Solar competes now with retail electric rates in all markets except those with big hydro. Check out the map on any of the links at http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html. Click on any non-white state to see rates. They'll
go down to $0.07 per kWh but not lower so some potential customers in Washington are left out. Dark blue means all utilities are
required to offer net metering, but not all utilities are listed in Washington. Elsewhere, solar can compete. That means
it costs less than coal, oil, gas and nuclear. I'm always looking for more feedback on this article: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/why-renewables -displace-nukes-first.html. Post a comment if you think of something.
You've got to be able to make money at it. This is what commercially viable means.
Entrants must submit a commercially viable design (the "Design") to achieve the net removal of significant volumes of anthropogenic, atmospheric greenhouse gases each year for at least 10 years without countervailing harmful effects (the "Removal Target"). The removal achieved by the Design must have long term benefits (measured over say 1,000 years) and must contribute materially to the stability of the Earth's climate.
Remember that the grant givers have other concerns. If I asked you to ship off for six months nestled cozily next to
a nuclear reactor a kilometer under the ocean, you'd want other reasons besides personal safety to say yes. An application
in exoskeletons is mentioned in the article. -- Solar, its simply better: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
It was one of Bucky Fuller's favorite things to point out that heat management
becomes easier with scale since the ratio of surface area (where heat escapes)-to-volume (where
heat is stored) goes down in inverse proportion to the increase in linear dimension. This
is why he felt that enclosing cities with his domes would be a good idea.
-- Take the solar scale advantage: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
You've got a typo which threw me, you want 33 kWh/kg. But isn't a low efficiency to be expected? One wants a big delta T for
high efficiency and that is going to be hard to achieve on small scales. However, if these are very durable, connecting them is
series rather than in parallel might get you something. You might build up to a very high delta T having one feed into another.
But, then you've just built a modular large turbine so there might not be any point.
I agree, the motivation to conserve is to reduce environmental impact, (or to save money) but it is not a virtue in itself. I would
rather not even use the word conserve. I'd much rather see a goal to eliminate the use of fossil fuels. In doing that, I'd like
to create a situation where we can use as much power as we like, play with it, enjoy it, leave the lights on all night just for
fun (though draw the shades cause I like to see the stars when I'm out at night). Right now we live in a scarcity driven energy economy and this is no good at all.
The potential for renewable energy to provide much more power than we use now is clearly present. The Sun provides more than
enough power directly and it also drives wind. What has been lacking up until now is large scale solar
and wind power fabrication capacity. This is what makes these sources cheaper than coal which has already taken its scale
advantage. -- Solar: its abundant http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
Power loss on the grid is about 7% http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transm ission#Losses which is significant,
but not so large that you save much if you are carting fuel to your distributed power generation system. High volatage power
transmission does not have a whole lot of rolling friction. If the "fuel" is already distributed like solar or wind then
you make power where you happen to be since it is really all the same. But saving on transmission losses is not a big motivator.
If there is net metering, then you are competing at retail prices, and this can be an advantage for distributed power generation.
-- Save money with solar http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
The thing about these is that they are so small. The figures given are not all that much greater than the Li ion batteries,
so in terms of applications is transportation, one does a whole lot better putting five 5 gal gas cans in your trunk for a
1400 mile range. For compact applications getting more power in a tight spot is a great advantage. If you are carrying
a lot of electronics this really helps in reducing the weight. But, I'm not sure you'd want to use these to replace the
two stroke in an chainsaw. -- 1000 W/m^2 http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
Most ethanol production in the US comes from fermenting the corn kernels, but there are new methods of breaking
down cellulose http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulosic_ethanol that use the whole plant and thus
could use a failed crop (ears don't form). Silage is used as an animal feed source, though a fundemental
competition between food and fuel is going to push most beef out of the market pretty quickly because
feedlots just won't be able to operate. Range fed cattle would continue unless arid lands were also
converted to fuel production.
