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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.
But to start us off on topic, is there any evidence that the cells will increase beyond their current 10% conversion rate?
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
In response to the controversy, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn argued that, "We don't think, as some people have argued, that Gore intended to claim he 'invented' the Internet. Moreover, there is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore's initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet."[101] In addition, Newt Gingrich, former Republican Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, stated: "In all fairness, it's something Gore had worked on a long time. Gore is not the Father of the Internet, but in all fairness, Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet, and the truth is -- and I worked with him starting in 1978 when I got [to Congress], we were both part of a "futures group" -- the fact is, in the Clinton administration, the world we had talked about in the '80s began to actually happen." - Wikipedia
Bruce Perens.
...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.
Moore's Law talks about the complexity, not speed or performance. That's why it doesn't apply to either solar cells or digital camera sensors.
Digital camera sensors, especially, as it's not the complexity that kills ya, it's that it can't get physically smaller and still capture as much light (independent of the # of pixels). CPUs get cheaper because they get physically smaller, and thus require less silicon. The same deal with silicon PV cells - you don't want to make them smaller, you want to make them more efficient at converting light to electricity. Solar cells will indeed get cheaper (MUCH cheaper) very quickly (within the next few years, you'll see several competing technologies, in fact), but not due to silicon processes, but because they're going to be made without silicon (or with much less silicon, or silicon of a much lower grade than CPU-grade silicon (they've been competing for the same Silicon resources all this time)). I'm just sayin'.
So Al's Internet is responsible for all the massive datacenters causing global warming huh?
Bite me
I firmly believe that solar is going to boom in the next few years and start covering every piece of cheap land on the globe. I feel that there is a lot of money to be made in energy in the short run when solar supplements the grid. And there is money to be made in energy in the long run as we phase into plugin hybrids and the demand on the grid gets huge. Of course like most nerds, I have a "not in my lifetime" long run view of an eventual Dyson Sphere of solar power in space which probably doesn't start out trying to be one, but instead starts out as Sim City microwave power plants. On a reverse note, people think the innermost planets cannot be habitable due to their temperatures from the sun, but can't we just pull a Mr. Burns and block out the sun? We could then send energy through focused beams to collectors.
God spoke to me.
doubling rate for price/performance of PV is 10 years rather than 18 months for transistors.
Ten years isn't a bad rate. It's not like oil is going down, so PV has a fixed target. We don't expect to get out of the oil addiction in 5 or less years anyhow. We need to invest in the future. Investment may hopefully speed up progress, but if not, a 10 year rate looks fairly good right now.
Table-ized A.I.
His idea for a 10 year Kennedy-esque-moon-mission-analog of rapidly transforming our energy base from one of fossil fuels to renewable energy is not only a great idea economically for the long term but also great for the short term. Any time a country is in an economic slump, the best way to relieve it is by instituting widespread public works projects. Not only do they create short term wealth and job opportunities, but they have sustained maintenance work as well as the overall betterment of society through the finalization of said public work.
A recent poll (I think it was from last Thursday) said that over 90% of Americans are FOR the rapid mobilization of wind and solar power. It seems everyone's on board for this.
Except BOTH PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES. Which is quite mind-blowing since the populous as a whole is ALL FOR IT and if either did support such a plan, it would net them a HUGE amount of voters from both political parties. It seems everyone I talk to has energy on their mind, a couple have said that they'll vote for whichever candidate would push for Gore's plan or one like it.
Which leaves me to wonder, if neither Obama nor McCain seem to have any desire to embrace it, is it finally time for a viable third candidate, one who represents the publics opinion? Could we be seeing/should we deserve to see a candidate Gore?
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.
As mentioned previously, Moore's Law does not apply here.
However, the use of nano-tech (to increase light collecting surface area), multiple layers (to absorb more frequencies), and lenses/concentrators (to focus more light on the collectors), and thermo-electric converters (to convert heat from the panels into electricity) should be able to push efficiencies well passed the 40% range at reasonable cost. Of course, these improvements will be "5-10 years out" for the foreseeable future.
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
With current technology it is impossible to convert to PV in any meaningful timescale mostly because PV has so much embodied energy.
PV's energy payback time is something like 10 years. That means that if we set a goal to make 20% of electricity from PV, you'd have to find 2 years worth of spare electricity to make the PV.... and where's that going to come from? This problem marginalises current PV into only ever being a bit player in the energy world. Or, to turn it around, if we can find 10% of spare electrical capacity to channel into making PV then that will limit the PV conversion rate to 1% per year. Or if it is only 5% spare then that makes a 0.5% conversion rate - not even enough to cover increasing demand.
