> Since when did Bill Gates and Warren Buffet turn into Climatologists?
Well, Buffet's company owns MidAmerican Energy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) which owns multiple gigawatts worth of wind turbines. One of their customers is Microsoft. They may not *be* climatologiests, but they certainly are smart people, and can easily afford being *briefed* by climatologists as part of their business decision making.
Solar panels do degrade over time, because by their nature they are constantly exposed to the Sun. The UV component degrades the electronic junctions over time, but it's in the range of 0.5-0.7%/year output decrease. The other parts of the panel (cover glass, aluminum frame, wiring) also suffer the usual effects of outdoor exposure.
So you can expect over a 30-50 year period it will make sense to replace old panels with new ones, and recycle the old ones. The average age of installed panels in the US is only 3 years, because the installation rate has been rapidly growing. So it will be a while before the replacement business will be significant.
> In 30+ years it still hasn't taken off, primarily due to cost.
Solar really took off in 2008. Before that, the quantities of silicon needed for solar cells was smaller than that needed for electronics. So it wasn't cost effective to build plants to make "solar grade" silicon. They just piggybacked on existing "electronics grade" production. Electronics needs very few defects in the silicon, because one defect can render a chip non-functional. A defect in a solar cell just lowers the efficiency a tiny bit. Solar-grade silicon costs 20x less per wafer. Once they started mass production of it, the cost of cells dropped like a rock, and production expanded by 75x from 2008 to this year, and still climbing.
> I will be installing solar panels soon,
Rooftop solar currently costs 3x as much as utility-scale solar, for the amount of power it produces. The panels themselves are the same, but the labor for installing a dozen panels on a roof is way higher than installing 300,000 on the ground in a solar farm. The solar farm gets them wholesale from the manufacturer, he only has to get one permit and make one power line connection instead of thousands, etc. If the numbers work for you, great, but you might get a better deal investing in a "yield co", a company that invests in solar farms for the income yield, and using that income to offset your electric bill. A new alternative is "community solar". That's where the utility builds a solar farm (like mine just did), and lets you buy the panels or the power they produce, and it gets deducted from your bill. That works for people like me. I have nice big shade trees around my house I don't want to cut down. It even works for renters, who can't put things on the roof. Just check out all the options before before you jump.
Robots already do the cleaning on solar farms. The panels are installed on long rows of support structure, and the cleaning bot runs on tracks along the top and bottom. It doesn't even need batteries, because, you know, solar panels. It just taps off a little of the power the row is producing. For the desert solar farms in the south-west, it's actually fairly necessary to clean them periodically, due to dust build-up. In rainier climates it's needed a lot less.
Building a power plant is labor intensive. Running it, not so much. So about 5000 people are working on building the Vogtle 3 & 4 nuclear reactors, on the GA/SC border. Once the new reactors are finished, there may only be 100 new jobs in running the two new reactors.
Same goes for a solar or wind farm today, or a hydroelectric dam in the mid-20th century. Lots of work to build it, not that many to run it.
> there's a good chance that we've reached peak jobs and the number of people who need to work to provide for all goods and services will start to shrink.
I've spent the last several years working on the concept of Seed Factories ( http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/S... ). These are starter sets of core machines (lathe, solar furnace, modular robot, etc.), which are used to make parts for *more* machines, until you have a mature factory. This is similar to the way a biological seed grows into a mature tree. The mature factory then produces things people want and need. The growth and operation of the factory is mostly automated, working from stored design files.
The starter set is less expensive to buy than a full factory, and being mostly automated, less expensive to run. Groups of people can split the cost of the starter set, and tend to the growing factory part-time, in addition to regular jobs. As the factory grows, it can produce more products, and the owner/operators can work conventional jobs less. There will still be personal service type things, and some people will work because they enjoy the work, but basic stuff like food, housing, and utilities can all be automated away to a large degree.
I'm convinced this sort of transition is not just possible, but inevitable, because it has better economics than the old way of doing things, and better security. A regular factory will lay you off to save a buck. That doesn't happen if you are part owner. It could go 100% automated, and you still get the stuff you need. During the transition period, it gives people a fall back position if they lose their main job. They just go work at "their factory" instead, while looking for another paid job.
> He campaigned on bringing back coal-producing jobs.... The cost of coal compared to other energy-sources, combined with automation, may prevent him from doing so.