-- Energy problems? Don't have a cow, go solar: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
Actually, silicon, the traditional material for making solar cells is very abundant. Shortages have been in purified
silicon because the solar cell industry has attempted to save on cost by taking semiconductor grade silicon scrap
as its raw material. Since there is nowhere near enough pentiums produced to cover everyone's roof with them, the supply
of scrap is inadequate for serious solar power production. However, refining silicon expressly for solar power fabrication
eliminates this issue. Useful cell lifetimes are approching 40 years with no more than a 20% degradation after 25 years.
On the biorefinery, the limit is mainly the amount of available fuel. Serious biofuel production probably has to go through
algae http://www.greenfuelonline.com/ since the surface area requirements for biofuel production are very constraining
and need all the help they can get. The 15% efficiency of solar is much higher even than algae. The curent waste stream is
much too small to provide a significant portion of our energy use and conservation does not help since this also implies reducing
the waste stream flow rate proportionally.
--
Solar: better than photosynthesis: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
One aspect of large scale solar fabrication is that heat management is easier. One only has to get silicon
up to temperature but you don't have to keep it there with more energy in, so the 5 year figure you give is
coming down dramatically. EROEI should end up near 40 on a single fabrication cycle, and potentially much higher
depending on how recycling of the cells is handled during subsequent fabrication cycles. If the dopant gradiant
is preserved through a cell-by-cell reannealing process to repair cosmic ray damage, then the energy requirements for
recycling solar cells could be quite low compared to the initial fabrication requirements and thus boost the final
EROEI over many recovery cycles. If not, one still saves on initial purification costs. Since we are considering a
40 year cycle, it is possible that silicon will be displaced by something more efficient, and it will become a nitch
application, in which case determining the recycled EROEI will depend on how much silicon is retained in the energy
generation sector.
-- Happy days are here again: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
G.'s promise of secret knowledge is a little problematic. C.S. Lewis has treated the problem of the "inner circle"
as it pertains to ways to make people do things that they would not ordinarily do. Still, I get the feeling that G.
is sincere in his belief that only esoteric training can communicate what he has to teach.
When Jung speaks of differentiation, I think he feels that there is some ab inito material to work with so I'm
not sure the Monty Python bit gets this just right. Still, one path is through attentive work and is probably open to
many for whom the Road to Damascus presents difficulties. -- Solar Enlightenment: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
I've been fascinates by Ouspensky's books and surmised that "My Dinner With Andre" was an echo of G.'s teachings but I had no idea
that there was so much more material. Thanks for the link.
I think James Joyce took some important steps on the problem of communicating internal experience in a way that induces close resonace
with the communicator's own experience in the reader, and I also think generally that art is most able to bring about the sort of direct communication
the G. was concerned with. Music performance, when it is working as intended, is certainly soul-to-soul transmission.
On the communication of ideas though I find Einstein's introduction to "The Meaning of Relativity" to cover the basics. The
external (objective) world provides a field on which we may mutually tune our internal experience and arrive at pretty good
certainty that our experiences are adequately interchangable. I think this actually provides an answer to Chuang Tzu's dream
in that he can discuss his dream as a philosopher but not as a butterfly and that participation with us in the discussion taken
associatively with our particpation with Einstein in a recheckable discussion of the objective means that he is a philosopher and
we are not merely the dream of a butterfly. This tie in answers a whole class of mystical intuitions that the world is illusion.
What is actually happening is that the difficulty in communication of internal experience is providing a problem that is profound
enough to warrant such speculation, but systematic effort shows that communication is possible and so the speculation needs to be
directed elsewhere.
-- Solar removes existential threats: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
Hum, I got the impression that a priori was considered more rigorous that a postieriori. Certainly in science,
theories that are fruitfully predictive are considered more beneficial than those which are simply usefully descriptive.
The theory that the Sun is very likely to rise tommorrow because that is what it usually does in our experience is taken as
less elegant than saying given the conservation of angular momentum as a fundemental law of physics, the Sun must rise tomorrow.
