Climate can change and it will change but predicting these kinds of trends to 2050 with any kind of accuracy is ludicrous at best, since they cannot even predict whats the weather next weekend.
Again, the above is a perfect example of bullshit, or if you want a more polite term, "poppycock" or "humbug". Quoting from the above link...
Bullshit is commonly used to describe statements made by people more concerned with the response of the audience than in truth and accuracy, such as goal-oriented statements made in the field of politics or advertising.
"bullshit" can be sometimes be distinguished from lying...
"Bullshit" does not necessarily have to be a complete fabrication; with only basic knowledge about a topic, bullshit is often used to make the audience believe that one knows far more about the topic by feigning total certainty or making probable predictions.
The parent poster seems to implicitly (and deliberately?) confuse climate and weather. There are numerousqualitydiscussions about chaotic systems, the differences between climate and weather, and how climate is predictable farther into the future than weather. The existence of these arguments, and the poster's seeming ignorance of them seems to indicate to me that the poster simply does not care about the truth, but cares rather only to appear to be truthful to those less well-read in science. As such, he falls nicely under Princeton Professor Harry Frankfurt's definition of a bullshiter given in his 2005 monograph 'On Bullshit':
It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.
Bullshit is commonly used to describe statements made by people more concerned with the response of the audience than in truth and accuracy, such as goal-oriented statements made in the field of politics or advertising.
Bullshit. Bullshit is just a non-PC way of saying citation needed.
It is a derogatory term for a despicable practice.
or, alternatively, none of those things will happen. Since the mid 90s billions of dollars and euros and yen have been wasted on climate models, most of which have been utterly useless. Even this year major factors have been discovered that render all previous models void, and the "climatologists" cherry-pick, cook the books, from the pile of models after the fact to try to justify their existence. This pseudo-science should have its plug pulled, it serves no purpose other than pumping "cap and trade" scams.
Bullshit is commonly used to describe statements made by people more concerned with the response of the audience than in truth and accuracy, such as goal-oriented statements made in the field of politics or advertising.
"Bullshit" does not necessarily have to be a complete fabrication; with only basic knowledge about a topic, bullshit is often used to make the audience believe that one knows far more about the topic by feigning total certainty or making probable predictions. It may also merely be "filler" or nonsense that, by virtue of its style or wording, gives the impression that it actually means something.
Here is a video of a scientist named Charles Chase who works for Lockheed Martin Skunkworks. The presentation is made at Google's "Solve for X". The video is 14 minutes long so I'll give an executive summary. Chase claims that his team has made a breakthrough in developing a small fusion reactor that will lead to a 100MW reactor the size of a truck trailer and of the complexity of a jet engine. The prototype they have built is a cylinder 1m in diameter by 2m long. In their experiment they put deuterium gas into a magnetically confined space and heat it up with radiofrequency energy. He infers that the confined plasma is reaching the conditions necessary for fusion to occur. The reactor is "high beta", with "beta" referring to the ratio of the magnetic field pressure to the pressure of the plasma pushing out. He says that the magnetic field strength in the reactor increases as you go out from the centre of the plasma, thus creating an extremely effective plasma confinement. He contrasts this with a Tokamak reactor, where the magnetic field is generated by the moving plasma itself, and thus decreases in strength out from the centre of the plasma. He says that this decreasing field strength is the main problem with Tokamak reactors and that it causes the confinement to be unstable. If the confinement becomes unstable, the magnetic field decreases, thus creating a negative feedback loop. This contrasts with his reactor design, that tends to create a far more stable plasma confinement.
I have a background in physics and what this man says in his video makes sense to me. It is of course short on details, but what would you expect for a short presentation. And you wouldn't expect a Skunkworks scientist to publish information in the same way as a university scientist. I have often puzzled in the past as to why we can't use an elegant method of magnetic confinement to achieve the conditions for fusion on a small scale. Tokamak seems an inelegant dead end. I think that if you can adequately confine the plasma, you have solved the energy balance problem that has plagued fusion reactors in the past.