Let's put it this way. The Southern Company (big southeast utility company), just finished their first big "clean coal" plant in Mississippi. It's clean in the sense of having the latest scrubbing tech, and the CO2 it produces will be sent down a pipeline to be injected into Gulf Coast oil wells to pump out more oil, and sequester the CO2 underground. It cost *ten times* as much per kW of capacity as utility-scale solar farms in 2016, and solar farms don't need fuel to keep running.
That's why Georgia Power, one of the Southern Co's divisions, is building 2.5 GW of solar in the next few years ( http://www.prnewswire.com/news... ). The Utility's divisions (Georgia Power, Alabama Power, etc.) are divided that way because each state regulates them differently. They are also half-owner of the Vogtle nuclear plant on the GA/SC border, which is adding two new reactors with 2.2 GW capacity.
Coal is dying. Ten years ago it supplied half of the US's electricity. Now it's down to 30%. It's mainly being replaced by Natural Gas, wind, and solar. It just takes a while to replace half the nation's electric capacity. Trump got votes by telling coal-country voters he's bring back jobs, but it ain't happening. According to the Energy Department, ~15 GW of renewable power plants are scheduled to be added in 2017, and 4.7 GW of coal plants shut down. That just continues the trend of the last decade.
He also lied about turning over his businesses to his sons. According to state offices which oversee corporations, he hasn't turned in the paperwork yet. The pile of file folders he used as a prop in his news conference about that subject were full of *blank paper*, as shown by a media photograph.
> Then of course there is getting into space in a big way and that at a minimum will require pretty high density long life energy sources, nuclear as a start.
Well, the Sun is nuclear. Solar power currently wins out to Jupiter, and nuclear wins beyond that. The Juno probe that arrived at Jupiter last summer is solar-powered, but it's a borderline case.
Photovoltaic *is* fusion power, what do you think the Sun runs on? It happens the reactor is free, and safely far away so we don't get much radiation from it.
PV has been viable for about a decade now. Over a billion panels have been installed worldwide as of the end of 2016.
Efficiency doesn't matter much for utility-scale solar, just levelized cost per kWh. Since tracker systems which follow the Sun now add 10% to system cost, but improve output by 30%, most large systems are going that way, because it lowers cost per kWh.
Efficiency matters to people who have limited roof space, since it determines the peak amount you can install. Rooftop costs 3x as much as utility solar, because it takes more labor and materials for installing a handful on a sloped roof than hundreds of thousands on flat, open land.
Efficiency matters a whole freaking lot to satellites, because of high launch costs and limited space to fold the arrays for launch. Thus the latest space arrays are 30% efficient vs 1.36kW/m^2 solar flux in space ( 400 W/m^2) vs 150-200 W/m^2 for panels on the ground. They reach the high efficiency by using three semiconductor layers, each tuned to different parts of the solar spectrum. This is too expensive to apply to ground panels at present.
A PPA is an agreement between the owner of a solar plant, and an electric utility or large commercial user, for a fixed amount of output for a fixed amount of time.
> He's retained ownership positions and left control in his children's hands.
Actually, according to government offices in the relevant states, he hasn't even filed to relinquish control yet. When you change the officers of a corporation, typically you have to file that information with someone.
> But no candidate will perfectly reflect what the voter wishes so there will always be some compromises.
This is part of why our system is fundamentally broken. We elect candidates who make decisions on every part of society, even though they only know about a few. It was different a few hundred years ago, when most people were farmers, and even city life wasn't that complicated. We choose people based on popularity, not competence. The people who voted for the losing candidate get no representation at all. Even if you voted for the winning candidate, whatever they promised in the campaign may not be what they actually do.
They have no responsibility for actions that may kill thousands. Repeal the ACA (Obamacare), and 20 million people lose their insurance. As a consequence, thousands will die. In any other field, there would be huge consequences for so many deaths, but not government.
There are all kinds of changes we could make to make the system better, but the first step is to recognize that it has big problems.
> There's no way to filter these without going to a strict whitelist (and even that has some chance of a collision error) and unfortunately whitelists aren't suitable for all people.
The way to deal with this on cellphones is to set the default ringtone to "none", and whatever ringtones you prefer to your legitimate contacts. Most telemarketers won't leave a message. The ones that do, I can screen at my own leisure.
My broker sent money via ACH to my credit union. They sent it four days ago, and it just arrived today. Bitcoin doesn't take weekends or holidays. An hour or less to fully confirm a transaction is like lightning compared to the traditional banking system.
Note that ACH means Automated Clearinghouse i.e. the money is sent via computers. And it still takes up to 4 days.
