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Bosch Finds Solar Business Unprofitable, Exits
New submitter rwise2112 writes "German engineering company Bosch said Friday that it is abandoning its solar energy business, because there is no way to make it economically viable.'We have considered the latest technological advances, cost-reduction potential and strategic alignment, and there have also been talks with potential partners,' Bosch CEO Volkmar Denner said. 'However, none of these possibilities resulted in a solution for the solar energy division that would be economically viable over the long term.'"
But I'm also aware without government subsidies, it's not economically viable. On the large scale.
That said, I love having a solar panel on my pack when I'm out hiking. It is a nice option when you're somewhere without access to the grid.
They probably mean that they cannot make enough money on it. Economically viable means that your situation (literally your household) improves. Most probably they are economically far more viable than cheap polluting alternatives.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
They didn't contribute enough to the Obama campaign.
I'm curious, what do you plug into your backpack when you're out hiking?
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
But in more latitudes closer to the equator that get more and stronger sun?
So, if something is nor producing money is not worth to try, even when we all know the long therm benefits for the planet and for ourselves.
We uncultured swines, don't deserve the planet we live in.
Bosch is Swiss.
The reason it is unprofitable is because China is flooding the market with panels that cost less than the production cost. If China was punished for its behavior, these companies would be able to compete and stay in business.
"European makers of solar energy have accused low cost Asian competitors, especially manufacturers from China, of creating the trouble for their western peers, partly by flooding the market with products at prices far below production costs."
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
I put all this money in the bank and don't have it anymore, at least for a long time. In the short term, is unprofitable.
Instead of mega projects we need a hybrid domestic appliance refrigeration unit.
- these are not the droids you are looking for -
If cars need gas, we'll either need to figure out how to create gas from atmospheric CO2 (probably more biodiesel) or give up on cars in not too terribly long. Eh. Electric or hydrogen will work, it will just take time to ramp up.
As for power plants. I can certainly see Nuclear as been a good and viable plan for the future (keep them away from coasts and tectonically active regions), but... What is wrong with also using solar? In areas where there is a lot of sunlight, and low enough latitude, solar is a perfectly viable solution. If it can be almost viable in Germany, there are certainly many parts of Africa, the American Southwest, and Central America that could use it just fine.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
I have solar and an electric car. It is an amazing combination. A 10Kw grid-tie system is now about $3/watt installed, and that drops to $2/watt after a 30% tax credit. If most new houses built included a solar panel on the roof, I could see the US becoming energy independent in a decade.
Seriously, do I have to think of everything?
Look you can produce a product, put it on the market, blah blah blah. Fuck that. Do what lockheed does.
1. Open a number of plants within the US, get the politicians to give speeches about how wonderful each plant will be locally. Make sure to choose towns that would be as deastated as possible by any future plant closure.
2. Lobby congress directly to buy the solar panels as a national security issue, and ignoring any irresponsible departments who claim they are not cost effective or they don't need them.
3. If #2 doesn't work right away, threaten to close individual plants, rinse and repeat until congress orders enough to ensure your profits. Be sure to tell your employees that the plant might be closing because of the uncertainty around government orders. Try to get the whole town involved.
4. Once they are buying them, get them to throw a few orders into the foriegn aid bucket. (Isreal needs solar power to keep it safe from Iran!)
5. Profit.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Same as always. There's not _a lot_ of money to be made in it, but if everything's going to always be about the money, may as well let the supporting race of that theory die out. You know, to make room for the improvement that will take it's place.
The low cost provider will ALWAYS make money.
The High quality provider may or may not make money.
The also rans usually get eaten up by the low cost provider.
The fact that your particular company fails in a business is a failure of YOU, not the business. It means you can't compete with the rest of the world.
When Bosch leaves, it lets everyone else raise their prices just a little bit.
Maybe that will be enough to make the rest of the corporations profitable. Or maybe some more 'also rans' may have to quit because THEY are losing money.
But I guarantee you, once enough also rans have left the business, the rest of the people will make money hand over fist.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
And the country which announced they want to go wind/solar/renewable as much as possible while abandonning nuclear out of fear of radiation.... And then went to burn coal , you know, a way to generate power which does not release radioactive particle in the atmosphere /sarcasm_tag. The country which added record amount of solar panel in 2012 , even while subsidy were cut a little. IRC the solar subsidy amounted to about 100 billion over 10 years.
And from that country, one of the best engineering manufacturer says "not rentable". You think solar company have a smidge of chance in the US ? Think about it.
electric cars only suck because our battery technology sucks. But there's nothing in the laws of physics that says you can't make batteries that don't suck.