In short, it's yet again the middle class that gets fucked.
2500 years ago, Aristotle wrote that
"The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes.
I sometimes wonder if many of our current political difficulties are due in part to the fact that our political and academic elites have stopped reading the classics. Those who designed our current political and economic systems were steeped in classical Greek literature (ie. Locke, Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, Voltaire, Rousseau et al.). The ancient Greeks invented money as a medium of universal exchange, private property, constitutional law and democracy. I wonder how we can preserve these systems if we do not understand where they come from.
From what I understand, there may have been a non-laws-of-physics-violating explanation for the observed production of neutrons and helium in the cold fusion curiosities of the late 80s
I am quite aware of the details of "cold fusion". I don't want to talk about that. What I do want to talk about is the presentation by Charles Chase on using small scale magnetic confinement (a cylinder of about 1 cubic meter volume I think) of plasma to achieve the conditions necessary for fusion. Sheesh. This is a nerds site. Would someone just watch the video I linked to and explain to me why this cannot be real. Because I have a physics background, and what Charles Chase speaks about sounds plausible to me. Lockheed Martin Skunkworks is a storied program, that brought us things like the SR-71 Blackbird. If they developed new fusion technology, we wouldn't expect them to publish the minute details yet...that's not how they work. But based on my intuitive knowledge of fields, I don't see why it isn't possible to craft a magnetic field arrangement that will confine high temperature plasma. They excite the plasma using radio-frequency EM radiation. And at some point the temperatures and pressures increase enough to achieve the fusion of hydrogen.
I don't understand why this Skunkworks project presentation from Google's "Solve for X" program isn't receiving more attention. The presentation is made by a Lockheed Martin Skunkworks scientist (Charles Chase) who claims they will be able to make a 100MW fusion reactor the size of a truck trailer in a few years. Admittedly there aren't that many details given, but that is understandable as Skunkworks does't usually release its projects. To me the above presentation has the ring of authenticity. I have often thought that achieving fusion conditions at a small scale should be possible by the elegant application of magnetic and electric fields. I know "cold fusion" fooled a lot of people and made us reflexively skeptical of fusion claims. But I don't believe Charles Chase's claims fundamentally violate the laws of physics like many people's vision of cold fusion did. Give this video a watch and see what you think.
I suspect that if you are willing to spend $10 000 on a sound system, properly installed in the right space, you will hear the difference. But if you are just using your iPod to play your music, there will be no difference at all.
Here is a better link. It states that in Australia, unsubsidised wind energy is cheaper than coal power for new coal plants if depreciation of the coal plant equipment is taken into account. It seems to me that many of the carefully constructed right wing myths about clean energy are beginning to evaporate.
Here is the text of the Reuter's link. Sorry about the formatting, but I only have time to insert line breaks and not paragraph markers.
Roof-top solar power is increasingly cost-competitive with retail power prices, with far-reaching implications for solar manufacturers, utilities and rival generation technologies.
Data gathered from U.S. installations by the Department of Energy suggests it is cheaper to generate electricity from roof-top solar panels than to purchase power from electric utilities, if applied to European retail power prices.
The economics of unsubsidised solar depends on the balance of self-generated solar power which is used at home, displacing more expensive purchased electricity, compared with the surplus which has to be exported back to the grid at much lower wholesale prices.
Retail power prices are higher than wholesale because of a mark-up by utilities, plus state levies and charges to cover the cost of grid transmission and renewable energy.
A report titled "The unsubsidised solar revolution" by UBS analysts last month estimated that households in southern Germany installing unsubsidised solar power could already make a net saving over the 20-year lifetime of the panels.
The analysts estimated a positive rate of return on investment of 2 percent already, rising to more than 6 percent by 2020.
The economics of solar will continue to improve as the installed cost continues to fall, retail power prices rise and residential battery storage becomes increasingly competitive, allowing households to displace more purchased electricity.
FALLING INSTALLED COST
Prices of solar panels, or modules, have more than halved in the past three years, because of a global glut after manufacturing ramped up in China.