PV will only be practical for mass generation when it comes from vastly different technology.
Wind is more viable, in some areas.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Moore's law is a measure of the maximum number of transistors per single integrated circuit changing over time. Evoking Moore's law to explain greater efficiencies of production or advances in technology that produce cheaper products are unfortunately all too common.
go work as a roofer for one summer...I bet ya you'll bingo to where we might be able to fit the next *billyun* solar panels... anyway, the EU is going to slap a few hundred square european big distance measuring units up of solar in the sahara desert, and pipe it to europe, in all the papers lately. While some people hem and haw and debate and keep shelling out the big bucks for energy and keep pharting around with "studies" and hoping mr backyard hydrogen fusion reactors will save them, others are doing something about it now, using the tech we have now, because it got "good enough" some years ago. I bought some solar pv 9 years ago, same as I bought earlier way more expensive computers 20 years ago. why? I want to be part of the solution, not just part of the whining about things problem. a real geek solves problems, wannabes play video games and wait for someone else to do it and crybaby around because it isn't perfect yet. And it is getting better, every day, lot of new dedicated to solar fabs going up, dye based solar is coming, solar concentrator tech is getting commercialized. Snooze ya lose, early adopters get the benefits, same as early adopters of computers got the benefits!
His idea for a 10 year Kennedy-esque-moon-mission-analog of rapidly transforming our energy base from one of fossil fuels to renewable energy is not only a great idea economically for the long term but also great for the short term.
I just had to question the assumption here so many people make that going to all renewable energy on such a short timeframe is indeed desirable and does not bring with it great costs to the society that attempts it.
Moving away from oil dependance is a great idea for so very many reasons, but to focus only on a few things like solar and wind and ignore the huge costs of transition, all while basically forming a religion around the effort that will brook no debate of directives handed down from on high - scary stuff.
To paraphrase Franklin, when passion begins to govern she never governs wisely. And there is WAY too much passion and far too little rational discussion of all the options on the table of moving away from an oil based economy on a timeframe and using technologies that make sense.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You want to reduce the number of people? You go first. At the least, don't have kids.
The fact is that if you want to reduce population growth, the best way to do that is to make everyone rich. Prosperity always leads to declining fertility.
i just don't get this obession with PV, it's not "free" energy, it's bloody expensive energy. cpu development has nothing to do with PV development i don't understand where he got that comparision from...
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Applied Materials, the largest maker of semiconductor fab machinery, makes fab gear for solar panels. Their CEO likes to show graphs of cost per watt vs. year, and there's a steady decline, at roughly the same rate as LCD panels. Applied Materials solar cell fabs are using technology borrowed from LCD panel fab, and they're now making 5 square meters of panel at a time. The machinery for manufacturing such huge panels is appropriately large, and that's part of what's bringing the cost down. Despite much hype, no single improvement has produced a big drop in panel cost. But the cumulative effect of continuous improvement is working.
Applied Materials people make the point that installation is now half the cost of the completed solar system, and the solar industry needs to move beyond the "guy with a pickup truck" level of installation. Bigger panels reduce installation cost, and they're working on panels that are roofs themselves, instead of being installed on top of roofs.
The actual rate of price drop is maybe a factor of 2 per decade. Which isn't bad. As the Applied Materials solar division head says, "This is a great business. Everybody else's costs are going up, and ours are going down. And we're nowhere near market saturation."
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.
Let's just forget about Al Gore. He may have some good points. He may have some made some bogus claims. But what really matters is the facts. Let's look at the facts and judge technologies on their own merits, not based on what Al Gore has said about them and what we think of him.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
The simple solution is plant more trees. More trees is more shade. More shade is more tolerance to higher temperatures (90 degrees in the shade feels cooler than 72 degrees in the sun). More trees is more hiding places / homes / food for pray/animals. Trees / plants also absorb sunlight, reducing the greenhouse effect.
Ok, so maybe that's not an energy solution, but I think a lot of our problems stem from urbanization and the lack of trees. The hippies are right, in this sense. Parking lots are a good place for trees, and having them for shade would help keep our cars cool as well. Trees are nature's natural climate stabilizer.
Here's an article from a few weeks ago I remembered reading, seems relevant. They claim a 40x increase with products available within 3 years.