(triple negative... yikes)
Somebody's gonna come up with a new battery that exploits quantum effects and raises energy density by 10x. The world will be theirs.
Hell, just yesterday I saw a Slashdot article about Lockeed Martin coming up with a new nano-material that decreases water desalinization energy requirement by 100x. We're just scratching the surface when it comes to nano-sized materials and quantum effects (which are related to nano stuff cuz they only happen at very small scales)
Just makes things easier for SolarCity.
I want a nuclear powered electric car.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Think about humanity as a whole. Solar energy benefits the earth and every living thing on it. Take a financial hit and progress humanity you cheap bastards...
Petroleum isn't economically viable over the long term either.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I want a nuclear powered electric car.
A co-worker of mine has one. It's powered (mainly) by the nuclear plant up the road.
Where is the precedent for this kind of jump in science? A golf cart is 80% battery and can go 10 miles. A Tesla S is state of the art, 20% battery and can go 200 or so miles on the 85kwH battery.
When in history has technology jumped 1000% in one discovery. Even when we broke the sound barrier, there were propellar driven planes that could go over 500MPH.
http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/herbert-dow-and-predatory-pricing#axzz2OIXQkkrp
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
No, it's called productivity.
The manufacturing costs for manufacturing a generally similar in both Europe and China, balancing German automation + power costs vs. Chinese labor costs.
What isn't the same is the after-cost of adhering to German vs. Chinese environmental regulations.
Most industrialized nations could easily save their local manufacturing bases by imposing requirements on products being manufactured in accordance to local environmental standards in the locations they are sold. It's optional whether they would want to impose environmental tarrifs and take the product anyway, despite "dirty" manufacturing, or simply block entry of the product into the country.
For China, depending on how far up the supply chain you wanted to push the requirement, you could take it to the point of requireing scrubbers on the stacks of the coal-fired power plants that powered the manufacturing facilities.
It's ironic that environmentalism has succeeded only in moving the mess out of view (to China), rather than keeping the mess from being injected into the global ecosystem anyway. But at least health care costs tend to go down when you have no local manufacturing going on, due to a reduction in pollutants.
The US doesn't spend trillions of dollars devoting its entire military to invade and destroy countries that refuse to hand their solar manufacturing facilities to US-owned companies.
It's a magical device that continuously spits out money. How the hell can they not make money on solar arrays? Technology is moving forward to the point where nobody in their right mind would have a hydrocarbon plant in a sunny area because it would actually cost more and produce less.
1945.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
...but part of the design of the core of the Internet is that it is, in fact, designed to survive a nuclear war.
Which isn't to say you'd have much of the Internet left, but if it wasn't fried by EMP, you could start reconfiguring your routers to connect with surviving nodes.
The laws of physics are pretty clear on batteries being inferior to fuel in terms of energy density. Those quantum effects you described are already exploited in fuels (chemistry is inherently quantum mechanical).
Water desalination is a very different problem, all together. (***Water desalination is very different problem!***)
Chemical fuels cannot be beat in terms of energy density (outside of nuclear fuels). However, they could feasibly be generated from grid energy and raw material. This is the concept behind the hydrogen economy: use grid energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, then store the hydrogen as a fuel. Unfortunately, hydrogen is very difficult to store. An improved storage solution would be to take the process a step further and generate a liquid fuel, such as methanol or ethanol. It's a difficult problem to do this economically, though, and it likely will not be solved until there is adequately incentive (i.e. grid energy much cheaper than petroleum).
I'm not too worried about energy. Solar photovoltaics will be at grid parity before the end of the decade. A gradual shift away from fossil fuels is inevitable, simply from a cost basis, even ignoring external costs.
Unless, of course, there's a breakthrough in fusion. Economical fusion. Not the multi-billion dollar boondoggles currently receiving funding. A true breakthrough would change everything. Forever.
"Cars need gas"
Depends upon your definitions. If you think that a multi-tonne SUV with the aerodynamic efficiency of a brick is a 'car' then you would be right that its not going to go far on battery power.
But its not going to go far on gas either. We tried gas powered vehicles in the country I come from a while back and it wasn't too successful. The low energy density and extra weight of the tank to hold the compressed gas was the problem even though the fuel was a lot cheaper than petrol.
But smaller single occupant vehicles powered by electric batteries would work well for city commuting.
"electrical grids need nuclear reactors."
The Gernans don't think so - they're shutting down their nukes.
As for power plants. I can certainly see Nuclear as been a good and viable plan for the future (keep them away from coasts and tectonically active regions), but... What is wrong with also using solar?