The remaining installation costs, chiefly labour, are often referred to as "balance of system" and vary according to the maturity of the supply chain.
The U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has developed an open project database detailing the combined full installation cost, excluding incentives, of projects based in the United States.
The NREL database can be found here:
openpv.nrel.gov/search
Utilities, installers and the public volunteer the data, which NREL monitors to ensure quality.
"Data validation occurs on each record in the database on a regular basis. The database is continually analysed for corrupt records, bad or invalid data, and outliers such as an abnormal cost to watt ratio. Records found to contain questionable data are flagged and are dealt with on a case by case basis."
As expected, full installed costs have fallen less precipitously than modules, given the labour component.
Median calculations are more meaningful than averages given the non-symmetrical data which includes a minority of utility-scale projects.
The NREL data show median, full installed costs fell 17 percent between 2010 and 2012, and are now around $4 (3 euros) per watt.
That is higher than some analyst estimates.
For example, UBS last month assumed current full installed costs at 1.9 euros ($2.5) per watt, perhaps reflecting a more developed supply chain and lower costs in parts of Europe and especially Germany, compared with the United States.
According to the NREL data, costs fell to a median $3.6 per watt in 2013 to date (sample size of just 7 records), from $4.9 in the last three months (99 records); $5.5 in calendar year 2012 (9,747 records); $6.3 in 2011 (31,388 records); and $6.6 in 2010 (35,906 records).
Regarding size, projects are the equivalent of large residential roof-top installations, with a median size of 4 kilowatts in the 2013 year to date; 7 kW in the last three months; 5.2 kW in 2012; 5.4 kW in 2011; and 5.5 kW in 2010.
LEVELISED COST
Assuming the full cost of a new roof-top installation is $4 per watt, it is straightforward to calculate a levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) using various assumptions.
An LCOE
You only want to do the symbolic gesture, cause you dont actually want to give up your A/C, your furnace, your comfortable house outside the city the requires a commute, your high tech toys.
I live close enough to work to ride a bicycle, which I do regularly. My car get 50mpg and serves my needs perfectly. I keep my house at 66 F when I am home, and wear a sweater. Because of these actions alone, I likely consume half the energy of the average person. My actions are not merely symbolic.
You only want to do the symbolic gesture, cause you dont actually want to give up your A/C, your furnace, your comfortable house outside the city the requires a commute, your high tech toys.
You are an unethical and dishonest debater, trying to create a false dichotomy. I drive a car that gets 50mpg easily. It is big enough, safe enough and fast enough to serve my purposes and gets me from A to B comfortably. Contrast that with someone who drives a 12mpg suv as a single occupant commuter vehicle and who almost never uses 95% of the space or capability. That is waste.
Consider the CIRS building at the University of British Columbia. It is a net producer of energy, and a net consumer of CO2. Consider passive houses, that consume 90% less energy than a regular house and yet cost about the same as a regular house when components are built in a factory. When such technologies are available, it is waste not to use them.
"green" energy is too expensive to compete with proven yet "dirty" tech? well instead of developing the green tech to compete we must artificially increase the cost of the dirty fuel!
Wrong. In some places, unsubsized solar is already cheaper than coal. And fossil fuels are already heavily subsidized. Why is the parent marked insightful?!
Well DUH! Earth hour IS symbolic. So what. In doing this, we are reminding ourselves that the world will not end if we reduce our energy consumption. We remind ourselves of how wasteful our energy use is. It encourages people to make long term adjustments to their energy consumption habits. When I see posts themed "fuck Earth Week", I am reminded of a 10 year old boy having a temper tantrum and holding his breath. That or a paid poster. The simple fact is that an economy cannot thrive long if it is based on a culture of waste. It is deeply irrational to think that waste is a positive practice. Waste of energy. Waste of financial resources. Waste of labor resources. Waste of physical resources. Wasting scarce resources makes us all poorer in the end.
