I agree that the the computers are hogs in the home electric bill. Not all utilities have such a tight cap and the thing that sort
of assures that larger houses will use more electricity is cooling, and sometimes heating. So, most of the time, even with a ridgeline
orientation that isn't perfect, you can get to 100% of what your using with silicon. That makes silicon good enough most of the time. With
green building standards, it should be good enough all the time and also cover some transportation through plugin hybrids.
At lower efficiency it is hard to be good enough for residential without, as I said, using other space besides the roof.
My interest is getting as many people converted to solar as possible at a price they can afford, namely what they pay now for electricity.
The base technology is not important to me but the feasability is. So, improved efficiency at a cost similar to or lower than silicon works
but reduced efficiency regardless of price has problems because silicon is right on the edge of feasibility now. This is just an aspect
of trying to get clean distributed residential power generation.
If you read my post, I did point out that lower cost at lower efficiency could work out well when the considerations are more on the
bottom line side rather than the convenience side. In my example I was suggesting that commercial roofs might be a good market. Another
example might be large solar installations like that planned by the Salt River Project where the cost of the land may be low enough that
needing twice as much for the same power is less expensive than going with more efficient panels. Right now solar is growing a lot because
of the way it can use space convienently and provide fixed grid competitive costs. Wind is out in front because it competes at the power generation
level on cost and can be dual use for the raw land. But solar, in the small scale distributed form, provides a fundemental reliability that
the grid, with large scale centalized/remote generation, cannot in the case of large scale natural disasters while also reducing the chance of grid failure owing to hot weather. So, broad solar deployment is going to be a very good thing. Just now, silicon is what is suitable for this aspect.
You can find out more on what I've been thinking about with regard to the transition to renewable energy at http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/. Though you'll see in the comments that I get accused of spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt about nuclear power, despite documenting the issues involved, I don't think you'll find any support for your idea that I'm doing this with regard to renewable energy sources. My interest there is how renewable energy can be made to work from a physics and cost perspective. I'm still trying to collect ideas about power storage at http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/why-renewables -displace-nukes-first.html if you have any.
Your number is averaged over both day and night over a year and works for southern Canada, here is a map: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/78/Inso lation.png. As you can see from the map, much of what
is going on is that the Earth is round so that surface is tilted with respect to the average direction to the
Sun. Solar panels are tilted back towards the Sun so this compensates though there is still a larger airmass
and so a larger likelihood of having a cloud in the way. A number closer to 300 w/m^2 is a better estimate
because of the tilt. In a month of 30 days you get 32 kWh from a sqaure meter of 15% efficient silicon
solar panel. So, you want about 31 square meters of panels to handle a 1000 kWh monthly power usage. That's
about 5.5 meters on a side. You can get that much for the same that you are currently paying for grid power
at http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html and fix your rate for up to
25 years, so yes, it probably is worth it.
I'm finding that rate structures are quite varied. In Toledo there are a number of charges that appear to be proportional to energy use
but are not listed as such. In Maryland, there is a charge for the electricity you use, and a proportional distribution charge and a
flat connection fee. As home power production becomes a bigger part of the market, some of these proportional charges might become flat,
but I doubt that you can go too far in this direction or landlords with empty apartments will get pretty upset. -- Go solar! http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
This is what Bucky Fuller wanted to do, but over the whole world. Problems with power loses over long transmision distances seemed
a little daunting but it you think about it, the resistance is inversely proportional to the cross-sectional area of the conductor and
you need a thick conductor to carry continent-scale power. I've blogged on this recently at http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/03/coast-to-coast .html
I've got just enough room on my roof to cover my electric use with 15% efficient silicon PV. I'm excluding about 25% of the south side which is shaded.
Many of my customers use twice as much electricity as I do, but also have bigger houses. Some of them will be running up against 10 kW limits imposed
by some utilities on net metering systems but others may not have enough roof and will need to put a portion of of their systems in the yard if they want
full coverage of their electric use. Our systems or OK to split up because they go to AC at the panels.
If this new material is only 7% efficient, then people may only cover half of their electric use with roof mounted system. The lower cost will only
help with a portion of their electric bill.