Solar doesn't have the density or the reliability to even be considered a competitor to nuclear.
Every watt of solar power needs some other type of reliable power generation to back it up. (or the application relying on solar is something that can be easily shut down)
It's not too big a deal if your lights go out. You won't like it if your internet goes out. The factory churning out widgets will NOT accept the power going out because of a cloudy day.
Because solar cannot provide reliable baseline power generation, you're asking the wrong question. "Why can't we use solar?" should be replaced with, "what baseline power generation techniques are environmentally friendly?"
The answer to *that* question is most definitely not solar, or wind, or any of the other "green power" fads.
Ecology trumps economics on proper accounting for all relevant factors-- every time.
Economics is loaded with a ton of chauvinistic value judgments that all boil down to, "if *I* don't do this polluting or oppressive exploit to increase my real buying power and decrease everyone else's, then someone else will so it might as well be me!" ... "And if regulation is threatened, then I'll inanely scream about the tragedy of the commons and demand privatization of the resources."
The attitudes are fairly evident in the practices of biotech firms like Monsanto. There is this great pretense of *science* along with their research staff trained in science... but they stonewall against analysis and critique from the field of ecology. In this (yet another) crucial sense, the machinations of unrestrained capital are advancing the grip of pseudoscience. It represents another runaway use of technology to externalize the risks and damages that come from "making money".
The argument is that if you aggregate the out production of wind and solar over vast geographies (think of all of Europe of maybe even the US), the fluctuations will be smaller. Then they say Europe could store massive amounts of energy in Norwegian hydro facilities, as they have suitable geography (fjords if I understand this correctly).
Of course that means MASSIVE, extremely-long distance power lines. Think of 1 Mega-Volt, DC over 3000kms (2000 miles) with a capacity in the order of 20000MW (20 large generation stations). We would need a sufficiently dense network of that throughout Europe. We currently don't even have enough power lines to get the wind power from the North sea coast to the industrial centres of Munich, Stuttgart and so on. Certainly there is no such thing as a substantial trans-European electric power system of any meaning at this time.
Already the less affluent struggle with their electricity bills, as it is already at 25 Euro Cent (30 to 35 US cent) per kWh.
To cut a long story short - German Romanticism at work. Rationally speaking, wind and solar generation is insane and cannot be afforded.
"The Gernans don't think so - they're shutting down their nukes."
I think you need to understand that the populace of Germany is quite easily being driven into Romantic, or should I say, INSANE states of mind. How could it happen Germany could not find a GERMAN colonel or General for their dictator job ? How is it possible Germany took an AUSTRIAN PRIVATE to be their dictator ? How could the German colonels and generals allow that ? How could German intelligence allow that ??
Now that Germany can be easily be driven into doing romantic/insane things, killing one of their economic Crown Jewels (nuclear power) and replacing it by an unreliable and insanely expensive energy "source" (solar cells) is just one of the minor Romantic Idiocies of Germany.
I am German, born to German parents and my English is proper because I had a diligent and well-educated teacher. And yeah, this drives me nuts. No, I am not a shill. I work in automotive and cars have never been propelled by nuclear. Our trains, though...
Germany also had the/(one of ?) first large-scale Thorium reactors in actual production:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300
It was killed by the Green Traitors in the pay of the CIA. These are generally scientific dumb people who want power. They get that by collaborating with CIA, who hate the fact that Germany could acquire nuclear weapons one day. Therefore, nuclear power must be poo-pooed. So far, CIA wins.
And yeah, I know the Canadian CANDU also uses some Thorium, but Afaik not to the same extent as the pebble-bed reactor above.
The argument is that if you aggregate the out production of wind and solar over vast geographies (think of all of Europe of maybe even the US), the fluctuations will be smaller. Then they say Europe could store massive amounts of energy in Norwegian hydro facilities, as they have suitable geography (fjords if I understand this correctly).
Connecting the US and European energy grids? The ones that use different voltage and phases? Separated by an ocean?
Yeah, there's a reason that's only an "argument".
To cut a long story short - German Romanticism at work. Rationally speaking, wind and solar generation is insane and cannot be afforded.
Which is why we need to beat every insane "green power" proposition to death with knowledge.
Nuclear: US alone, 7.1Bn a year subsidy.
EDF is asking for a $100Bn guaranteed income from the UK government.
Fracking requires guaranteed prices and government investigation to go ahead.
Oil companies require huge subsidies and tax breaks. Similarly for coal.
