Cold fusion gets little or no government funding. For the most part people work on in their spare time or have private funding. There was a
slashdot article recently http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/0 5/2148217 implying that the Navy was supporting cold fusion research.
Well, yes, in a way. There was some lab space that was used, but the funding level was a few thousand dollars from a discretionary account. No
salaries were paid.
I agree with you that diversity in research on fusion should be supported, but I'd extend it even beyond your limit to the DOE idea that focused
research in cold fusion using improved instruments should be supported. So far though, I think the DOE is not supporting this kind of work. --
Harvest fusion on your roof: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
Thanks! I would disagree with him though. What Germany does is important. They are showing how to convert to renewable energy and handling
many of the technical issues first. They are already at over 10% with wind ahead of hydro: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_G ermany. Their experience is going to help to inform the rest of us on how to do this
kind of thing.
Actually, working in the IR from the ground is quite possible. What is different is the sensitivity. On the ground, but the telescope and the
atmosphere emit IR light, so you have to look at sources that are not too much fainter than the foreground light (we usually call it background).
A cold telescope in space can work on much much fainter objects because it is limited not by the background, but by the arrival statistics of the source
photons. If you've got 20 photons, you've got a detection. In the backgound limit you need three times as many photons as the square root of the
number of background photons. The square root of a very large number is still pretty big. Hubble, while not cold, has had some near infrared capability.
You'd have to take time to travel to that distance so the advantage is erased. I am interested in incredibly large telescopes, which is what
you'd need to get that kind of detail. I've begun to wonder of the combined power production data from many solar power systems might be used
to study the Sun in more detail, especially helioseismology, or at night to monitor bolides and other bright transients. -- You might be building the biggest telescope ever: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
Actually, you'd like to have it as some distance from Earth because the Earth is warm. At L2 you block both the Sun and Earth with the sun shield and so can make the telescope colder without extra shielding. This is not a big deal for Hubble but it is a big deal for infrared telescopes. Spitzer Space Telescope orbits the Sun on a trailing orbit to get away from the Earth's emissions. -- Please help cool the Earth: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
I don't want to hear that. Don't misunderstand; I don't begrudge a single dime spent on it. I take it on faith that those who know best are building something incredible. Analysis of the early universe is crucial to cosmology. I get it.
There are two things happening here: The first is that the angular resolution of a telescope depends on the wavelegth. The longer the wavelength,
the lower the resolution. JWST is about four times larger than Hubble but it is optimized for a wavelength that is 4 times longer so it replaces
Hubble in resolution at 2 microns. Secondly, for ten meter telescopes on the ground, their 10 micron resolution is not as good as the best seeing,
so since the resolution and seeing basically add in quadrature (sqrt(resolution^2+seeing^2)), you can get pretty close to the actual resolution of the
Keck at 10 microns. So, since the Keck is larger that JWST, it can do better on resolution. It can't, by a long way, do better on sensitivity. Hubble beats ground based telescopes on resolution because the seeing on the ground is larger than the actual resolution of telescopes of the same size or even larger.
The high-resolution "pretty pictures" aspect of Hubble means a lot. Perhaps more that is appreciated in academia. If all the money and drama of NASA produced nothing but Hubble it has been worth it. NASA is billing JWST as Hubble's replacement. Is it? Really? Honestly?
I think that it more than replaces Hubble in the sense that it has the same resolution, but since the universe was smaller early on, less of it is
spread out over the same amount of sky so that the physical scales are magnified optically. Beyond the epoch of reionization, you can't see anything
in the visible because the universe is opaque, but at 2 microns, you'll have improved resolution compares to what Hubble observes when the universe was
half to a quarter of its present age. Because of this magnification, it quite important to have the deepest possible and highest quality Hubble images, especially at Z band where the Hubble ACS is actually fully sampled so that we can really know that new sources observed with JWST are not present in Hubble images. The magnifiaction means that you have to work harder because photons are sread out over more pixels in the camera. Hopefully the ACS can be repaired in the next servicing mission.
Personally, the most thrilling aspect of contemporary astronomy is extrasolar planets. The ESA is detecting Earth size objects from the ground. Will JWST be able to contribute to this? I can't help but wonder what sort of space-based planet finding/resolving capability could be had for $4.5G.