I am typing this from a System 76 laptop running Ubuntu. I switched from a Macbook Pro to Linux three months ago, and so far, the main thing I miss is the nice trackpad on my mac, with its one easy to press button. I also miss the amazing mac Preview app. One thing I really like is that I got back my Spaces behavior that was lost when I updated to Lion. I have hot-corners activated so that my windows shrink and are arranged to pick one. The graphics are very snappy. Ubuntu is unbearable without 3d acceleration, but because I bought a machine made for Linux the 3d works out of the box.
As for desktop environments, I may start playing around with other options when I get time. In some ways I don't mind unity too much. Once discovered the compiz manager, it felt more like my old laptop. It is true that often I have to use the google manual to make my system work like I want. This still isn't my mother's computer. But on the whole, I don't regret the move. I get my work done. But most importantly, I enjoy the feeling of freedom and control I get from running open source software.
There is an ancient Greek saying: "Nothing in excess" ( ). Indeed this was carved into the temple of Phoebus Apollo at Delphi, and was at the heart of Greek life. Those who framed our current civilisation were deeply informed by the ancient Greeks, which is why so much of what the Greeks said and wrote rings so true to us.
If the EU force Apple to have a browser ballot on iOS, I do believe Steve Jobs will be turning ever so violently in his grave:D
On a more serious note: couldn't the fact that Apple forces all apps to be purchased through their own app store just as well be seen as anti-competitive?
Apple's tight control over their iOS operating system has creeped me out so much that I have ditched my Macbook Pro of five years for a Linux laptop. I know OSX is not so tightly controlled, but I believe that iOS shows Apple's long term intentions for operating systems, and I don't like it one bit. I don't like the idea of a single company controlling what I can run on my own computer. I don't care if they are permissive or restrictive. The very fact that a single company controls what can run on computers is I believe quite dangerous.
The question -- as it always is -- is: What is the operating temperature range for this material? Because if it's still "refrigerate or die", applications will not expand much beyond where they are today.
If we get superconductors we can use as power transmission lines in normal environmental temperature ranges, that'll be a serious game-changer.
Java fails yet again, and really who is surprised. Java was and is a flawed language from the ground up and all of these exploits just help prove it. If you want a good secure system / language just look to C, it does everything you can think of or want, has little to no overhead and runs on almost every device in the world. Real programmers use C, hipster wantabe's use Java.
What do you think the JVM is written in?
Yeah, C and probably C++.
Grow a brain, you twerp.
I've heard it argued that Java is insecure because too much of it is written in C++, poor quality code no doubt. It would have been more secure if a core of commands was written in C++, and the rest was written in Java. Then, more effort could be put into making the core secure.
One concern is the life of their pressure suits. Lunar fines are very abrasive and Apollo surface suits had a short working life. Martian fines may cause similar problems.
I don't think the fine particles on Mars will for the most part resemble those on the Moon. Mars has had wind blowing the particles around for a very long time, smoothing out the rough corners on the particles. The Moon clearly has no wind. The particles on the Moon likely formed via meteorite impact ejecta, either from shattered rock or by condensation from vaporized rock. After formation, there would likely be less corner erosion of fine particles due to the lack of wind. Thus the Moon's fine particles are quite abrasive.
They didn't use them because THEY DIDN'T HAVE THEM.
Oh please. Chemical weapons, especially mustard gas are trivial to synthesize. Iran is a modern technical nation. Even now they are building their own guided missile systems. They are also, apparently enriching their own uranium, which is not easy to do. If they chose to, they could have easily made chemical weapons.
It is telling that during the Iran Iraq war, when Iraq used chemical weapons on Iranians, Iran did not respond in kind. In truth, it seems likely that many in the Iranian political class look at weapons of mass destruction with disgust. That said, they are obviously pursuing nuclear weapons to some degree. A source that I have, who is quite plugged into these things thinks that Iran wants to get a few months away from having nuclear weapons, and then hold short.
Slashdot Mirror
Climate can change and it will change but predicting these kinds of trends to 2050 with any kind of accuracy is ludicrous at best, since they cannot even predict whats the weather next weekend.
Again, the above is a perfect example of bullshit, or if you want a more polite term, "poppycock" or "humbug". Quoting from the above link...