To pay back its cost, 3-7 years. Lifetime guarantee 25, retains stated efficiency for 30+.
Lifetime emissions of solar PV are about a quarter of nuclear for most current grid-comparable (because of decent sunshine records) locations.
If Bosch doesn't get it done, nobody will at this point in time. Robert Bosch invented the first car ignition system, they have massive corporate R&D, semiconductor fabs and still drive automotive innovation with things like ESP, ABS and so on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bosch
I don't understand. Obama says solar is the future. Doesn't our Father know best?
It is so heavily subsided it isn't funny. For example if you install solar panel, you get to sell your electricity back to utility at a *higher* price than what the utility sell normal electricty (from gas or coal) do. That "cost parity" you cite is actually quite artificial in germany. In fact would the subsidie disappear and the utilitiies pay the market price, nobody would by solar. Low insolation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SolarGIS-Solar-map-Europe-en.png most germany is about 1000 kw.h/m^2/year with a bit of spike toward 1100 in the south) where the united state is mostly 2.400 kw.h./m^2/year (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NREL_USA_PV_map_lo-res_2008.jpg multiply by 365) even the northern part of the US seems to get more than the southern part of germany.
And we are speaking of very heavy subsidy here , to the tune of more than 10 billion per year until recentely when they were slightly lowered.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
"Unless, of course, there's a breakthrough in fusion."
In fact, I think fusion is the reason. Even oil companies are selling off oil fields and renting the mineral rights.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/02/new-google-solve-for-x-lockheed.html
Where are my mod points when i need them? :P
will you settle for nuclear/steam
all kidding (and retro-futurism) aside. I suppose you could use a radioisotope generator, although most of these have a kinetic energy step used to drive a dynamo. At that point you might as well use the kinetic energy directly, and avoid the extra conversion steps. You'd have to replace your car when the "atomic battery" died, too (or at least replace the power-plant), but you wouldn't have to buy fuel.
Also, it would be a damn expensive car (even before considering the regulatory concerns)
No it's not. The marginal car attached to the grid gets its energy from the marginal fuel source. In the U.S., the marginal source is typically natural gas. Said another way, when he unplugs his car, which generator throttles down a tiny bit? That's the generator that accounts for his electricity.
A subsidy is a handout of taxpayer cash to a favored business
Recently I have noted progressives twisting the term and saying that if government does not take more money from you you are getting a subsidy (this is dishonest, but it's consistent with the progressive view that everything, including money, belongs to government)
But now you are saying that it is a subsidy if government does not come after you and charge you for all the negative effects of your activities! So... I guess people who fart and don't pay a methane abatement fee are having their farts subsidized?
I have a suggestion consistent with this garbage: A Hazardous substance abatement fee, a toxic manufacturing processes offset fee, a solar panel disposal tax, etc. All those solar panels are made of stuff, manufactured using stuff, and the raw stuff is obtained by methods that, many progressives complain about in other industries... AND the typical panel will have degraded enough that it will be disposed of and replaced at about the point when it starts to break-even. My home is solar powered (moved to it when the CA govt proved so incompetent it could not keep the lights on) The panels provide less energy with each passing year as they degrade and I have calculated that mine will break-even about 6 months after they are finally paid-off.... and at that time I will again be getting most of my energy from the grid (whose rates will have gone up because we did not keep building power plants because our president and his pals insisted we were all moving to "green energy", which seems to be energy that stuffs the pockets of his campaign supporters with green)
we'll either need to figure out how to create gas from atmospheric CO2
Huh?
With exception for very minor fringe cases, photovoltaics are useless. The future is really in solar thermal energy. Generating multi megawatt amounts of energy. Photovoltaics never had the efficiency or generating capacity to cover everyone's houses.
"Connecting the US and European energy grids?"
No, just "properly" connecting all of the US or all of Europe. Currently we don't even have Germany properly connected for fluctuating solar/wind and that is about 900 km across.
Thanks to the semiconductor revolution of the 1970s and beyond the silicon ingots are huge and the wafers are small, so the energy consumption of zone refining per metre squared of panel space is not really all that large even if the energy input per ingot is freaking huge. The "never recover the energy" bunch are using numbers from the early 1970s when most of the photovoltaics were one off hand assembled things that went into satellites. Skylab's panels probably never generated as much energy as was used to make them but not long after that things changed. Do you understand where you've been mislead now? The same thing that made the device you are using to post words onto the net affordable has reduced the energy cost of making photovoltaics from the same wafers.
Those little lights are cheap to make and even cheap in the west as "solar garden lights" with a markup and cosmetic casing.