I've suspected that there is a problem in this division, that the correspondence between physical law and repeated behavior
formed a tautology somewhere. But then I look at Maxwell's Equations and say, Nah, couldn't be. --
Live electromagnetically: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
It has happened to me a number of times that I have been right for the wrong reason, and only further work
showed that the reasons that draped themselves on intuition were specious. Yet the certainty of the feeling
of correctness that conjured those films of argument made me seek out the more subtle arguments that may have
been present but not perceived at the initial insight. Then there have been more times when I just found out I
was wrong from the git-go. To me, those "faith" feelings are guides to what might be important but do not
count as knowledge, only hints. I've taken 'justified true belief' to mean rigorously demonstrated comprehension,
and perhaps this is not what is meant. I see knowing you could be correct, and knowing you are correct as
two different stages.
Perhaps my hang up is that I tend to hold the word 'belief' in reserve for the unknowable. I'll use it when
answering a question about where some one is: 'I beleive she is at the store.' meaning I don't know for sure
but that was the plan.
I suspect there is something more to this problem that I'm proposing, basically that it is like an early compiler
that allowed ambigous entry points. But I haven't really felt any discomfort with the problem either to urge
that it is fundemental.
In any case, being right by accident must have something to do with it, and your example makes me think that
God smiles at all our attemts in that particular direction. -- You don't have to be Icarus to get cozy with the Sun. http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
Slashdot Mirror
OK, so at present consumption we've got 100 years.... Instead of 20% we go to 100% plus transportation and heating and we've got less than 10 years, fifty with your scratch dirt reserves, it's hardly worth building the reactors. http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/why-renewables -displace-nukes-first.html
Solar competes now with retail electric rates in all markets except those with big hydro. Check out the map on any of the links at http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html. Click on any non-white state to see rates. They'll
go down to $0.07 per kWh but not lower so some potential customers in Washington are left out. Dark blue means all utilities are
required to offer net metering, but not all utilities are listed in Washington. Elsewhere, solar can compete. That means
it costs less than coal, oil, gas and nuclear. I'm always looking for more feedback on this article: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/why-renewables -displace-nukes-first.html. Post a comment if you think of something.
That should have been Engineer-Poet http://slashdot.org/~Engineer-Poet/.
--
Solar is carbon free: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
I can't help it, something has got to hitting the fan here.
Here! Here! No. Listen! Listen! No, No. Just bring me a shrubbery.
Remember that the grant givers have other concerns. If I asked you to ship off for six months nestled cozily next to a nuclear reactor a kilometer under the ocean, you'd want other reasons besides personal safety to say yes. An application in exoskeletons is mentioned in the article.s -selling-solar.html
--
Solar, its simply better: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Here! Here!
A preposition is awkward to end a sentence with. But, "whom" is the word "on" is followed by.s -selling-solar.html
--
Solar follows the rules for grammer. http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
At least one of your objections has already been covered on slashdot. http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/2 5/1331227
0 &cid=10918320.
s -selling-solar.html
This link also covers the effort reported in the present post. Your comment on the efficiency of the proposed turbine anticipates some comments here. http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=13081
It was one of Bucky Fuller's favorite things to point out that heat management becomes easier with scale since the ratio of surface area (where heat escapes)-to-volume (where heat is stored) goes down in inverse proportion to the increase in linear dimension. This is why he felt that enclosing cities with his domes would be a good idea.
--
Take the solar scale advantage: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
You've got a typo which threw me, you want 33 kWh/kg. But isn't a low efficiency to be expected? One wants a big delta T for high efficiency and that is going to be hard to achieve on small scales. However, if these are very durable, connecting them is series rather than in parallel might get you something. You might build up to a very high delta T having one feed into another. But, then you've just built a modular large turbine so there might not be any point.
s -selling-solar.html
Since fuel cells don't depend of delta T, small versions of these can be pretty powerful and also efficient.
-
Solar, its not just for calculators any more. http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
I agree, the motivation to conserve is to reduce environmental impact, (or to save money) but it is not a virtue in itself. I would rather not even use the word conserve. I'd much rather see a goal to eliminate the use of fossil fuels. In doing that, I'd like to create a situation where we can use as much power as we like, play with it, enjoy it, leave the lights on all night just for fun (though draw the shades cause I like to see the stars when I'm out at night). Right now we live in a scarcity driven energy economy and this is no good at all.
s -selling-solar.html
The potential for renewable energy to provide much more power than we use now is clearly present. The Sun provides more than enough power directly and it also drives wind. What has been lacking up until now is large scale solar and wind power fabrication capacity. This is what makes these sources cheaper than coal which has already taken its scale advantage.