Bullshit is commonly used to describe statements made by people more concerned with the response of the audience than in truth and accuracy, such as goal-oriented statements made in the field of politics or advertising.
"bullshit" can be sometimes be distinguished from lying...
"Bullshit" does not necessarily have to be a complete fabrication; with only basic knowledge about a topic, bullshit is often used to make the audience believe that one knows far more about the topic by feigning total certainty or making probable predictions.
The parent poster seems to implicitly (and deliberately?) confuse climate and weather. There are numerous quality discussions about chaotic systems, the differences between climate and weather, and how climate is predictable farther into the future than weather. The existence of these arguments, and the poster's seeming ignorance of them seems to indicate to me that the poster simply does not care about the truth, but cares rather only to appear to be truthful to those less well-read in science. As such, he falls nicely under Princeton Professor Harry Frankfurt's definition of a bullshiter given in his 2005 monograph 'On Bullshit':
It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.
Yea, fuck those ROHS, UL, and FCC certifications!
Yes, indeed, please fuck ROHS. It is a wrongheaded idea that has caused no end of problems. Why do you think really critical devices are exempt?
What about ROUS's?
Bullshit is commonly used to describe statements made by people more concerned with the response of the audience than in truth and accuracy, such as goal-oriented statements made in the field of politics or advertising.
Bullshit. Bullshit is just a non-PC way of saying citation needed.
It is a derogatory term for a despicable practice.
or, alternatively, none of those things will happen. Since the mid 90s billions of dollars and euros and yen have been wasted on climate models, most of which have been utterly useless. Even this year major factors have been discovered that render all previous models void, and the "climatologists" cherry-pick, cook the books, from the pile of models after the fact to try to justify their existence. This pseudo-science should have its plug pulled, it serves no purpose other than pumping "cap and trade" scams.
Definiton of bull shit:
Bullshit is commonly used to describe statements made by people more concerned with the response of the audience than in truth and accuracy, such as goal-oriented statements made in the field of politics or advertising.
"Bullshit" does not necessarily have to be a complete fabrication; with only basic knowledge about a topic, bullshit is often used to make the audience believe that one knows far more about the topic by feigning total certainty or making probable predictions. It may also merely be "filler" or nonsense that, by virtue of its style or wording, gives the impression that it actually means something.
Here is a video of a scientist named Charles Chase who works for Lockheed Martin Skunkworks. The presentation is made at Google's "Solve for X". The video is 14 minutes long so I'll give an executive summary. Chase claims that his team has made a breakthrough in developing a small fusion reactor that will lead to a 100MW reactor the size of a truck trailer and of the complexity of a jet engine. The prototype they have built is a cylinder 1m in diameter by 2m long. In their experiment they put deuterium gas into a magnetically confined space and heat it up with radiofrequency energy. He infers that the confined plasma is reaching the conditions necessary for fusion to occur. The reactor is "high beta", with "beta" referring to the ratio of the magnetic field pressure to the pressure of the plasma pushing out. He says that the magnetic field strength in the reactor increases as you go out from the centre of the plasma, thus creating an extremely effective plasma confinement. He contrasts this with a Tokamak reactor, where the magnetic field is generated by the moving plasma itself, and thus decreases in strength out from the centre of the plasma. He says that this decreasing field strength is the main problem with Tokamak reactors and that it causes the confinement to be unstable. If the confinement becomes unstable, the magnetic field decreases, thus creating a negative feedback loop. This contrasts with his reactor design, that tends to create a far more stable plasma confinement.
I have a background in physics and what this man says in his video makes sense to me. It is of course short on details, but what would you expect for a short presentation. And you wouldn't expect a Skunkworks scientist to publish information in the same way as a university scientist. I have often puzzled in the past as to why we can't use an elegant method of magnetic confinement to achieve the conditions for fusion on a small scale. Tokamak seems an inelegant dead end. I think that if you can adequately confine the plasma, you have solved the energy balance problem that has plagued fusion reactors in the past.