There's a man with a smile on his face, I gues he must be economically viable. I was not economically viable, no no no no. I'm going away now, I'm going away everybody. This is what happens when you're not economically viable!
We won't know until the first AP1000 gets finished in China, and even then there will be some unknown costs due to siting in the US.
Hydrogen and electric cars are just using a storage medium and not an initial energy source, so are really just a mechanism to produce pollution elsewhere and not where your lungs are. Hydrogen is currently produced from petrochemicals so it currently makes a lot more sense in energy terms to use those to power the vehicles or generate electricity to power the vehicles. Even a hydrogen fuel cell may as well be a propane or butane power cell since those are a hell of a lot easier to store and you can get them by using a lot less energy than hydrogen gas.
It doesn't have to be a competitor to nuclear since it's used at a different scale. It's now a competitor to gas turbines used to cover peak loads.
I do agree that we need more R&D into civilian nuclear power, but it's got to come from the government with safegaurds to stop interference or it's not going to happen. The US nuclear lobby ate it's children (eg. killed the thorium reactor work outright by direct interference, discouraged plenty of other work and spends more yearly on lobbying to use variants of TMI painted green to fleece than taxpayer than R&D to actually develop something to deliver the promises), but of the alternative energies nuclear does hold a lot of promise for large thermal base load units.
The barriers are that since it's best at large sizes the capital cost is huge, that it makes zero sense to use existing designs since so many improvements have suggested themselves since the 1970s so there is some financial risk due to the reactors being experimental, various leeches happy with the nuclear status quo that would be threatened by new nuclear plants that actually work as advertised, and there being nobody willing to put up money for a decade plus before cutting the ribbon and flipping the switch. A modern reactor would have to be protected from the leeches and funded in some way other than the bankers that are not going to be prepared to wait and are not going to want to fund anything new.
So if you want a nuclear future be prepared to buy it from India or hope that some startup will come out from under the radar of the nuclear lobby with some military submarine derived reactors or similar. Those announced AP1000 reactors in the US are not much more likely to happen as Bush's man on mars, and even if they do get built they are a baby step ahead of the 1970s designs, not really much more than TMI painted green.
Since long range transmission is now high voltage DC that's no longer a problem.
That however is a complete showstopper.
They've fixed those with the same sort of scrubbers as in the US power stations but still have a shitload of vehicle air pollution and industial air pollution to deal with.
never had any government subsidies.
also, the CIA didn't overthrow Mossadegh in a fucking coup to install a fucking dictator who murdered his political opponents with a secret police force in large part so we could have oil. that didn't happen and also no taxpayer dollars were expended to do that.
also our alliance with a bunch of dictators who run slave labor camps and rape brothels (the UAE, Saudi, Kuwait, Qatar) never cost us any taxpayer dollars.
also the massive amounts of environmental damage from petrochemical sites, well, that doesnt cost any taxpayer dollars.
also the massive interstate highway system that was built purposely after pressure from the auto and oil lobies, along with the destruction of the train infrastructure in the US, of course also didnt cost any taxpayer dollars. also all the pavement, which uses petroleum as a primary ingredient, didnt cost any taxpayer dollars.
also the Credit Default Swap, which was a financial instrument created to keep Exxon from going bankrupt after the Valdez spill, may have been sold to the World Bank, but the World Bank doesn't really count as 'government', even though it gets all its funding from governments. . . but anyways.
also the numerous petroleum engineering departments of various colleges and universities spread all over the country do not receive a single penny of taxpayer money, because even though they are 'public universities', well, there is a magic purple unicorn that shits out "Fountainhead dollars" that are magically washed of their 'publicness' before being spent on professorships, buildings, labs, etc.
yes. i am glad that oil is just 100% privately funded, with no government involvement at all.
The capital cost of entry with photovoltaics is very low compared with just about anything else. They don't scale, but you can build something small and work up unlike a thermal plant where it costs a lot less per MW but you need to start on 700MW or so with a huge capital cost to do it.
With France the side effect is the electricity that came out of a very large military budget and some dual purpose technology. In hindsight they could have done it a lot cheaper and maybe even break even, but they blew a vast amount on the bet in 1968 that uranium would run out and built a couple of plutonium fast breeder money sinks. Also they decided to spend a lot on leading the world in reprocessing research which could pay off someday but until now has been just a very expensive proof of concept.
I think it is time to pull the plug on solar and focus instead on wind and research thorium reactors.
When you factor everything (e.g. panel production environmental cost, maintenance, use of land, longevity of the panels, and so on), solar is just not worthy, or at least very rarely better than wind. So i see no reason to artificially keep it alive.
