giant ditch, and than hired another 10,000 people to fill in the ditch, jobs would be created, but would it help the economy? The government doesn't magically have money, they need to obtain it somewhere. In this instance they've created 20,000 jobs, but added nothing to the economy. In fact, under such a situation, they've likely decreased the economy. Even if unemployment is really high, some of these people are likely not doing other (productive) jobs to dig a ditch and fill it in instead. This decreases the net value of the economy. Additionally, where is the money to pay these workers coming from? They either tax the people (reducing the money they have to create new jobs, and buy goods, decreasing the size of the economy) or print money, causing inflation, resulting in an inflation tax instead.
Of course, the real world is much more difficult, and I am not an economist, but I know not all economists believe that public works projects are good for the economy. The publics works projects in the great depression did not cure the depression, however government military spending did help bring us out of the depression (although, I imagine the average standard of living decreased during the war years, as the money was going into the war). One factor of public works projects that can also helps the economy (beyond the help the public works project itself does) in the long term, is the training that workers might receive working on the project, making them more productive afterward.
What I do know about pushing people into public works projects on renewable resources is that it would create jobs, and result in more renewable energy. However, if the cost of the energy is greater, than everyone is paying in higher overall costs (or taxes). It must also be noted that in a slumping economy, the costs of implementing large public works projects is cheaper, as there are often large numbers of unemployed people (who in the US are often earning money from the government already from the welfare system). This means the net cost of implementing these projects is cheaper due to being able to pay lower wages, and even cheaper still because you don't have to pay these people welfare benefits.
Maybe a real economist could plug through the numbers and predict if your proposed projects would help the economy (even than they'd be guessing). However, claiming it's a fact that public works projects help the economy is definitely not true.
Phil
Trees are good, but there's a problem with one of your arguments. Absorbing sunlight does not reduce the greenhouse effect. Absorbing sunlight means more energy is added into the system that would have previously been reflected. Trees COULD reduce greenhouse effect by taking in more carbon dioxide. However, by absorbing more solar energy at the surface, you'd get more terrestrial energy emitted. The retention of this terrestrial energy IS the greenhouse effect - solar energy has nothing to do with it. In fact, less trees = higher albedo for earth = earth reflects more sunlight = less terrestrial radiation. The albedo effect is HUGE (just look at the radiation that happens on an ice sheet, or the desert) in maintaining some solar balance. Let's consider an example. A forested area has a broadband shortwave albedo of around 10-14%. A desert area has an albedo of somewhere of 25-30+%. Taking the solar constant of 342 W/m2, you're talking about around a 30-40 W/m2 difference of solar absorption at the surface. That's 30 joules per second per square meter. To give some real-world example, you could heat one kilogram of water 1 degree Celsius if you harnessed that heat difference over one square meter after only a minute. It's a big difference in terms of radiative forcing. More trees would be good, but not for that reason.
Any one that has tried using a magnifying glass to light tings on fire, should know that you have to aim it pretty well for this to work, which means you will have to have a solar setup that can follow the suns movement, or your actual cell will get out of focus quite fast and you will have -no- efficiency, as opposed to regular cells that can absorb energy from a wide angle(I don't know anything about the efficiency of regular cell when the angle becomes steep).
www.aleo.no
Nuclear development is still where most resources should be poured into. Advanced breeder reactors, and longer term, fusion projects like ITER, are the only solution that can provide for a long time the amounts of energy needed to sustain progress and accommodate the exploding energy needs of underdeveloped and third world countries as they start industrializing. You'd have to cover the planet in solar panels and windmills if you wanted to use those technologies instead. It almost makes me wonder if that isn't the reason greens are pushing them--they know they would curb progress due to inadequate generation capacity. Never underestimate the megalomania of luddites and back-to-nature creeps.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
That might not be necessarily true. If the manufacturing technique required to produce such items does not scale well, then the demand could go through the roof, but the costs will also.
"The problem with nuclear is waste, which we currently have no way of disposal."
Not true.
The fuel can be recycled which really cuts down the waste stream just like they do in France and Japan. The waste can be "burned" some of the new reactor designs.
We don't use the different options for disposal that are available.
"Picture solar concentrators in orbit sending focused beams of intensified sunlight to solar stations on the planet surface which is converted and stored for use later."
Picture death beams. Think ants and a magnifying glass.
Think of frying any birds that fly into that beam.
Think of Greenpeace protests and the ASPCA screaming bloody murder.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.