I never forgot about them, but mined or accumulated steadily from mid-2011 to mid-2016. When the price and my accumulation goal were met, I started selling, which I will do for the next few years, so as not to take a big capital gain all at once. I've already covered my original investment, so it's all profit at this point. I can't predict what the price will do in the future, so it might end up a small or a large gain. We'll see.
The service that the Bitcoin Network provides is transfer of value, without restrictions from borders, lack of bank accounts, or high fees, and it does this fairly fast. It's better than bank wire transfers, PayPal, or Western Union in many cases, so some people use it. Bitcoins as value tokens are a necessary part of the Network they are part of, they are the accounting units for transactions. The usefulness of the Network is what gives the coins value, since they are scarce and necessary to perform the Network's function.
> Bitcoin is, by all definitions, a fiat currency.
No, that's not what a fiat currency is. "Fiat" is Latin for "let it be so", as in "Fiat Lux" (let there be light) from the Bible. A fiat currency is one that a government authority says is a currency. Commodity money is the kind based on a commodity that has value. Cattle, sea shells, gold, and silver have all been commodity money at one time or another. Usually the most easily traded and widely accepted good ends up that way. Bitcoin is easily traded, being fully electronic, and has other properties good for money (divisibility, durability, scarcity, etc.) and has therefore become a well traded commodity. It is not yet widely accepted aside from the community of merchants and users, so it is not yet a full currency at the level of dollars or euro.
There is no such thing as an "official blockchain server". My home PC becomes a bitcoin network node whenever I run the software, and updates my copy of the blockchain when I do so.
Ingenious software is what keeps everyone's copy of the blockchain the same and un-alterable. Solving that problem was the key invention of bitcoin's creator(s).
One third of Americans are "unbanked", and higher numbers in less-developed countries. One bout of unemployment or illness, and your credit and bank accounts can be lost for years. Or has happened in my case, Bank of America decided to make the automatic credit card payment twice in one month, for no reason. Fortunately I caught it right away, but I was overdrawn for two days and still had to pay a fee. Someone who doesn't catch it could run up all kinds of fees from bounced checks, and then banks don't want you as a customer.
Slashdot Mirror
> Since when did Bill Gates and Warren Buffet turn into Climatologists?
Well, Buffet's company owns MidAmerican Energy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) which owns multiple gigawatts worth of wind turbines. One of their customers is Microsoft. They may not *be* climatologiests, but they certainly are smart people, and can easily afford being *briefed* by climatologists as part of their business decision making.
Solar panels do degrade over time, because by their nature they are constantly exposed to the Sun. The UV component degrades the electronic junctions over time, but it's in the range of 0.5-0.7%/year output decrease. The other parts of the panel (cover glass, aluminum frame, wiring) also suffer the usual effects of outdoor exposure.
So you can expect over a 30-50 year period it will make sense to replace old panels with new ones, and recycle the old ones. The average age of installed panels in the US is only 3 years, because the installation rate has been rapidly growing. So it will be a while before the replacement business will be significant.
> In 30+ years it still hasn't taken off, primarily due to cost.
Solar really took off in 2008. Before that, the quantities of silicon needed for solar cells was smaller than that needed for electronics. So it wasn't cost effective to build plants to make "solar grade" silicon. They just piggybacked on existing "electronics grade" production. Electronics needs very few defects in the silicon, because one defect can render a chip non-functional. A defect in a solar cell just lowers the efficiency a tiny bit. Solar-grade silicon costs 20x less per wafer. Once they started mass production of it, the cost of cells dropped like a rock, and production expanded by 75x from 2008 to this year, and still climbing.
> I will be installing solar panels soon,
Rooftop solar currently costs 3x as much as utility-scale solar, for the amount of power it produces. The panels themselves are the same, but the labor for installing a dozen panels on a roof is way higher than installing 300,000 on the ground in a solar farm. The solar farm gets them wholesale from the manufacturer, he only has to get one permit and make one power line connection instead of thousands, etc. If the numbers work for you, great, but you might get a better deal investing in a "yield co", a company that invests in solar farms for the income yield, and using that income to offset your electric bill. A new alternative is "community solar". That's where the utility builds a solar farm (like mine just did), and lets you buy the panels or the power they produce, and it gets deducted from your bill. That works for people like me. I have nice big shade trees around my house I don't want to cut down. It even works for renters, who can't put things on the roof. Just check out all the options before before you jump.
Robots already do the cleaning on solar farms. The panels are installed on long rows of support structure, and the cleaning bot runs on tracks along the top and bottom. It doesn't even need batteries, because, you know, solar panels. It just taps off a little of the power the row is producing. For the desert solar farms in the south-west, it's actually fairly necessary to clean them periodically, due to dust build-up. In rainier climates it's needed a lot less.