Note all the question marks. I'm not making an argument. I just haven't got a frig'n clue what to think about JWST as a "Hubble replacement." Convince me. I want to hear that this machine will carry on producing the sort of output that inspires the public to keep NASA funded because, one way or another, Hubble is going down and this is what we're going to be left with, if we're fortunate.
Public support of Hubble has been crucial to keeping NASA focused on ways to avoid not discarding this great asset. My second favorite boss once related to me something that was said during the debate about funding the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC). The question was why should we fund this when we have all these other priorites and
The age of precision cosmology is a relative term. This mission will make precision astrometry so good its a little scary. But, I do like mid-infrared so I like JWST.
It is not exactly obstacles that cause the redshift, but rather the expansion of the universe. Dust can redden light, but this is really just subtracting blue light. Gravitational lensing is acromatic. In the gamma-rays, Compton scattering can shift photons to lower energy, but it does not preserve spectral features the way that the cosmological redshift does.
The imaging will be near infrared with particular capability near 2 microns, but the 5 micron capability is alos of interest. There is also a smaller camera working from 5 to 27 microns. This is mid-infrared. The resolution of this instrument will not be so good because of the longer wavelength. The Keck Telescope can get better image quality. But what it will have is spectroscopic capability and much greater sensitivity. We've gotten quite alot of milage out of the much smaller Spitzer Space Telescope using it's 5--30 micron spectrograph. This new instrument should really open things up, allowing us to analyse stars in galaxies as they were when the universe was 12 billion years younger. All telescopes can be considered time machines, but this one is made to see some of the very first stars. You can read more about it here: http://www.stsci.edu/jwst/instruments/. -- Rent solar power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
With a very rapid conversion to renewable energy, the demand for non-renewable energy will be much lower. I'd like to see coal, gas and oil so cheap
that it isn't worth pulling out of the ground. Most likely you are right, we won't anticipate reduced supply, but it would be smart if we did.
This is just right. Going to a 500 MW/year production facility brings costs down by as much as a factor of 4, but you need the market to be there to
risk the large production capacity. The market is arriving now as we see interest in renewable energy for its own sake growing. The effect will be to
make renewable energy cheaper than non-renewable energy. What is meant by cheaper? For wind, in the standard way, cheaper delivered as it now is in Texas. I just lost a customer to that which is fine by me. For solar, this means cheaper than delivered power since it is already in place. This thing
with time of use rates actually does a big favor for the way we do business. We can rent a customer a system that zeros out their utility bill but does not actually cover all the power they use. It produces at peak so it does not need to owing to the price difference. We charge at about the average rate
but for less electricity since the system does not need to be so big. Presto! A big savings for the customer. --
We're also good if things change since we can adjust the system size again to optimize for a different rate structure.
Where does this leave the utility? In a pretty good place. They'll need to start thinking more about how they can server their customers. What can
they do to cover the cost of providing a local two way connection which won't drive customers off the grid entirely? It is a conversation we need to have. --
Time of use rates mean you save when you rent solar: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
You can have your own generator and plug some thing into it, but as soon as it is actually connected in with the grid, you have to have an interconnect
agreement with the utility. There has to be anti-islanding switching to protect people who are working on the lines during an outage. You can't have
a "seemless" system without telling the utility. -- Solar power without the hassles: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
Here in Maryland the rebates are not so large, but neither are they available to the company. I don't know about California. But, the picture is not
so grim as you think. There is accelerated depreciation, federal tax credits and renewable energy credits together with scale and verticle integration. The scale gets you to about
$1.50/watt at the factory so the trick is to keep the further assembly and installation costs low by being able to schedule efficiently, basically the
same way that UPS does. Currently, in the residential market, the panel producers, hardware producers, inverter producers, wholesalers and installers are
all seperate businesses. Your retail price goes up everytime there is idling or a mismatch in equipment. One installer here lost half a day not long ago when the supplier sent the wrong parts. You can't leave the panels on the roof if they are not secured, so down they all came again with much cursing and
moaning. You are paying for that. So, taking a good chunk off of your $20K figure is a big part of the business model. --
Need more panels? Add them in at no charge. Need fewer? Same deal. Anticipate the utlities: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
You don't get the rebate if you rent though I think you can get it later if you decide to buy later. You just get a lower price (in this case) for electricity. The company tries to match the utility rate for each
utility with net metering, but sometimes they come in a little high or a little low. The formula is to divide what the utility says it collected for residential by what it says it delivered. With staged rates and time of use rates, things can get a little confusing but for time of use one can usually save some money. --
Rent solar power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
California's Access law is one of the better ones. They also exist in
Arizona (tested in court)
Colorado
Florida
Hawaii
Indiana (planning zoning=HOA?)
