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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!
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
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.
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 -
Those "latitudes" are rich in oil and gas, better deal.
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"
Go spew your "science" somewhere else.
That has been completely debunked. On Fox News.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/02/07/fox_news_expert_on_solar_energy_germany_gets_a_lot_more_sun_than_we_do_video.html
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
It's German http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bosch_GmbH
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.
More importantly solar doesn't get nearly the amount of government subsidies as oil. You know oil companies that make BILLIONS of dollars in a single quarter. Switch the oil subsidies to solar and what the solar industry take off.
I want a nuclear powered electric car.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
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.
http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/herbert-dow-and-predatory-pricing#axzz2OIXQkkrp
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Acutally, solar gets more subsidies by percentage. Oil gets more subsidies in total. This is pretty well known.
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.
Can you replace /build a solar cell with the energy it provides? I'm pretty sure you can't. Thus it's not sustainable and not really helping anybody.
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.
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.
Destroy countries? The U.S is the only country in the world that when it wins a war then rebuilds the country they attacked!
Can you replace /build a solar cell with the energy it provides? I'm pretty sure you can't. Thus it's not sustainable and not really helping anybody.
What makes you so sure?
It seems to me that as a first approximation, if a solar cell lasts long enough to recoup its acquisition cost, it has generated at least as much energy as was used in its production. That's because the cost of the energy used in production is rolled into the acquisition cost of the cell.
This is not to say that some PV cells don't manage to recoup the energy used in their production, e.g. PV cells used in spacecraft.
Anyhow ten seconds with Google Scholar produced the following abstract
Citation: Pearce, J., & Lau, A. (2002). Net energy analysis for sustainable energy production from silicon based solar cells. ASME.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
...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 backbone of the internet should survive as it was intended, but the more local components (ISPs) would probably fail. Many customers only have 99% or 99.9% uptime, and this is with the power grid working more-or-less correctly.
For this to actually work, we would probably find ourselves switching to a loose-coupled wireless internet (at least for the ISP piece), which is something that has been researched.
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".
Everyone knows that Al Gore invented surviving a nuclear war as well as the Internet.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Actually, the Internet is a Steve Jobs' invention.
Yeah Cisco totally hooked me up with this $22 000 router. What a bargain!
Perhaps this is some subtle internet humor, but if you actually follow that link, it contradicts what our ubiquitous friend Anonymous Coward says. The bit about surviving a nuclear war is discussed in a section labeled "Misconceptions of design goals".
(And as long as I'm responding to trolls, may I point out that Al Gore does indeed have a plausible claim to being the guy who created the internet.)
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.
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.
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
Blasphemy.
Inventing something implies he did not know it already.
The Omnipotent Lord our Jobs willed the internet into existence when humanity was ready to ascend one step closer to true enlightenment.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
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.
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.
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.
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.
You're an idiot.
If a company is dumping toxic waste into a stream but aren't being fined/punished that is most definitely a 'subsidy' to their bottom line. Right now nobody is paying for CO2 release, but we will 'all' be paying for it as global warming kicks in full swing. Best to start now and get some money for the coming costs no?
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
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.
Externalities aren't subsidies. A subsidy is a gift of value to the target while an externality is the imposition of a cost on a third party.
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.
That actually worked out VERY well for the USA in the 1950s with a lot of local benefits and an overall raise in the standard of living. People in the USA working for US owned companies made a lot of the stuff used for reconstruction and got paid well for it.
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>
This is Slashdot, I can tell by your low UID that you've been here a while. We're not typically the kind of crowd that accepts claims of invention from political types whose only input was to vote on funding.
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))"
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...
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
In a typical year I pay $2000 for heating and $2 for air conditioning. Please explain how global warming is something I will pay for.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
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.
While technically true, governments actively enabling the externalization of costs are most certainly subsidizing if they are covering those external costs themselves. For example, you can't say the US liability shielding/exemption for nuclear power generation isn't a subsidy. The government directly says, "we know you can't afford it so you don't have to pay that bill. If something goes wrong, we'll take care of it."
Surely we would scream "subsidy" if Obama announced a $10 liability limit for Prius drivers and federal funds paid for any excess damages.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
with imports across the globe you have transport
Good thing all that coal being burned is dug up in the back yard...
*everything* has costs but fossil fuels have direct things that renewables don't. Like the FUEL itself.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
How much tax payer money was spent on New Orleans? How much will be spent on moving Miami? Or building a sea wall to protect NYC?
The sea is rising and getting warmer. More warmth means more energy available for storms so they 'will' be stronger.
The costs will be massive and while perhaps *you* won't pay them directly, your kids and grand kids certainly will be paying them - unless we start trying to head it off now.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
And to put your ignorant 'me first' outlook in perspective:
LA governor Bobby Jindal decried 'volcano monitoring' in his 2009 State of the Union response. Guess what happened 2 weeks later in Alaska? A volcano not too far from Anchorage erupted. I'm quite sure that LA isn't going to be effected by volcanoes anytime soon...yet they certainly pay money towards 'volcano monitoring' because we do that as a society - we help everybody even if 'we' aren't directly affected by that particular issue.
Join AC as being an idiot.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
For example, you can't say the US liability shielding/exemption for nuclear power generation isn't a subsidy.
I agree that is a subsidy, but it's not an externality because an involved party (here, the US federal government) is still paying the bill. However, I have to say that this with slight modification could create both an externality and subsidy. Say, if nobody was required to pay (including the government) in the event of a nuclear accident when they would normally pay.
So my claim was wrong, but it would require deliberate shielding by the government. So going back to pixelpusher's original claim, if a company were dumping toxic waste into a stream, and the local government was actively shielding that company from lawsuits and regulation fines for the harm the pollution caused (in other words, without the active interference of the government, the company would be bearing the costs of its pollution one way or another), then that would be a case of something that was both an externality and a subsidy.
No actually its a series of tubes! at least according to Late Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska)
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.
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.
.... nuclear power, namely electricity when you need it, not when the clouds allow for it..
There are several posts spreading this stupidity in this discussion once again. When running Nuclear plants produce power continually at a more or less constant rate. That is not even close to "when you need it". Electricity needs vary quite quickly. For example if there is a time when many people start cooking or boiling water. This happens on a big scale also when a nuclear plant has a failure and has to scram. In the normal operating range of a Nuclear plant changing output levels takes a long time and is undesirable because it makes the plant inefficient. Once you hear the reactor core you have to keep taking power it of it or you get problems like the ones in Japan not so long ago. This slow power output control is shared with coal plants but is much worse with nuclear.
There are a number of technologies which can give you direct control over the output. Batteries, flywheels and pump storage exist precisely for this but don't generate any electricity. Hydro is great but there are limits to how much you can afford to build. Gas fired are expensive but close to hydro in convenience. Solar and wind both provide you with real generating capacity which can easily be ramped up and shut down almost instantly. Tidal and wave power could also be okay in this way.
What this means is that any future "low carbon" electricity generating system, whether based on some imaginary low cost future nuclear system or on renewables just has to be able to store more of the generated electricity. Once you do this then there is really little benefit from Nuclear so the huge costs become unjustifiable.
What is really needed are reasonably efficient large scale ways of changing electricity and atmospheric carbon dioxide into hydrocarbons or alcohols. These are easy to store and could be used to generate power when needed or to power vehicles if there is an excess.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
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.
Well I can't help think that some countries are tempted to go to war with the U.S just so they could have one of those free nation building promo's.
...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.
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).