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/solarcells-0710.html
Quote: "CPUs get cheaper because they get physically smaller, and thus require less silicon." Totally wrong. CPUs are cheaper not because they use less silicon. The die (the actual chip, without the encasing) of an Intel Core Duo is about the same size of that of the original Pentium. What drove the prices down is the new scalable processes in place in manufacturer nanofabrication facilities. Back in the day fabrication was done in 4 inches wafers, with a yield a much lower die per wafer ratio. Today's 12 inch wafer allows the production of more dies per wafer. The cost of silicon has nothing to do with it. Silicon is one of the most abundant elements, and also easily available (read: cheap).
Khosla is one of the planet's largest investor in biofuels. He has engaged in rather disheartening attacks on any plan that suggests electrons can replace liquid carbons molecules. See his recent statements on how plug in hybrids will forever be "toys."
He may very well be right in some instances, but given the vitriol he has spilled against alternatives to his investments, it's hard to trust his statements as honest assessments.
Gore, on the other hand, has been even handed in suggesting there is no silver bullet to our energy and climate crises.
All that being said, PV cost and efficiency has historically been closer to Khosla's estimate than it has been to Gore's. But that has been mostly as a function of investment. Now that billions upon billions are being invested in the space, I think we'll see the cost curve start to look more attractive.
I'm for all plausible technologies for generating electricity which don't emit CO2. I think there's hope for large wind and solar-thermal generating grids, but these will come online too slowly and still cost too much.
That's why I'm convinced that we'll be burning coal till my death unless we also supplement these with a big deployment of nuclear. I'm also a leftist-environmentalist, but I really feel betrayed by Gore.
By definition you can't get more energy from a photovoltaic than the total energy that is being deposited on the surface. You can only go so high. While there are fundamental limits to what a CPU can do, also by definition you can theoretically shrink it many orders of magnitude more, you can make bigger chips, you can play games with the driving current, the transmission medium (photonics anyone?) etc. In short one you have control of the input the other you don't.
The problem, though, is that we don't have much gallium. Definitely not enough to build whole square miles worth of solar panels.
Gallium is only found in trace amounts in Zinc and Bauxite ores. There is no gallium-high ore. Mostly we get a little of it as side effects of producing aluminium. It's enough for silicon doping and leds, but that's about it.
Even at the rate at which we're already using it, there's an estimate that the (easily accessible) reserves will be depleted by 2017. Can you imagine the rate we'd use it up for solar panels? Not to mention we'd need to dig out and process a _heck_ of a lot more bauxite than we currently do, to get that much of it.
So it seems to me that that plan is dead right there. There is no obvious way how to get lots of it, and the price will likely only go up from here.
Err, not really. You can use steam to produce electricity. Nuclear power goes the same route, btw. IIRC some 80% of the world's electricity is produced by steam turbines.
So, I don't know... any particular reason why we _can_ use heated water to produce electricity, if we heat it with coal or a nuclear reactor, but not if it was heated by the sun? It's the same process and with the same efficiency.
Plus, it seems to me that, from a pragmatic point of view,
1. A significant part of the world would rather have convenience, rather than sacrifice themselves for the greater good. I'd rather have a small stove in the kitchen, rather than a huge solar contraption. Plus, I'd rather cook when I want to, not just when it's sunny outside.
2. The world seems to have decided already that it wants solar-produced electricity.
3. We're actually pretty good at producing electricity from steam in the meantime. The big power plants get about 40-45% of the energy out of the fuel and converted into electricty. That's good enough.
But more importantly, it's better than what even the best uber-expensive prototypes of solar panels can do. So I'm kind of wondering, dunno, what's with the obsession with solar panels?
4. Transporting hot steam or hot water is pretty wasteful too. _Storing_ it, even more so. It needs a lot of insulation, and even so there are losses.
And it's done already, btw. I live in a town where the power plants also provide the hot water.
Let me tell you, when I want to take a shower in the morning, I first have to waste some cubic metre or two of water (no, seriously) just so I actually get hot water. Everything that was past the big insulated pipes, comes out as cold water first.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
...most credible population models have the worlds population leveling out at 15 billion, which we can easily sustain.
But sustain at what level of existence?
The broken window fallacy is about replacing one window with another window and having the side re-investment of money. Instead, this is the fundamentals of econ. That is, when something is perceived as being too high price, it gets replaced when the first low costs item can do so.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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."
Do you have a cite for that statement, or is that just your opinion?