Maryland (after 1980)
Massachusetts (specifically including in the yard)
Nevada
and North Carolina (Chapel Hill only)
As can be checked here: http://www.dsireusa.org/summarytables/index.cfm?&C urrentPageID=7&EE=1&RE=1. They basically help with HOAs for the most part.
The rates quoted in the article go down to $0.163/kWh off peak but solar power as a rental deal is already being offered at $0.14/kWh flat rate
for Southern California Edison customers. So by twiddling the rates, they've begun to price themselves out of the market. In fact, with a ~60%
system you can likely zero out your Edison bill and just pay $0.14/kWh for that 60% under the TOU rates. So, you'll be saving 50% or so on your
electric bill (compared to TOU rates). Check the offered solar rates for Edison and the other California utilites by clicking the map at the bottom of the page at any of the links here: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
The original headline on the submission was "Time of Use Rates and Solar Power." I thought it would be an intersting discussion of how these
rates affect decisions about solar power. You can clearly save money if your system is large enough to produce excess during peak because
you get paid more for what you produce than you pay for what you take from the utility. The problem seems to be forcing time of use rates on people who
get systems that only produce part of what they use during peak. The bigger problem I see is switching policies every year so that long term investments
like solar power become unatractive in that way as well. --
Try this math: compare our flat rate with your TOU rate (click the map): http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
You might be able to zero out your bill with them while still forcing them to supply power. The problem in the article is about smaller systems.
At a larger size, you are delivering power at peak and taking delivery at off peak which means you can have the deliver net power that you
don't pay them for. --
Get the optimal system size for TOU and keep it that way: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
Slashdot Mirror
Cold fusion gets little or no government funding. For the most part people work on in their spare time or have private funding. There was a slashdot article recently http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/0 5/2148217 implying that the Navy was supporting cold fusion research.
s -selling-solar.html
Well, yes, in a way. There was some lab space that was used, but the funding level was a few thousand dollars from a discretionary account. No salaries were paid.
I agree with you that diversity in research on fusion should be supported, but I'd extend it even beyond your limit to the DOE idea that focused research in cold fusion using improved instruments should be supported. So far though, I think the DOE is not supporting this kind of work.
--
Harvest fusion on your roof: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Thanks! I would disagree with him though. What Germany does is important. They are showing how to convert to renewable energy and handling many of the technical issues first. They are already at over 10% with wind ahead of hydro: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_G ermany. Their experience is going to help to inform the rest of us on how to do this
kind of thing.
Actually, working in the IR from the ground is quite possible. What is different is the sensitivity. On the ground, but the telescope and the atmosphere emit IR light, so you have to look at sources that are not too much fainter than the foreground light (we usually call it background).
A cold telescope in space can work on much much fainter objects because it is limited not by the background, but by the arrival statistics of the source photons. If you've got 20 photons, you've got a detection. In the backgound limit you need three times as many photons as the square root of the number of background photons. The square root of a very large number is still pretty big. Hubble, while not cold, has had some near infrared capability.
Hans von Storch is characterized as level headed in the article. He has been involved in a few cortroversies in climate science, but what I like best is that he founded the Donald Duck Club to defend the drake against accusations of indecent behavior http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_von_Storch.s -selling-solar.html
--
End global warming! http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
You'd have to take time to travel to that distance so the advantage is erased. I am interested in incredibly large telescopes, which is what you'd need to get that kind of detail. I've begun to wonder of the combined power production data from many solar power systems might be used to study the Sun in more detail, especially helioseismology, or at night to monitor bolides and other bright transients.s -selling-solar.html
--
You might be building the biggest telescope ever: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Actually, you'd like to have it as some distance from Earth because the Earth is warm. At L2 you block both the Sun and Earth with the sun shield and so can make the telescope colder without extra shielding. This is not a big deal for Hubble but it is a big deal for infrared telescopes. Spitzer Space Telescope orbits the Sun on a trailing orbit to get away from the Earth's emissions.s -selling-solar.html
--
Please help cool the Earth: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
The war costs a little more than that: http://costofwar.com/
There are two things happening here: The first is that the angular resolution of a telescope depends on the wavelegth. The longer the wavelength, the lower the resolution. JWST is about four times larger than Hubble but it is optimized for a wavelength that is 4 times longer so it replaces Hubble in resolution at 2 microns. Secondly, for ten meter telescopes on the ground, their 10 micron resolution is not as good as the best seeing, so since the resolution and seeing basically add in quadrature (sqrt(resolution^2+seeing^2)), you can get pretty close to the actual resolution of the Keck at 10 microns. So, since the Keck is larger that JWST, it can do better on resolution. It can't, by a long way, do better on sensitivity. Hubble beats ground based telescopes on resolution because the seeing on the ground is larger than the actual resolution of telescopes of the same size or even larger.