Because of this possible lack of fit for the new material, I suspect that silicon will hold its own for a while in the residential market. The place to look
for an alternative may be in 40% efficient materials combined with moderate concentration of sunlight.
On the other hand, material that is less efficient but also less expensive could get a lot of use on commercial buildings where the interest is to
get some extra use out of a roof or parking lot. In this case the purpose of the property is to make money rather than to provide comfort so the
aesthetic issues are different and the financial issues may work out well.
I use slides as a crutch as well. My worst offence was typing out my lectures and putting them on the overhead. The trouble is knowing
your subject while also moving your jaw. I think notes and a blackboard work better but they just don't seem high tech. Between the
overhead an powerpoint, I notice a lot of time lost getting the display to read as different computers hook up and speakers who are
flustered at the beginning of their talks because of the connection problems. With the overhead, you get the problem of the missing slide,
or the pile of slides falling on the floor. Really good talks are done from podiums (hidden notes) with only pictures as a visual aid. Excellent
talks are done without notes with the speaker moving around. Back projection helps in this case. -- Silent power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
Seems as though when used this way, it needn't deplete the soil and does not need much fertilizer. Don't know if the numbers would hold up in practice.
Thanks! I'm just reading the opinion. Apparently the EPA argued that by misbehaving itself, it gained leverage over other countries. Wow.
EPA has refused to comply with this clear statutory
command. Instead, it has offered a laundry list of reasons
not to regulate. For example, EPA said that a number of
voluntary executive branch programs already provide an
effective response to the threat of global warming, 68 Fed.
Reg. 52932, that regulating greenhouse gases might impair the President's ability to negotiate with "key developing nations" to reduce emissions, id., at 52931, and that
curtailing motor-vehicle emissions would reflect "an inefficient, piecemeal approach to address the climate change
issue," ibid.
Although we have neither the expertise nor the authority to evaluate these policy judgments, it is evident they
have nothing to do with whether greenhouse gas emissions contribute to climate change. Still less do they
amount to a reasoned justification for declining to form a
scientific judgment. In particular, while the President has
broad authority in foreign affairs, that authority does not
extend to the refusal to execute domestic laws. In the
Global Climate Protection Act of 1987, Congress authorized the State Department--not EPA--to formulate United
States foreign policy with reference to environmental matters relating to climate. See 1103(c), 101 Stat. 1409. EPA
has made no showing that it issued the ruling in question
here after consultation with the State Department. Congress did direct EPA to consult with other agencies in the
formulation of its policies and rules, but the State Department is absent from that list. 1103(b).
The willingness to use stopgap measures depends on the level of urgency. If fleet conversion takes about 12 years and production conversion takes
about 5 years then we might expect plug in hybrids to dominate the fleet in about 15 years. If we actually need to reduce emissions by 80% in
ten years, to avoid releasing too much carbon that is currently held in frozen ground, then making the current fleet closer to carbon neutral becomes a
priority.
So, at the same time that we convert to solar and wind, it may be needful, during the transition, to supply the current fleet with biofuels
produced from the flu gas of existing power plants.
No matter what, we do need to transition and so the steps of the transition need to be thought through. Portions of the transition are unlikely to look
like the desirable relatively stable end point no matter how we aproach it. So, the question is how much desperation to include. Setting up a
competition between food and fuel looks too desperate to me, but making some use of biofuels does not http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/02/photosynthesis .html.
On the relative costs of wind and PV, I think you need to look at both the savings available from large scale production and the cradle-to-cradle
aspects of both. The labor and return on energy in involved in recycling PV verses wind together with the improved
heat management at scale for PV may bring the two into cost parity.