Watch the video and see what you think.
In short, it's yet again the middle class that gets fucked.
2500 years ago, Aristotle wrote that
"The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes.
I sometimes wonder if many of our current political difficulties are due in part to the fact that our political and academic elites have stopped reading the classics. Those who designed our current political and economic systems were steeped in classical Greek literature (ie. Locke, Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, Voltaire, Rousseau et al.). The ancient Greeks invented money as a medium of universal exchange, private property, constitutional law and democracy. I wonder how we can preserve these systems if we do not understand where they come from.
From what I understand, there may have been a non-laws-of-physics-violating explanation for the observed production of neutrons and helium in the cold fusion curiosities of the late 80s
I am quite aware of the details of "cold fusion". I don't want to talk about that. What I do want to talk about is the presentation by Charles Chase on using small scale magnetic confinement (a cylinder of about 1 cubic meter volume I think) of plasma to achieve the conditions necessary for fusion. Sheesh. This is a nerds site. Would someone just watch the video I linked to and explain to me why this cannot be real. Because I have a physics background, and what Charles Chase speaks about sounds plausible to me. Lockheed Martin Skunkworks is a storied program, that brought us things like the SR-71 Blackbird. If they developed new fusion technology, we wouldn't expect them to publish the minute details yet...that's not how they work. But based on my intuitive knowledge of fields, I don't see why it isn't possible to craft a magnetic field arrangement that will confine high temperature plasma. They excite the plasma using radio-frequency EM radiation. And at some point the temperatures and pressures increase enough to achieve the fusion of hydrogen.
I don't understand why this Skunkworks project presentation from Google's "Solve for X" program isn't receiving more attention. The presentation is made by a Lockheed Martin Skunkworks scientist (Charles Chase) who claims they will be able to make a 100MW fusion reactor the size of a truck trailer in a few years. Admittedly there aren't that many details given, but that is understandable as Skunkworks does't usually release its projects. To me the above presentation has the ring of authenticity. I have often thought that achieving fusion conditions at a small scale should be possible by the elegant application of magnetic and electric fields. I know "cold fusion" fooled a lot of people and made us reflexively skeptical of fusion claims. But I don't believe Charles Chase's claims fundamentally violate the laws of physics like many people's vision of cold fusion did. Give this video a watch and see what you think.
I suspect that if you are willing to spend $10 000 on a sound system, properly installed in the right space, you will hear the difference. But if you are just using your iPod to play your music, there will be no difference at all.
My Prius does get 50mpg. Others get more. It depends on how you drive. Hint...flooring when the light goes green doesn't help.
Here is a better link. It states that in Australia, unsubsidised wind energy is cheaper than coal power for new coal plants if depreciation of the coal plant equipment is taken into account. It seems to me that many of the carefully constructed right wing myths about clean energy are beginning to evaporate.
Here is the text of the Reuter's link. Sorry about the formatting, but I only have time to insert line breaks and not paragraph markers.
Roof-top solar power is increasingly cost-competitive with retail power prices, with far-reaching implications for solar manufacturers, utilities and rival generation technologies.
Data gathered from U.S. installations by the Department of Energy suggests it is cheaper to generate electricity from roof-top solar panels than to purchase power from electric utilities, if applied to European retail power prices.
The economics of unsubsidised solar depends on the balance of self-generated solar power which is used at home, displacing more expensive purchased electricity, compared with the surplus which has to be exported back to the grid at much lower wholesale prices.
Retail power prices are higher than wholesale because of a mark-up by utilities, plus state levies and charges to cover the cost of grid transmission and renewable energy.
A report titled "The unsubsidised solar revolution" by UBS analysts last month estimated that households in southern Germany installing unsubsidised solar power could already make a net saving over the 20-year lifetime of the panels.
The analysts estimated a positive rate of return on investment of 2 percent already, rising to more than 6 percent by 2020.
The economics of solar will continue to improve as the installed cost continues to fall, retail power prices rise and residential battery storage becomes increasingly competitive, allowing households to displace more purchased electricity.