--
Solar: its abundant http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Power loss on the grid is about 7% http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transm ission#Losses which is significant,
but not so large that you save much if you are carting fuel to your distributed power generation system. High volatage power
transmission does not have a whole lot of rolling friction. If the "fuel" is already distributed like solar or wind then
you make power where you happen to be since it is really all the same. But saving on transmission losses is not a big motivator.
If there is net metering, then you are competing at retail prices, and this can be an advantage for distributed power generation.
s -selling-solar.html
--
Save money with solar http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
The thing about these is that they are so small. The figures given are not all that much greater than the Li ion batteries, so in terms of applications is transportation, one does a whole lot better putting five 5 gal gas cans in your trunk for a 1400 mile range. For compact applications getting more power in a tight spot is a great advantage. If you are carrying a lot of electronics this really helps in reducing the weight. But, I'm not sure you'd want to use these to replace the two stroke in an chainsaw.s -selling-solar.html
--
1000 W/m^2 http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Most ethanol production in the US comes from fermenting the corn kernels, but there are new methods of breaking down cellulose http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulosic_ethanol that use the whole plant and thus could use a failed crop (ears don't form). Silage is used as an animal feed source, though a fundemental competition between food and fuel is going to push most beef out of the market pretty quickly because feedlots just won't be able to operate. Range fed cattle would continue unless arid lands were also converted to fuel production.s -selling-solar.html
--
Energy problems? Don't have a cow, go solar: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
On surplus food, we actually keep that stuff around as a hedge against crop failure. The current surplus is quite low: http://www.earth-policy.org/Indicators/Grain/index .htm while demand for this as a biofuel is growing: http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/2007/Update63. htm. So, while we do need energy, s -selling-solar.html
our need for food seems a little more basic and setting up a competition between the two may be a big mistake.
--
Solar: It's not for dinner. http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Actually, silicon, the traditional material for making solar cells is very abundant. Shortages have been in purified silicon because the solar cell industry has attempted to save on cost by taking semiconductor grade silicon scrap as its raw material. Since there is nowhere near enough pentiums produced to cover everyone's roof with them, the supply of scrap is inadequate for serious solar power production. However, refining silicon expressly for solar power fabrication eliminates this issue. Useful cell lifetimes are approching 40 years with no more than a 20% degradation after 25 years.
s -selling-solar.html
On the biorefinery, the limit is mainly the amount of available fuel. Serious biofuel production probably has to go through algae http://www.greenfuelonline.com/ since the surface area requirements for biofuel production are very constraining and need all the help they can get. The 15% efficiency of solar is much higher even than algae. The curent waste stream is much too small to provide a significant portion of our energy use and conservation does not help since this also implies reducing the waste stream flow rate proportionally.
--
Solar: better than photosynthesis: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
One aspect of large scale solar fabrication is that heat management is easier. One only has to get silicon up to temperature but you don't have to keep it there with more energy in, so the 5 year figure you give is coming down dramatically. EROEI should end up near 40 on a single fabrication cycle, and potentially much higher depending on how recycling of the cells is handled during subsequent fabrication cycles. If the dopant gradiant is preserved through a cell-by-cell reannealing process to repair cosmic ray damage, then the energy requirements for recycling solar cells could be quite low compared to the initial fabrication requirements and thus boost the final EROEI over many recovery cycles. If not, one still saves on initial purification costs. Since we are considering a 40 year cycle, it is possible that silicon will be displaced by something more efficient, and it will become a nitch application, in which case determining the recycled EROEI will depend on how much silicon is retained in the energy generation sector.s -selling-solar.html
--
Happy days are here again: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
RMS also distributes in Ogg Vorbis http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/audio/audio.html
--
Please mod this off topic too. We don't want people to know.