This is funny, but, up to how you're food gets fertilized, transported and processed, the carbon in it comes from the air. So, the EPA
may regulate the fossil fuel used to produce your food but not the portion that comes from photsynthesis I think. That is the stuff you
exhale so you don't come under regulation. Still not sure about cheez whiz, that might be petroleum based. -- Carbon free energy: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
To me the proper place to grow biofuels, of the rooted variety, is on land that is agricultural but not being used for food. Where I live tobacco
is on the way out, but other crops don't really pay enough for the size of the farms so there is a subsidy for not growing tobacco. In this case,
I've argued that biofuel crops can make sense, though they can't really put a big dent in fossil fuel use. Maryland is considering a subsidy of
about $0.30/gal for boifuel production which could be a help in a small way. -- Grow silicon leaves! http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
For those of us who actually use it we say submillimeter and far infrared but as the interest grows in space communications THz is
coming more into use. I've seen it used for the mid-infrared as well. Presumably some funding agency started saying THz and
lots of people followed. The company is welcome. One far infrared astronomer famously said "These is no such thing as a far infrared
detector." This is about right since the properties of the materials we use are really atrocious. History dependent sensitivity,
unpredictable dark current, weird spectral response, and internal fringing are just some of the difficulties encountered. Yet,
much of the luminosity of the local universe is emitted in this band and many of the most important spectral features of the young
universe are redshifted into this band. Improved THz technology is needed and this article is certainly getting noticed in the astronomical
community. --
Intercept the daily optical to terahertz conversion: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
In a way this is a pretty standard result. One can reduce the ringing in a Fourrier transform by including non-periodic sampling. What is
provacative is the implication that there is some flaw in the surface plasmon interpretaion. Namely, they point to straight interference
as being important rather than the constrained response of the surface electons. --
Get solar: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that the the computers are hogs in the home electric bill. Not all utilities have such a tight cap and the thing that sort of assures that larger houses will use more electricity is cooling, and sometimes heating. So, most of the time, even with a ridgeline orientation that isn't perfect, you can get to 100% of what your using with silicon. That makes silicon good enough most of the time. With green building standards, it should be good enough all the time and also cover some transportation through plugin hybrids.
s -displace-nukes-first.html if you have any.
At lower efficiency it is hard to be good enough for residential without, as I said, using other space besides the roof.
My interest is getting as many people converted to solar as possible at a price they can afford, namely what they pay now for electricity. The base technology is not important to me but the feasability is. So, improved efficiency at a cost similar to or lower than silicon works but reduced efficiency regardless of price has problems because silicon is right on the edge of feasibility now. This is just an aspect of trying to get clean distributed residential power generation.
If you read my post, I did point out that lower cost at lower efficiency could work out well when the considerations are more on the bottom line side rather than the convenience side. In my example I was suggesting that commercial roofs might be a good market. Another example might be large solar installations like that planned by the Salt River Project where the cost of the land may be low enough that needing twice as much for the same power is less expensive than going with more efficient panels. Right now solar is growing a lot because of the way it can use space convienently and provide fixed grid competitive costs. Wind is out in front because it competes at the power generation level on cost and can be dual use for the raw land. But solar, in the small scale distributed form, provides a fundemental reliability that the grid, with large scale centalized/remote generation, cannot in the case of large scale natural disasters while also reducing the chance of grid failure owing to hot weather. So, broad solar deployment is going to be a very good thing. Just now, silicon is what is suitable for this aspect.
You can find out more on what I've been thinking about with regard to the transition to renewable energy at http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/. Though you'll see in the comments that I get accused of spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt about nuclear power, despite documenting the issues involved, I don't think you'll find any support for your idea that I'm doing this with regard to renewable energy sources. My interest there is how renewable energy can be made to work from a physics and cost perspective. I'm still trying to collect ideas about power storage at http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/why-renewable
Your number is averaged over both day and night over a year and works for southern Canada, here is a map: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/78/Inso lation.png. As you can see from the map, much of what
is going on is that the Earth is round so that surface is tilted with respect to the average direction to the
Sun. Solar panels are tilted back towards the Sun so this compensates though there is still a larger airmass
and so a larger likelihood of having a cloud in the way. A number closer to 300 w/m^2 is a better estimate
because of the tilt. In a month of 30 days you get 32 kWh from a sqaure meter of 15% efficient silicon
solar panel. So, you want about 31 square meters of panels to handle a 1000 kWh monthly power usage. That's
about 5.5 meters on a side. You can get that much for the same that you are currently paying for grid power
at http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html and fix your rate for up to
25 years, so yes, it probably is worth it.