Building a power plant is labor intensive. Running it, not so much. So about 5000 people are working on building the Vogtle 3 & 4 nuclear reactors, on the GA/SC border. Once the new reactors are finished, there may only be 100 new jobs in running the two new reactors.
Same goes for a solar or wind farm today, or a hydroelectric dam in the mid-20th century. Lots of work to build it, not that many to run it.
> there's a good chance that we've reached peak jobs and the number of people who need to work to provide for all goods and services will start to shrink.
I've spent the last several years working on the concept of Seed Factories ( http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/S... ). These are starter sets of core machines (lathe, solar furnace, modular robot, etc.), which are used to make parts for *more* machines, until you have a mature factory. This is similar to the way a biological seed grows into a mature tree. The mature factory then produces things people want and need. The growth and operation of the factory is mostly automated, working from stored design files.
The starter set is less expensive to buy than a full factory, and being mostly automated, less expensive to run. Groups of people can split the cost of the starter set, and tend to the growing factory part-time, in addition to regular jobs. As the factory grows, it can produce more products, and the owner/operators can work conventional jobs less. There will still be personal service type things, and some people will work because they enjoy the work, but basic stuff like food, housing, and utilities can all be automated away to a large degree.
I'm convinced this sort of transition is not just possible, but inevitable, because it has better economics than the old way of doing things, and better security. A regular factory will lay you off to save a buck. That doesn't happen if you are part owner. It could go 100% automated, and you still get the stuff you need. During the transition period, it gives people a fall back position if they lose their main job. They just go work at "their factory" instead, while looking for another paid job.
> He campaigned on bringing back coal-producing jobs. ... The cost of coal compared to other energy-sources, combined with automation, may prevent him from doing so.
Let's put it this way. The Southern Company (big southeast utility company), just finished their first big "clean coal" plant in Mississippi. It's clean in the sense of having the latest scrubbing tech, and the CO2 it produces will be sent down a pipeline to be injected into Gulf Coast oil wells to pump out more oil, and sequester the CO2 underground. It cost *ten times* as much per kW of capacity as utility-scale solar farms in 2016, and solar farms don't need fuel to keep running.
That's why Georgia Power, one of the Southern Co's divisions, is building 2.5 GW of solar in the next few years ( http://www.prnewswire.com/news... ). The Utility's divisions (Georgia Power, Alabama Power, etc.) are divided that way because each state regulates them differently. They are also half-owner of the Vogtle nuclear plant on the GA/SC border, which is adding two new reactors with 2.2 GW capacity.
Coal is dying. Ten years ago it supplied half of the US's electricity. Now it's down to 30%. It's mainly being replaced by Natural Gas, wind, and solar. It just takes a while to replace half the nation's electric capacity. Trump got votes by telling coal-country voters he's bring back jobs, but it ain't happening. According to the Energy Department, ~15 GW of renewable power plants are scheduled to be added in 2017, and 4.7 GW of coal plants shut down. That just continues the trend of the last decade.
If that's what they want, I'll gladly demolish their compound, and replant native forest plants.
He also lied about turning over his businesses to his sons. According to state offices which oversee corporations, he hasn't turned in the paperwork yet. The pile of file folders he used as a prop in his news conference about that subject were full of *blank paper*, as shown by a media photograph.
> Then of course there is getting into space in a big way and that at a minimum will require pretty high density long life energy sources, nuclear as a start.
Well, the Sun is nuclear. Solar power currently wins out to Jupiter, and nuclear wins beyond that. The Juno probe that arrived at Jupiter last summer is solar-powered, but it's a borderline case.
I would call 80 MWh Tesla Powerpack "Industrial scale":
https://electrek.co/2017/01/23...
It's more like 1-2 years these days, depending on type. See page 32 of https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/...
Photovoltaic *is* fusion power, what do you think the Sun runs on? It happens the reactor is free, and safely far away so we don't get much radiation from it.
PV has been viable for about a decade now. Over a billion panels have been installed worldwide as of the end of 2016.
Efficiency doesn't matter much for utility-scale solar, just levelized cost per kWh. Since tracker systems which follow the Sun now add 10% to system cost, but improve output by 30%, most large systems are going that way, because it lowers cost per kWh.
Efficiency matters to people who have limited roof space, since it determines the peak amount you can install. Rooftop costs 3x as much as utility solar, because it takes more labor and materials for installing a handful on a sloped roof than hundreds of thousands on flat, open land.