Also there is not as much uranium as people think. Civilization is a 18TW bulb. If you power (all of) it only with existing uranium resources the light would last barely one year, (go run the number yourself if you don't believe it or have a look at this). Thorium should be better.
We learn from history that we learn nothing from history - Tom Veneziano
Since long range transmission is now high voltage DC that's no longer a problem.
Since when? and yes I am aware of superconductivity methods which have their own issues.
Long distance power transmission (see here) has always been AC since the Edison, Westinghouse wars (see here) over 120 years ago.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
Google search result says you are the FIRST person in the digital age ever to compare a comparison to comparing bananas to goats!
And I think that's cool. Congratulations.
Hence forthwith I will deign to point out to others they are comparing bananas to goats, as they do so. I will even do it myself to show them how it ought to be done.
It will soon rise to a tumultuous crescendo of cliche and there will be songs, there will be hip-hop lyrics. There will be T-shirts. Dave Letterman will hold off making his first 'banana and goat' salvo for months, even as the audience waits for it intently. Then when he does there will be applause! Presidential candidates will say with a Groucho Marx eyebrow-raise, "If he's a banana what does that make me?" And the crowd will wave their signs that say the answer. Slashdot will suffer a round of nananse and goatse again.
And it all started here. We are all present at this profound moment in history.
There, I just took a picture of us all together. It will be portrayed in future documentaries as a vivid photograph that fades to sepia accompanied by soulful yet inspiring music.
Television commercials will have goats!
Dancing!
With Bananas!
This thing could be bigger than Yankee Doodle Dandy.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Fourth paragraph of the Wikipedia article you linked contains:
"High-voltage direct-current (HVDC) technology is used for greater efficiency in very long distances (typically hundreds of miles (kilometres))"
methanol and ethanol are difficult because carbon is hard to fix.
Try ammonia.
You need heat, electricity, nitrogen (a.k.a. the biggest fraction from distilled air), and hydrogen (just break some water lol).
You get a liquid fuel that has been used to power buses during wartime shortages, that is already piped around the country for fertilizer.
Also, no need for fusion. There's plenty of uranium and thorium available. The heat and electricity produced by nuclear power plants would be useful for making ammonia with. Ammonia can go in cars, it smells worse than gasoline but burns cleaner (just air, water, maybe some NOx, no carbon = no soot or VOCs, it's nice to feed to fuel cells which could power electric motors on the wheels directly so you don't need a transmission...)
The GP is talking about generating fuel for things like internal combustion engines using, for example, water and atmospheric CO2. That's the idea behind most biofuels, for example. Plants pull CO2 from the atmosphere, then make carbohydrates and lipids, etc. to store energy. You then directly burn the lipids, or ferment the carbohydrates, or chemically process into hydrocarbons, etc. to get a replacement for petrol or diesel. Otherwise, you can directly create methane (main component of natural gas) using CO2 from the atmosphere and the Sabatier process, then use that to directly run engines or as a feedstock for chemical processes to create more complex hydrocarbons.
Best bet would seem to be to use a radioisotope generator with a Stirling engine. No steam required that way. Driving wheels directly with a Stirling engine wouldn't be practical for a car, so you'd need to make it a hybrid where the engine charges a modest battery bank which runs the electric motor(s) which turn the wheels. The ideal radioisotope would be plutonium 238 due to its high safety and low shielding requirements. Provided, that is, that you could somehow manage to get enough to put a few hundred kilograms of it into millions of cars, which seems a little unlikely.
How much energy does that nano-material take to produce?
Like most things, many new inventions are simply offsetting costs to someone else who can handle the specialized burden of a specific cost. I can pay $10 a year for site and domain hosting because someone else has that economy of scale down pat. I can pay $100 a month for colo rack space because the colo exists. I can pay $5 for a t-shirt because some slave in China made it. And so on...
That's always the thing here: where is the nano-material going to be made, and how much energy is it actually going to use to produce? I'm guessing more than the energy saved, but it's Chinese energy being consumed, not Californian - so it's cheaper.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Somehow I don't think the concentration of CO2 in air makes this very efficient...
*Breathing* does not contribute to CO2 in any harmful way.
While technically you are correct, you'll have to factor in *what* you've eaten. If all you consume is locally produced, non-industrial (I'm avoiding "organic", because that might have thousand meanings) stuff, then you're OK.
With industrial agriculture, you have fertilizers, with imports across the globe you have transport -- both a non-trivial contribution.