There has been some work on this but they are having stability problems: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6434.s -selling-solar.html
--
Durable solar power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
I'm finding that rate structures are quite varied. In Toledo there are a number of charges that appear to be proportional to energy use but are not listed as such. In Maryland, there is a charge for the electricity you use, and a proportional distribution charge and a flat connection fee. As home power production becomes a bigger part of the market, some of these proportional charges might become flat, but I doubt that you can go too far in this direction or landlords with empty apartments will get pretty upset.s -selling-solar.html
--
Go solar! http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
This is what Bucky Fuller wanted to do, but over the whole world. Problems with power loses over long transmision distances seemed a little daunting but it you think about it, the resistance is inversely proportional to the cross-sectional area of the conductor and you need a thick conductor to carry continent-scale power. I've blogged on this recently at http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/03/coast-to-coast .html
I've got just enough room on my roof to cover my electric use with 15% efficient silicon PV. I'm excluding about 25% of the south side which is shaded. Many of my customers use twice as much electricity as I do, but also have bigger houses. Some of them will be running up against 10 kW limits imposed by some utilities on net metering systems but others may not have enough roof and will need to put a portion of of their systems in the yard if they want full coverage of their electric use. Our systems or OK to split up because they go to AC at the panels.
s -selling-solar.html
If this new material is only 7% efficient, then people may only cover half of their electric use with roof mounted system. The lower cost will only help with a portion of their electric bill.
Because of this possible lack of fit for the new material, I suspect that silicon will hold its own for a while in the residential market. The place to look for an alternative may be in 40% efficient materials combined with moderate concentration of sunlight.
On the other hand, material that is less efficient but also less expensive could get a lot of use on commercial buildings where the interest is to get some extra use out of a roof or parking lot. In this case the purpose of the property is to make money rather than to provide comfort so the aesthetic issues are different and the financial issues may work out well.
You can sign up for silicon now at http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
I strike a careless pose
Enjoy the Sun http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
And whistle a happy tune
And paint right under the nose
Of the King!
Apologies to Rodgers and Hammerstein "The King and I" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King_and_I.
--
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Army_Balloon_Co rps before the blitz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrage_balloon. There were problems
though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrage_balloon#Disad vantages.s -selling-solar.html
--
Ground based solar: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
You can get tethered wind turbines now. One company is http://www.magenn.com/. Here is a writeup from a distributor http://www.renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/partner/s tory;jsessionid=89EBAB338FE0B78CFA33259EF429902B?i d=41478. This is not for placement in the jet stream but
it is not bad for getting into more steady power generation.s -selling-solar.html
--
The Sun makes the wind blow: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
I use slides as a crutch as well. My worst offence was typing out my lectures and putting them on the overhead. The trouble is knowing your subject while also moving your jaw. I think notes and a blackboard work better but they just don't seem high tech. Between the overhead an powerpoint, I notice a lot of time lost getting the display to read as different computers hook up and speakers who are flustered at the beginning of their talks because of the connection problems. With the overhead, you get the problem of the missing slide, or the pile of slides falling on the floor. Really good talks are done from podiums (hidden notes) with only pictures as a visual aid. Excellent talks are done without notes with the speaker moving around. Back projection helps in this case.s -selling-solar.html
--
Silent power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
No! let's fire cannons in every street to wake people at dawn! http://webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/franklin3.ht ml s -selling-solar.html
--
The Sun he gives light as soon as he rises: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Sorry, I forgot to say plug in hybrid. Solar and wind produce electricity though wind can be used directly for transportation. It is mainly used for sport these days http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_yachting.e t Solar: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
--
G
Interestingly, tobacco itself has been considered, to a small extent, as an energy crop: http://home.ktc.com/bdrake/altengy.html.
Seems as though when used this way, it needn't deplete the soil and does not need much fertilizer. Don't know if the numbers would hold up in practice.
The willingness to use stopgap measures depends on the level of urgency. If fleet conversion takes about 12 years and production conversion takes about 5 years then we might expect plug in hybrids to dominate the fleet in about 15 years. If we actually need to reduce emissions by 80% in ten years, to avoid releasing too much carbon that is currently held in frozen ground, then making the current fleet closer to carbon neutral becomes a priority.
s .html.
t .html.