I think that it more than replaces Hubble in the sense that it has the same resolution, but since the universe was smaller early on, less of it is spread out over the same amount of sky so that the physical scales are magnified optically. Beyond the epoch of reionization, you can't see anything in the visible because the universe is opaque, but at 2 microns, you'll have improved resolution compares to what Hubble observes when the universe was half to a quarter of its present age. Because of this magnification, it quite important to have the deepest possible and highest quality Hubble images, especially at Z band where the Hubble ACS is actually fully sampled so that we can really know that new sources observed with JWST are not present in Hubble images. The magnifiaction means that you have to work harder because photons are sread out over more pixels in the camera. Hopefully the ACS can be repaired in the next servicing mission.
This is getting more specialized as a field. I think the Terrestrial Planet Finder mission http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/newworlds/tpf- 20070411.html is going to make this search more systematic. JWST may be able to do followup on discovered planets though as Spitzer has done: http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2005/03/upcoming _extras.html
Public support of Hubble has been crucial to keeping NASA focused on ways to avoid not discarding this great asset. My second favorite boss once related to me something that was said during the debate about funding the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC). The question was why should we fund this when we have all these other priorites and
The age of precision cosmology is a relative term. This mission will make precision astrometry so good its a little scary. But, I do like mid-infrared so I like JWST.
It definitely need help. The main camera has not been working since June of last year. They did get one channel going in February http://www.stsci.edu/resources/acs.html.u nd based solar power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
--
Gro
It is not exactly obstacles that cause the redshift, but rather the expansion of the universe. Dust can redden light, but this is really just subtracting blue light. Gravitational lensing is acromatic. In the gamma-rays, Compton scattering can shift photons to lower energy, but it does not preserve spectral features the way that the cosmological redshift does.
The imaging will be near infrared with particular capability near 2 microns, but the 5 micron capability is alos of interest. There is also a smaller camera working from 5 to 27 microns. This is mid-infrared. The resolution of this instrument will not be so good because of the longer wavelength. The Keck Telescope can get better image quality. But what it will have is spectroscopic capability and much greater sensitivity. We've gotten quite alot of milage out of the much smaller Spitzer Space Telescope using it's 5--30 micron spectrograph. This new instrument should really open things up, allowing us to analyse stars in galaxies as they were when the universe was 12 billion years younger. All telescopes can be considered time machines, but this one is made to see some of the very first stars. You can read more about it here: http://www.stsci.edu/jwst/instruments/.s -selling-solar.html
--
Rent solar power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
He'll get recovered.
There is a wiki on this, a couple of facilities are already operating: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_air_energy _storage.
s -selling-solar.html
--
Generate peak power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
With a very rapid conversion to renewable energy, the demand for non-renewable energy will be much lower. I'd like to see coal, gas and oil so cheap that it isn't worth pulling out of the ground. Most likely you are right, we won't anticipate reduced supply, but it would be smart if we did.
Thanks! That was a bit of a pitch for renting.
This is just right. Going to a 500 MW/year production facility brings costs down by as much as a factor of 4, but you need the market to be there to risk the large production capacity. The market is arriving now as we see interest in renewable energy for its own sake growing. The effect will be to make renewable energy cheaper than non-renewable energy. What is meant by cheaper? For wind, in the standard way, cheaper delivered as it now is in Texas. I just lost a customer to that which is fine by me. For solar, this means cheaper than delivered power since it is already in place. This thing with time of use rates actually does a big favor for the way we do business. We can rent a customer a system that zeros out their utility bill but does not actually cover all the power they use. It produces at peak so it does not need to owing to the price difference. We charge at about the average rate but for less electricity since the system does not need to be so big. Presto! A big savings for the customer.
s -selling-solar.html
--
We're also good if things change since we can adjust the system size again to optimize for a different rate structure.