Look up HVDC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current). Not possible in Edison's time but now there are links up to 2500km long.
summary ignores the current political situation in Germany (Bosch is a german company).
For many years now, the government has supported alternative energy with various subsidies, etc. - before you cry foul and wave the flag of market capitalism, let me remind you that coal and especially nuclear power are also heavily subsidised. Without government "interference", there would be no nuclear power plants, because the technology would not have been developed.
But that's not the point. The point is that originally the plan was set with a long-term strategy, reducing subsidies yearly in the anticipated speed of the technology maturing so that in the beginning, when R&D costs are high and profits low, the subsidies are high to compensate, and over time, as the technology becomes more profitable, subsidies drop.
This system also provided players in the market with a reliable environment they could count on, making venturing into this market less risky.
The current government has gone to great lengths to destroy that environment. They've been keeping discussions about extra and faster reductions of the subsidies in the news continuously for years, and have taken several steps to actually cut them. From people I know in the industry, the cuts are not the bad part, the uncertainty is. It makes any investment a high-risk project.
Some commentators say this is all due to alternative energy growing quickly and the old energy companies becoming unhappy because other than they thought they can't control the market. Both wind and solar (the two primary sources of alternative energy in Germany) are mostly used in a de-centralized, small-plants way. There are very few huge wind or solar farms.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
That's an odd way of looking at things... By that argument, nothing is powered by the nuclear generator! You just keep unplugging marginal loads...
That economy of scale is why it takes less energy to produce them. Large ingots mean less energy input required per unit volume because less energy is being lost per unit volume from the surface.
I am not confusing the two but instead pointing out where the cost comes from! Less consumables required to produce the heat means spending less money on producing heat - and zone refining of silicon is the single most expensive step in semiconductor production.
Inefficient compared to what? Pretty much all the carbon in plants and in fossil fuels got there through that kind of process, so it's clearly more efficient than fossil fuels if you actually consider the entire cycle. pretty much all plant and animal life is reliant on such a cycle. If you actually want to use hydrocarbons for fuel for any decent amount of time (millenia or centuries, or maybe even just decades more) then there aren't really any other choices.
Breeder reactors!
They are our only hope to escape the fossile fuel cartel's death march. Death, by the way, not from climate change, but instead, and unlike climate change, this is 100% certain, death from the squeeze that will happen as fossil fuels get more and more expensive, combined with the fact that by the time that stupid humans wake up and realize the truth of that trend, there will no longer be a sufficient energy surplus to operate the fossil fuel machine and, at the same time, build its replacement. Oh well. The few people that survive the cataclysm will be much wiser than us.
Social Credit would solve everything...
1945.
Almost. Fermi was really this discovery.
IIRC, the cost per kwh for pv in germany is half what it is in the us. not sure why, if it's capped or what.
Yup... until you get to the nuclear generator's marginal load. Then that's the thing powered by the nuclear generator.
The point is that the nuclear generator's electricity will be used whether of not that car is on the grid. So you can't really say "the nuclear generator powers the car".
Regardless of your skepticism, this is the appropriate way to think of the cost of generating electricity for electric cars.
WILL NOT BE TOLERATED.... as - I must say what is the bleeding obvious of this story AND yesterday's news the the SAME CHINESE FIRM responsible for dumping solar panels has now gone bankrupt with a 1,9 Billion USD hole ...(https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/21/business/energy-environment/chinese-solar-companys-operating-unit-declares-bankruptcy.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)
SOLAR ENERGY IS A MYTH !!! ... unless it is completely state run....
it take enormous amounts of energy to dig for the proper rare earth materials, enormous amounts of energy to manufacture the exceedingly polluting manufacturing facilities AND, after the MUCH LESS than 25 year lifecycle ( which is totally bogus)
SOLAR PANELS ARE SOME OF THE MOST POLLUTING WASTE AROUND...
THERE ! I said this is gonna get some flack from "greens" but it is the unfortunate TRUTH about a BUSINESS that never was meant to be large scale profitable in the first place as it was wholly sustainable with GOVERNMENT SUBSIDIES other customers would pay in their electric or gas bills...
the only renewable that makes sense in kinetic based, like hydroelectric, wind farming or wave energy harvesting, the rest including so called torium reactors is pure marketing....
"Every watt of solar power needs some other type of reliable power generation to back it up. (or the application relying on solar is something that can be easily shut down)"
[snip]
"Because solar cannot provide reliable baseline power generation"
I always laugh when I see people pontificate on this, while ignoring the obvious counterexample.