So, at the same time that we convert to solar and wind, it may be needful, during the transition, to supply the current fleet with biofuels produced from the flu gas of existing power plants.
No matter what, we do need to transition and so the steps of the transition need to be thought through. Portions of the transition are unlikely to look like the desirable relatively stable end point no matter how we aproach it. So, the question is how much desperation to include. Setting up a competition between food and fuel looks too desperate to me, but making some use of biofuels does not http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/02/photosynthesi
On the relative costs of wind and PV, I think you need to look at both the savings available from large scale production and the cradle-to-cradle aspects of both. The labor and return on energy in involved in recycling PV verses wind together with the improved heat management at scale for PV may bring the two into cost parity.
I've added to my blog on the subject of what a relatively stable endpoint of a transition might look like. If you have the time, I'd appreciate your thoughts: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/03/coast-to-coas
Is this a non-sequitur or was the administration arguing that this was a foreign policy issue?
This is funny, but, up to how you're food gets fertilized, transported and processed, the carbon in it comes from the air. So, the EPA may regulate the fossil fuel used to produce your food but not the portion that comes from photsynthesis I think. That is the stuff you exhale so you don't come under regulation. Still not sure about cheez whiz, that might be petroleum based.s -selling-solar.html
--
Carbon free energy: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
To me the proper place to grow biofuels, of the rooted variety, is on land that is agricultural but not being used for food. Where I live tobacco is on the way out, but other crops don't really pay enough for the size of the farms so there is a subsidy for not growing tobacco. In this case, I've argued that biofuel crops can make sense, though they can't really put a big dent in fossil fuel use. Maryland is considering a subsidy of about $0.30/gal for boifuel production which could be a help in a small way.s -selling-solar.html
--
Grow silicon leaves! http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
You can get to close to 15% efficiency using algae but at the cost of needing a concentrated source of CO2 http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/02/photosynthesis .html. This is why shifting as much transportation to
solar and wind as possible makes much more sense that biofuels. But, during a transition, getting a second use
from the CO2 produced at power plants could make some sense.s -selling-solar.html
--
Get Solar! http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
For those of us who actually use it we say submillimeter and far infrared but as the interest grows in space communications THz is coming more into use. I've seen it used for the mid-infrared as well. Presumably some funding agency started saying THz and lots of people followed. The company is welcome. One far infrared astronomer famously said "These is no such thing as a far infrared detector." This is about right since the properties of the materials we use are really atrocious. History dependent sensitivity, unpredictable dark current, weird spectral response, and internal fringing are just some of the difficulties encountered. Yet, much of the luminosity of the local universe is emitted in this band and many of the most important spectral features of the young universe are redshifted into this band. Improved THz technology is needed and this article is certainly getting noticed in the astronomical community.s -selling-solar.html
--
Intercept the daily optical to terahertz conversion: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
This type of technology (but with regular arrays) has already found application is space: http://www.iso.esac.esa.int/manuals/HANDBOOK/lws_h b/node14.html. Water vapor is not a big
concern there.s -selling-solar.html
--
Tap the Sun: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
For the next harvest it looks as though central planning will lead to reduced soy and cotton in favor of corn: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/30/business/30wire- corn.html. Funny how the State of the Union Speech
gets so many mixups.s -selling-solar.html
--
Solar: It's more Efficient! http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
In a way this is a pretty standard result. One can reduce the ringing in a Fourrier transform by including non-periodic sampling. What is provacative is the implication that there is some flaw in the surface plasmon interpretaion. Namely, they point to straight interference as being important rather than the constrained response of the surface electons.s -selling-solar.html
--
Get solar: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
I tend to agree but there is one hitch: The algae achieve high photosynthetic efficiency right now by using concentrated CO2 so we need such a source without it coming from fossil fuels eventually. But, for now you can recapture about 70% of the CO2 and give it a second use as a biofuel. I give some relative efficiency estimates here: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/02/photosynthesis .html.s -selling-solar.html
--
Get Efficient, Get Solar: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
I think he's into biodiesel. That often comes from soy not corn. You still get the leftovers as feed.s -selling-solar.html
--
Get Real! Get Solar: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user