Where does this leave the utility? In a pretty good place. They'll need to start thinking more about how they can server their customers. What can they do to cover the cost of providing a local two way connection which won't drive customers off the grid entirely? It is a conversation we need to have.
--
Time of use rates mean you save when you rent solar: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
You can have your own generator and plug some thing into it, but as soon as it is actually connected in with the grid, you have to have an interconnect agreement with the utility. There has to be anti-islanding switching to protect people who are working on the lines during an outage. You can't have a "seemless" system without telling the utility.s -selling-solar.html
--
Solar power without the hassles: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Here in Maryland the rebates are not so large, but neither are they available to the company. I don't know about California. But, the picture is not so grim as you think. There is accelerated depreciation, federal tax credits and renewable energy credits together with scale and verticle integration. The scale gets you to about $1.50/watt at the factory so the trick is to keep the further assembly and installation costs low by being able to schedule efficiently, basically the same way that UPS does. Currently, in the residential market, the panel producers, hardware producers, inverter producers, wholesalers and installers are all seperate businesses. Your retail price goes up everytime there is idling or a mismatch in equipment. One installer here lost half a day not long ago when the supplier sent the wrong parts. You can't leave the panels on the roof if they are not secured, so down they all came again with much cursing and moaning. You are paying for that. So, taking a good chunk off of your $20K figure is a big part of the business model.s -selling-solar.html
--
Need more panels? Add them in at no charge. Need fewer? Same deal. Anticipate the utlities: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
You don't get the rebate if you rent though I think you can get it later if you decide to buy later. You just get a lower price (in this case) for electricity. The company tries to match the utility rate for each utility with net metering, but sometimes they come in a little high or a little low. The formula is to divide what the utility says it collected for residential by what it says it delivered. With staged rates and time of use rates, things can get a little confusing but for time of use one can usually save some money.s -selling-solar.html
--
Rent solar power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
California's Access law is one of the better ones. They also exist inC urrentPageID=7&EE=1&RE=1. They basically help with HOAs for the most part.
e rs-selling-solar.html
Senator Menendez (NJ) has introduced a bill in the Senate which has also be introduced in the House too (Cardoza CA and Ferguson NJ) that would do the same kind of thing http://www.solarbuzz.com/News/NewsNAGO325.htm
nation wide.s -selling-solar.html
Arizona (tested in court)
Colorado
Florida
Hawaii
Indiana (planning zoning=HOA?)
Maryland (after 1980)
Massachusetts (specifically including in the yard)
Nevada
and North Carolina (Chapel Hill only)
As can be checked here: http://www.dsireusa.org/summarytables/index.cfm?&
http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-us
--
Save with Solar: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
You can get this arranged so that you do get the power even with the anti-islanding in effect. This is standard on systems we offer: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
The rates quoted in the article go down to $0.163/kWh off peak but solar power as a rental deal is already being offered at $0.14/kWh flat rate for Southern California Edison customers. So by twiddling the rates, they've begun to price themselves out of the market. In fact, with a ~60% system you can likely zero out your Edison bill and just pay $0.14/kWh for that 60% under the TOU rates. So, you'll be saving 50% or so on your electric bill (compared to TOU rates). Check the offered solar rates for Edison and the other California utilites by clicking the map at the bottom of the page at any of the links here: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
The original headline on the submission was "Time of Use Rates and Solar Power." I thought it would be an intersting discussion of how these rates affect decisions about solar power. You can clearly save money if your system is large enough to produce excess during peak because you get paid more for what you produce than you pay for what you take from the utility. The problem seems to be forcing time of use rates on people who get systems that only produce part of what they use during peak. The bigger problem I see is switching policies every year so that long term investments like solar power become unatractive in that way as well.s -selling-solar.html
--
Try this math: compare our flat rate with your TOU rate (click the map): http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
You might be able to zero out your bill with them while still forcing them to supply power. The problem in the article is about smaller systems. At a larger size, you are delivering power at peak and taking delivery at off peak which means you can have the deliver net power that you don't pay them for.s -selling-solar.html
--
Get the optimal system size for TOU and keep it that way: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user