The place where I use Ogg is at DemocracyNow! which includes this format along with realplay, cd and mp3. http://www.democracynow.org/streampage.pl. This show tends to cover problems with voting machines, corporate control of media and net neutrality that are also covered on slashdot, as well as other issues.s -selling-solar.html
--
One person one solar power system! http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
G.'s promise of secret knowledge is a little problematic. C.S. Lewis has treated the problem of the "inner circle" as it pertains to ways to make people do things that they would not ordinarily do. Still, I get the feeling that G. is sincere in his belief that only esoteric training can communicate what he has to teach.
s -selling-solar.html
When Jung speaks of differentiation, I think he feels that there is some ab inito material to work with so I'm not sure the Monty Python bit gets this just right. Still, one path is through attentive work and is probably open to many for whom the Road to Damascus presents difficulties.
--
Solar Enlightenment: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
I've been fascinates by Ouspensky's books and surmised that "My Dinner With Andre" was an echo of G.'s teachings but I had no idea that there was so much more material. Thanks for the link.
s -selling-solar.html
I think James Joyce took some important steps on the problem of communicating internal experience in a way that induces close resonace with the communicator's own experience in the reader, and I also think generally that art is most able to bring about the sort of direct communication the G. was concerned with. Music performance, when it is working as intended, is certainly soul-to-soul transmission.
On the communication of ideas though I find Einstein's introduction to "The Meaning of Relativity" to cover the basics. The external (objective) world provides a field on which we may mutually tune our internal experience and arrive at pretty good certainty that our experiences are adequately interchangable. I think this actually provides an answer to Chuang Tzu's dream in that he can discuss his dream as a philosopher but not as a butterfly and that participation with us in the discussion taken associatively with our particpation with Einstein in a recheckable discussion of the objective means that he is a philosopher and we are not merely the dream of a butterfly. This tie in answers a whole class of mystical intuitions that the world is illusion. What is actually happening is that the difficulty in communication of internal experience is providing a problem that is profound enough to warrant such speculation, but systematic effort shows that communication is possible and so the speculation needs to be directed elsewhere.
--
Solar removes existential threats: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Hum, I got the impression that a priori was considered more rigorous that a postieriori. Certainly in science, theories that are fruitfully predictive are considered more beneficial than those which are simply usefully descriptive.
s -selling-solar.html
The theory that the Sun is very likely to rise tommorrow because that is what it usually does in our experience is taken as less elegant than saying given the conservation of angular momentum as a fundemental law of physics, the Sun must rise tomorrow.
I've suspected that there is a problem in this division, that the correspondence between physical law and repeated behavior formed a tautology somewhere. But then I look at Maxwell's Equations and say, Nah, couldn't be.
--
Live electromagnetically: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
It has happened to me a number of times that I have been right for the wrong reason, and only further work showed that the reasons that draped themselves on intuition were specious. Yet the certainty of the feeling of correctness that conjured those films of argument made me seek out the more subtle arguments that may have been present but not perceived at the initial insight. Then there have been more times when I just found out I was wrong from the git-go. To me, those "faith" feelings are guides to what might be important but do not count as knowledge, only hints. I've taken 'justified true belief' to mean rigorously demonstrated comprehension, and perhaps this is not what is meant. I see knowing you could be correct, and knowing you are correct as two different stages.
s -selling-solar.html
Perhaps my hang up is that I tend to hold the word 'belief' in reserve for the unknowable. I'll use it when answering a question about where some one is: 'I beleive she is at the store.' meaning I don't know for sure but that was the plan.
I suspect there is something more to this problem that I'm proposing, basically that it is like an early compiler that allowed ambigous entry points. But I haven't really felt any discomfort with the problem either to urge that it is fundemental.
In any case, being right by accident must have something to do with it, and your example makes me think that God smiles at all our attemts in that particular direction.
--
You don't have to be Icarus to get cozy with the Sun. http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
They're under the Associated Federation of Organizations. You can read about them here: http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/programs/2006/1 2/31/scripts/rhubarb.shtml s -selling-solar.html
--
What are sunshile laws to Solar power? http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user