FALLING INSTALLED COST
Prices of solar panels, or modules, have more than halved in the past three years, because of a global glut after manufacturing ramped up in China.
The remaining installation costs, chiefly labour, are often referred to as "balance of system" and vary according to the maturity of the supply chain.
The U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has developed an open project database detailing the combined full installation cost, excluding incentives, of projects based in the United States.
The NREL database can be found here:
openpv.nrel.gov/search
Utilities, installers and the public volunteer the data, which NREL monitors to ensure quality.
"Data validation occurs on each record in the database on a regular basis. The database is continually analysed for corrupt records, bad or invalid data, and outliers such as an abnormal cost to watt ratio. Records found to contain questionable data are flagged and are dealt with on a case by case basis."
As expected, full installed costs have fallen less precipitously than modules, given the labour component.
Median calculations are more meaningful than averages given the non-symmetrical data which includes a minority of utility-scale projects.
The NREL data show median, full installed costs fell 17 percent between 2010 and 2012, and are now around $4 (3 euros) per watt.
That is higher than some analyst estimates.
For example, UBS last month assumed current full installed costs at 1.9 euros ($2.5) per watt, perhaps reflecting a more developed supply chain and lower costs in parts of Europe and especially Germany, compared with the United States.
According to the NREL data, costs fell to a median $3.6 per watt in 2013 to date (sample size of just 7 records), from $4.9 in the last three months (99 records); $5.5 in calendar year 2012 (9,747 records); $6.3 in 2011 (31,388 records); and $6.6 in 2010 (35,906 records).
Regarding size, projects are the equivalent of large residential roof-top installations, with a median size of 4 kilowatts in the 2013 year to date; 7 kW in the last three months; 5.2 kW in 2012; 5.4 kW in 2011; and 5.5 kW in 2010.
LEVELISED COST
Assuming the full cost of a new roof-top installation is $4 per watt, it is straightforward to calculate a levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) using various assumptions.
An LCOE
You only want to do the symbolic gesture, cause you dont actually want to give up your A/C, your furnace, your comfortable house outside the city the requires a commute, your high tech toys.
I live close enough to work to ride a bicycle, which I do regularly. My car get 50mpg and serves my needs perfectly. I keep my house at 66 F when I am home, and wear a sweater. Because of these actions alone, I likely consume half the energy of the average person. My actions are not merely symbolic.
You only want to do the symbolic gesture, cause you dont actually want to give up your A/C, your furnace, your comfortable house outside the city the requires a commute, your high tech toys.
You are an unethical and dishonest debater, trying to create a false dichotomy. I drive a car that gets 50mpg easily. It is big enough, safe enough and fast enough to serve my purposes and gets me from A to B comfortably. Contrast that with someone who drives a 12mpg suv as a single occupant commuter vehicle and who almost never uses 95% of the space or capability. That is waste.
Consider the CIRS building at the University of British Columbia. It is a net producer of energy, and a net consumer of CO2. Consider passive houses, that consume 90% less energy than a regular house and yet cost about the same as a regular house when components are built in a factory. When such technologies are available, it is waste not to use them.
"green" energy is too expensive to compete with proven yet "dirty" tech? well instead of developing the green tech to compete we must artificially increase the cost of the dirty fuel!
Wrong. In some places, unsubsized solar is already cheaper than coal. And fossil fuels are already heavily subsidized. Why is the parent marked insightful?!
Well DUH! Earth hour IS symbolic. So what. In doing this, we are reminding ourselves that the world will not end if we reduce our energy consumption. We remind ourselves of how wasteful our energy use is. It encourages people to make long term adjustments to their energy consumption habits. When I see posts themed "fuck Earth Week", I am reminded of a 10 year old boy having a temper tantrum and holding his breath. That or a paid poster. The simple fact is that an economy cannot thrive long if it is based on a culture of waste. It is deeply irrational to think that waste is a positive practice. Waste of energy. Waste of financial resources. Waste of labor resources. Waste of physical resources. Wasting scarce resources makes us all poorer in the end.
