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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.
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'.
37% is available. Oh did I mention they cost 100 times as much ;)
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
There is a lot of research going on into improving not only the output of solar but into lowering the cost of manufacturing them. Nanotechnologies have in lab tests have shown certain avenues of current research may have the ability to increase performance of basically existing tech by as much as 25%, sure they are a ways to go before any kind of mass production can be done with this research but it's there. Increaseing acceptance by the population as to the usefullness of the equipment will of course generate more investor dollars into this research, and frankly I'd much rather see this than more research into increaseing payload output of bombs. Some areas stil have much they could do to encourage the adoption of solar too. being able to sell engery to the grid rather than just offset the cost of what you bought for instance in California alone would be a boon to the industry.
I Need someone to rebuild a Digitech Digital Delay pedal for me....for me...for me...for me.
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)
Given that we have technology like CSP using mirrors and standard steam turbines, What do you feel is the best balance between improving what has already proved functional, or dickering around with a test tube? I see MIT has dye-impregnated acrylic, you have an asbestos, er nanotech, based material and some theories, while the European are building real working Solar plants at Utility scale.
I dunno, it just seems we're a bit heavy on the science experiments and little to slow on the Yankee Ingenuity these days.
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."
Solar isn't competing against oil unless you a solar powered car. Solar power is competing against coal, natural gas, hydroelectric and nuclear for electricity generation. In the U.S. oil accounts for 1.6% of electricity generation. Don't mean to be pedantic but it drives me up a wall that people have no clue where their power comes from.
Coal is nearly half of America's electric power. Its price is going up but not as much as oil and it is in much greater abundance in the U.S. Unfortunately coal's impact on the environment, both mining it and burning it, tends towards devastating. The Chinese are using huge amounts of coal for their electricity too.
@de_machina
Almost.
The cooling tower has a very important job in any heat cycle engine since energy = hot side - cold side. Take away the cold side, and you've got bumpkiss. The plant re-uses the water. In an Open cycle, some water evaporates, but much of it is reused - in a closed cycle plant, all of the water is recycled and only air passes through the cooling tower.
Yes, this heat can be used for things, but its tricky to find a customer for that much heat all of the time. Food processing plants use a lot of low-temperature steam, and some other industrial processes, but that's been a strategy for a long time, and it's not exactly solved the riddle yet.
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.
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.
I wonder if it would make sense to run the leftover heat through a series of heat engines, with each optimized for smaller temperature differentials than the last. E.g., steam turbine -> sterling engine.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Did you not see T. Boone Pickens' proposal for reducing our dependency on foreign fuels?
Solar isn't competing against oil unless you a solar powered car. Solar power is competing against coal, natural gas, hydroelectric and nuclear for electricity generation.
And Pickens' proposal was to create giant wind farms to generate electricity, so that we could free up the locally-sourced natural gas for cars.
I'm not saying I agree with him on everything, but some people understand plenty well where fuel comes from, at least well enough to know that you can use the same energy source for different purposes, just like you can use different energy sources for the same purpose.
(For what it's worth, our house is powered by wind and hydro for electricity, but natural gas for heat & water heat. I'd consider a swap to solar thermal if my HOA would allow solar anything on my roof.)
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
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.
No need to get so fancy. Normal lenses ("concentrators") and used with high-efficiency triple-junction cells to collect light from a large area (see Emcore's page for an example). In fact these cells perform better with higher intensity light anyways.
Fraunhofer is using a slightly different approach that looks to get better and better as light intensity increases: article
Sounds like something that solar thermal plants might have a lot of. Some {coal,gas,nuclear} plants already sell their excess heat to industry during the day, but they could also keep solar plants from going offline overnight..
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
In my town they built a natural gas power plant called the Cogen that takes the steam, and runs it to a large lumbermill next door, to power the equipment. Most lumbermills still use steam to drive saws and such, as it is more efficient (and cheaper) than straight power saws.. Kind of a neat idea for a "dual use" system
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
http://www.energy.rochester.edu/nordvarm/env/
http://www.energy.rochester.edu/uk/chpa/commheat/eursuccess.htm
Already done on a quite large scale in finland, norway and sweden.
Make a man a fire and he will be warm for a day, set a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life
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.
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
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
So, what you're saying is that we should hire 7-year-olds to control the lenses, and put ants around the high efficiency cell. Got it.
I wonder if it would make sense to run the leftover heat through a series of heat engines, with each optimized for smaller temperature differentials than the last.
It's referred to as a combined cycle. Many gas power plants recover the heat from the gas turbine and use it to run a steam turbine. GE claims 60% efficiency for their combined cycle turbines, where a standalone gas turbine would get around 35%.
It does not make sense to continue the process indefinitely. Eventually one will reach a point where building the equipment requires more energy than is produced from the ever-dwindling temperature difference.
But then again, I could be wrong.
In Denmark, 60% of housing is connected to district heating. 95% of that heat is "waste" from power plants. If you have cities of more than a few thousand people in temperate/cold areas it's a viable strategy.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
The problem with nuclear is waste, which we currently have no way of disposal.
What we *NEED* is ultra efficient storage of energy. "Batteries" that can store the energy produced from sunlight and windmills and store it until it is needed at night. Trick is, their production needs to be lower environmental impact than nuclear.
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.
Or switch the Pebble-bed based Nuclear Energy that was patented in the early 1940s and banned as the first action by the Atomic Energy Commission's formation.
http://www.memagazine.org/contents/current/features/pebbles/pebbles.html
You'd be surprised what Liquid Helium and Uranium encased in Graphite can do without Cooling rods or Towers.
Most of the issues raised with the reactor are commercial - at the moment it's economically more viable to simply burn the fuel in a shamefully inefficient manner and bury the waste. There is also an issue about proliferation threats due to the fact that some of the by-products of the reactor are technically usable in nuclear weapons - but it seems like the sort of issue which would be possible to address, and seems like a small price to pay for such an effective source of energy.
I dunno, it just seems we're a bit heavy on the science experiments and little to slow on the Yankee Ingenuity these days.
That's coming from a guy with a homepage on "WaveBlankets".
You're totally and completely wrong.
Consider a car moving at a steady speed along a level highway. It will slowly lose energy to rolling resistance and aerodynamic resistance. The Prius is highly streamlined, which helps with the latter. The former is essentially constant for any vehicle.
Also, a smaller engine is an asset, not a liability. An engine is more efficient when working closer to its maximum capacity. A huge BMW engine still has to move heavy cylinders around rapidly and lubricate components designed for a high power output even when only a small portion of that power is needed. On the other hand, a Prius' smaller engine is sized precisely correctly for the average load it handles. Larger peak demands are supplemented by the battery.
Also, the Prius' transmission is an advantage here: it's a continuously variable design, meaning that the engine can operate at precisely the most efficient speed all the time, whereas the BMW's engine speed is dictated by a combination of road speed and transmission gear ratio. That speed is likely not optimal.
As for diesel hybrids: I'd love one. But manufacturers have had difficulty making diesel engines meet strict emissions standards imposed by states like California and New York. Besides: I spend so little on gasoline these days that the incremental advantage of using diesel doesn't make me miss it much.
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.
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."
The cost will be reduced sharply as demand grows.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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 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 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.