Kidding, somewhat. The problem is not People, the problem is our cultural myth that tells us that we can take, take, take, that the Earth is here for us to Use and have 'dominion over', that we are Smart enough that we can stay ahead of the curve of declining natural resources, increasing amounts of disease, that we will survive just fine despite what we do to the overall ecosystem of our planet, this little blue ball of limited space and resources.
Get this: I am not a GW advocate. I am not an "eco freak". I think that if we aren't going to take the steps to have alternative energy like nuclear *now*, then we should be moving drills out to the Florida shelf and ANWAR. I have never liked Gore, and regard him as simply a political opportunist with his GW agenda (to wit: his lifestyle, vs what he espouses).
But I have always seen and understood that the root cause of all of these problems we have here on Earth is just *too many people*.
Recommended reading for you: "Ishmael", by Daniel Quinn. Incredible book, it'll perhaps help you to see things in a different light...
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
Yes as far as cleaning there are many ways to power those vehicles. You could do electric powered vehicles, or if you are concerned with storing electricity, then use some electricity to break h2o apart, get the hydrogen and then use fuel cell vehicles for running around the cells.
The efficiency numbers you see on these things are by and large the product of someone's imagination.
The testing procedure involves the solar company building a very small sliver of a PV cell under lab conditions (not mass manufacture conditions) and then sending it to a test facility. The smaller that sliver is the more likely the efficiency numbers are inflated. The more experimental a technology is the harder it is to manufacture anything big enough for meaningful results. This means that all these reports of 37% efficient PV technology being 5 years away are probably incorrect.
My friend works in an office that does energy retrofits of government buildings and one of the lists they have is the factor for each PV manufacturer between what the manufacturer claims their panels will do and what kind of energy the panels actually generate in the wild, based on monitoring previous installs they've done themselves.
These efficiency numbers are all academic until you've tried the cells out in the environment from which you need to generate energy.
The Internet today is worth anything because of the hundreds of other bits and protocols that were tacked on top of it. E.g., probably Tim Berners-Lee's WWW concept was _the_ one thing that took the Interent from the ivory tower of academic curiosities and made it useful for the common man.
So? That doesn't mean the Internet didn't exist before them.
You're arguing that writing didn't exist before Gutenberg because it was a pain in the ass to make books before movable type was invented.
The Mosaic browser, and thus the WWW as we know, it owe much to the "Gore Bill" funding the NCSA. To quote Marc Andreessen, "If it had been left to private industry, [Mosaic] wouldn't have happened, at least, not until years later."
What makes it _the_ Internet isn't just the underlying TCP/IP protocol, but the whole eidifice of applications and protocols on top of them.
None of which would be possible without TCP/IP and the network of networks underneath.
At any rate, what Gore championed wasn't that. It was ARPANET, a toy for the military
This is an outright lie.
The first ARPANET link went online in 1969, the same year Al Gore was enlisting in the Army. He was not elected to Federal office until 1977. By the time Gore was sworn in, ARPANET needed no champions.
Al Gore championed the educational NSFNet, whose importance was not apparent to most in Congress. In hindsight, it was the major step between the closed military ARPANET and the open public Internet.
So basically it's a bit like crediting Karl Benz with inventing the tank. You know, 'cause he made a car, and later someone else added a bigger engine, treads, armour and gun(s) and got a tank. But, hey, if you want to, you can still see it as just Karl Benz's car.
What you are doing is a like not giving Benz credit for the car because his car didn't have a radio, air conditioning, and air bags. You've moved the goalposts, redefining the word "Internet" to mean something other than the Internet.
Regardless of whether he "invented" the Internet or not, his taking credit for it is still highly misleading and a bit bullshit.
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn say Al Gore's statement is accurate. Marc Andreessen gives him a measure of the credit for the web browser as we know it.
We would probably have the Internet without Al Gore. But we probably would have had to wait a bit without him greasing the governmental wheels.
But then again, I could be wrong.
And eventually this network will take on sentience and we will be subject to conquest by...
Talky Toaster!
"Hi! Would you like some toast?"
Frankly, Skynet would be a walk in the park in comparison.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I'm sorry, but if you are not a troll, then you're either extremely naive and brainwashed by green propaganda, or a misanthrope.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
This isn't a subjective matter, the way, say, the arts are. When dealing with objective things, such as what can meet energy needs with minimal probability of damage (such as genetic due to radioactive waste), then there can only exist ONE right answer. And, in this case, it is clearly mine.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."