I am typing this from a System 76 laptop running Ubuntu. I switched from a Macbook Pro to Linux three months ago, and so far, the main thing I miss is the nice trackpad on my mac, with its one easy to press button. I also miss the amazing mac Preview app. One thing I really like is that I got back my Spaces behavior that was lost when I updated to Lion. I have hot-corners activated so that my windows shrink and are arranged to pick one. The graphics are very snappy. Ubuntu is unbearable without 3d acceleration, but because I bought a machine made for Linux the 3d works out of the box.
As for desktop environments, I may start playing around with other options when I get time. In some ways I don't mind unity too much. Once discovered the compiz manager, it felt more like my old laptop. It is true that often I have to use the google manual to make my system work like I want. This still isn't my mother's computer. But on the whole, I don't regret the move. I get my work done. But most importantly, I enjoy the feeling of freedom and control I get from running open source software.
There is an ancient Greek saying: "Nothing in excess" ( ). Indeed this was carved into the temple of Phoebus Apollo at Delphi, and was at the heart of Greek life. Those who framed our current civilisation were deeply informed by the ancient Greeks, which is why so much of what the Greeks said and wrote rings so true to us.
If the EU force Apple to have a browser ballot on iOS, I do believe Steve Jobs will be turning ever so violently in his grave :D
On a more serious note: couldn't the fact that Apple forces all apps to be purchased through their own app store just as well be seen as anti-competitive?
Apple's tight control over their iOS operating system has creeped me out so much that I have ditched my Macbook Pro of five years for a Linux laptop. I know OSX is not so tightly controlled, but I believe that iOS shows Apple's long term intentions for operating systems, and I don't like it one bit. I don't like the idea of a single company controlling what I can run on my own computer. I don't care if they are permissive or restrictive. The very fact that a single company controls what can run on computers is I believe quite dangerous.
To quote Plutarch (46 - 120 AD),
An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.
The question -- as it always is -- is: What is the operating temperature range for this material? Because if it's still "refrigerate or die", applications will not expand much beyond where they are today.
If we get superconductors we can use as power transmission lines in normal environmental temperature ranges, that'll be a serious game-changer.
Methinks you meant Vogonium.
Java fails yet again, and really who is surprised. Java was and is a flawed language from the ground up and all of these exploits just help prove it. If you want a good secure system / language just look to C, it does everything you can think of or want, has little to no overhead and runs on almost every device in the world. Real programmers use C, hipster wantabe's use Java.
What do you think the JVM is written in?
Yeah, C and probably C++.
Grow a brain, you twerp.
I've heard it argued that Java is insecure because too much of it is written in C++, poor quality code no doubt. It would have been more secure if a core of commands was written in C++, and the rest was written in Java. Then, more effort could be put into making the core secure.
One concern is the life of their pressure suits. Lunar fines are very abrasive and Apollo surface suits had a short working life. Martian fines may cause similar problems.
I don't think the fine particles on Mars will for the most part resemble those on the Moon. Mars has had wind blowing the particles around for a very long time, smoothing out the rough corners on the particles. The Moon clearly has no wind. The particles on the Moon likely formed via meteorite impact ejecta, either from shattered rock or by condensation from vaporized rock. After formation, there would likely be less corner erosion of fine particles due to the lack of wind. Thus the Moon's fine particles are quite abrasive.
They didn't use them because THEY DIDN'T HAVE THEM.
Oh please. Chemical weapons, especially mustard gas are trivial to synthesize. Iran is a modern technical nation. Even now they are building their own guided missile systems. They are also, apparently enriching their own uranium, which is not easy to do. If they chose to, they could have easily made chemical weapons.
It is telling that during the Iran Iraq war, when Iraq used chemical weapons on Iranians, Iran did not respond in kind. In truth, it seems likely that many in the Iranian political class look at weapons of mass destruction with disgust. That said, they are obviously pursuing nuclear weapons to some degree. A source that I have, who is quite plugged into these things thinks that Iran wants to get a few months away from having nuclear weapons, and then hold short.