Efficiency matters a whole freaking lot to satellites, because of high launch costs and limited space to fold the arrays for launch. Thus the latest space arrays are 30% efficient vs 1.36kW/m^2 solar flux in space ( 400 W/m^2) vs 150-200 W/m^2 for panels on the ground. They reach the high efficiency by using three semiconductor layers, each tuned to different parts of the solar spectrum. This is too expensive to apply to ground panels at present.
> We're still paying 0.528kWh for solar here in Ontario
I don't know why you are getting screwed up in Canada, but US Power Purchase Agreements are down around $0.05kWh ($50/MWh):
https://newscenter.lbl.gov/wp-...
A PPA is an agreement between the owner of a solar plant, and an electric utility or large commercial user, for a fixed amount of output for a fixed amount of time.
> He's retained ownership positions and left control in his children's hands.
Actually, according to government offices in the relevant states, he hasn't even filed to relinquish control yet. When you change the officers of a corporation, typically you have to file that information with someone.
> But no candidate will perfectly reflect what the voter wishes so there will always be some compromises.
This is part of why our system is fundamentally broken. We elect candidates who make decisions on every part of society, even though they only know about a few. It was different a few hundred years ago, when most people were farmers, and even city life wasn't that complicated. We choose people based on popularity, not competence. The people who voted for the losing candidate get no representation at all. Even if you voted for the winning candidate, whatever they promised in the campaign may not be what they actually do.
They have no responsibility for actions that may kill thousands. Repeal the ACA (Obamacare), and 20 million people lose their insurance. As a consequence, thousands will die. In any other field, there would be huge consequences for so many deaths, but not government.
There are all kinds of changes we could make to make the system better, but the first step is to recognize that it has big problems.
> There's no way to filter these without going to a strict whitelist (and even that has some chance of a collision error) and unfortunately whitelists aren't suitable for all people.
The way to deal with this on cellphones is to set the default ringtone to "none", and whatever ringtones you prefer to your legitimate contacts. Most telemarketers won't leave a message. The ones that do, I can screen at my own leisure.
My broker sent money via ACH to my credit union. They sent it four days ago, and it just arrived today. Bitcoin doesn't take weekends or holidays. An hour or less to fully confirm a transaction is like lightning compared to the traditional banking system.
Note that ACH means Automated Clearinghouse i.e. the money is sent via computers. And it still takes up to 4 days.
I never forgot about them, but mined or accumulated steadily from mid-2011 to mid-2016. When the price and my accumulation goal were met, I started selling, which I will do for the next few years, so as not to take a big capital gain all at once. I've already covered my original investment, so it's all profit at this point. I can't predict what the price will do in the future, so it might end up a small or a large gain. We'll see.
Wire transfer fees are often a hundred times higher than bitcoin fees.
The service that the Bitcoin Network provides is transfer of value, without restrictions from borders, lack of bank accounts, or high fees, and it does this fairly fast. It's better than bank wire transfers, PayPal, or Western Union in many cases, so some people use it. Bitcoins as value tokens are a necessary part of the Network they are part of, they are the accounting units for transactions. The usefulness of the Network is what gives the coins value, since they are scarce and necessary to perform the Network's function.
> Bitcoin is, by all definitions, a fiat currency.
No, that's not what a fiat currency is. "Fiat" is Latin for "let it be so", as in "Fiat Lux" (let there be light) from the Bible. A fiat currency is one that a government authority says is a currency. Commodity money is the kind based on a commodity that has value. Cattle, sea shells, gold, and silver have all been commodity money at one time or another. Usually the most easily traded and widely accepted good ends up that way. Bitcoin is easily traded, being fully electronic, and has other properties good for money (divisibility, durability, scarcity, etc.) and has therefore become a well traded commodity. It is not yet widely accepted aside from the community of merchants and users, so it is not yet a full currency at the level of dollars or euro.
There is no such thing as an "official blockchain server". My home PC becomes a bitcoin network node whenever I run the software, and updates my copy of the blockchain when I do so.
Ingenious software is what keeps everyone's copy of the blockchain the same and un-alterable. Solving that problem was the key invention of bitcoin's creator(s).
One third of Americans are "unbanked", and higher numbers in less-developed countries. One bout of unemployment or illness, and your credit and bank accounts can be lost for years. Or has happened in my case, Bank of America decided to make the automatic credit card payment twice in one month, for no reason. Fortunately I caught it right away, but I was overdrawn for two days and still had to pay a fee. Someone who doesn't catch it could run up all kinds of fees from bounced checks, and then banks don't want you as a customer.