Nuclear power cannot provide reliable dispatchable power generation. Peak is about 50% greater than base around here, so every watt of nuclear has to be backed up with 0.5 watts of some other power source. Here in Ontario it used to be coal, but we're in the midst of an extremely expensive and politically loaded switch to NG.
As a result of nuclear, we already have way more backup power than we need for any conceivable renewable buildout. And that's true in every jurisdiction I'm aware of.
"what baseline power generation techniques are environmentally friendly"
Hydro, of course. And before anyone says that's tapped out, only about 50% of the large scale hydro resources are currently used, a number that is surprisingly common worldwide.
Here in Canada we could actually go to a 100% hydro-powered grid, if we wanted to spend the money. And "the money" is small, because hydro is also the cheapest form of power, by far. Capex is normally between $1 and $2 a Watt, which is cheaper than coal's 2 to 3 or nuclear 7 to 9. LCoE is on the order of 2 to 5 cents.
Seems Safari lost my login credentials...
"But smaller single occupant vehicles powered by electric batteries would work well for city commuting."
And they also work fine for wide distance commuting if you're willing to invest in a dual-mode system...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-mode_vehicle
Nuclear power cannot provide reliable dispatchable power generation. Peak is about 50% greater than base around here, so every watt of nuclear has to be backed up with 0.5 watts of some other power source. Here in Ontario it used to be coal, but we're in the midst of an extremely expensive and politically loaded switch to NG.
Solar is not reliable dispatchable power generation, either.
You can turn it off, but you don't have full control of when it's on. Higher energy usage does generally correspond to daytime, but sunlight can be quite variable depending local weather.
Then there's land area. The amount of solar cells you would need to reach 50% of your base would make for some interesting solar "forests" that you hope don't get hail or heavy wind or other bad weather.
That's before we even start dealing with the environmentalists who will try to protect some endangered desert tortoise or ground squirrel.
...until the point where you drop below what the nuclear plant's full output is needed, at which point they shut down one of the reactors. I understand the difference between baseload plants and peaking plants. My point is that you cannot consider all loads on the grid to be handled by the peaking plants based on your "marginal load" argument above. If you had a lot of electric cars in the market, then the electric cars charging at 6pm when everyone gets home would be part of the base load for that time slot.
The truth is that there are a lot of plants putting power on the lines and you've no idea which ones you're using at any given moment. In his locality, it's probably most correct for the poster to say that "75% of your car is nuclear powered" or something like that, depending on what average percentage of power is supplied by the reactors in that area.
electric cars only suck because our battery technology sucks. But there's nothing in the laws of physics that says you can't make batteries that don't suck.
(triple negative... yikes)
scales)
Quadrupal if you count "suck"
Every watt of solar power needs some other type of reliable power generation to back it up. (or the application relying on solar is something that can be easily shut down)
An application like battery charging for electric cars you mean?
The factory churning out widgets will NOT accept the power going out because of a cloudy day.
Somewhat depends on what processes they're using; they may well be prepared to shutdown for a few days a year if the price of the power contract was more favourable that way, particularly if they were given some notice.
I'm certainly in favour of nuclear for baseload, but it doesn't work out that cheap and there's certainly a place for making use of the "renewable" power which can be harvested in places which get enough wind/sun.
Fuel generation from excess wind power is already being done, not as liquid fuels, but as methane. There is quite a bit of existing infrastructure for natural gas that can be utilized.
This is a fundamentally invalid argument.
The fact that you have no idea which one you are using is immaterial. The only question that matters is "what is the source of power that is added/subtracted if you add/subtract a load, with all else held equal".
If the nuclear power will be used even if your load is not on the network, then it is fundamentally invalid to claim "my addition of this load to the network is clean because it comes from nuclear power".
An application like battery charging for electric cars you mean?
"Sorry Hon, I'm going to be walking home today because it was cloudy and my electric car didn't charge. See you in two hours."
Somewhat depends on what processes they're using; they may well be prepared to shutdown for a few days a year if the price of the power contract was more favourable that way, particularly if they were given some notice.
"Work is canceled on account of a cloudy day. No, we're not paying you for work you didn't do. Pray for a sunny day tomorrow."
Your "depends" is fluff. List some real world businesses that are willing to run that way. If the factory is profitable, then they want it to be running with maximal uptime and efficiency. Random power outages work against that.
Power rates could compensate a little bit for random power outages, but there's a labor and opportunity cost that needs to be covered as well - so there would have to be some extreme cost savings to solar in order for it to be a net gain.
Problem: solar isn't cheaper than the alternatives - so no, it doesn't make sense (and probably never will).