Production improvements of low ISP vehicles contribute absolutely nothing to high ISP vehicles. Production improvements of vehicles with minimal to no TPS contribute nothing to the serious TPS challenges of actual orbital vehicles. Virtually nothing about SS1 applies to the serious challenges involved in spaceflight.
I should add that I'm only criticizing SS1/SS2. I have nothing against WK1 or WK2; they're quite nice carrier aircraft. But SS1 and SS2 are completely meaningless. If you want small companies doing meaningful rocketry, check out SpaceX. Their Falcon 9, a rocket whose heavy version will carry as much payload as NASA's beleagured (and possibly dead in the water) Ares, including its own spacecraft that can dock with the ISS, will be launching this June. The typical launch cost of payloads in the west is $10k/kg. In Russia, China, and India, $7k/kg is the standard. Sometimes you can get discounts down toi as low as $4-5k/kg. The Falcon 9 is $2-3k/kg. And looking over its construction, design, stats, etc, these numbers definitely appear credible.
Cheer for the rocketry not matters, not the irrelevant joyrides.
Oooh, yeay. Another joyride that contributes absolutely nothing to space exploration.
If you disagree with this statement, go ahead -- explain why you feel that a vehicle with this low delta-V, horrible ISP, and proportionally high mass that faces bare minimal reentry heating -- advances the state of the art.
Well, at least their prospects for selling it look rosy. I'm sure a member of the large "creationist fossil hunters with lots of money to burn" community will come to bail them out.
Won't require large quantities? Where on Earth are you getting that from? H is part of "H2O", as in all of the bulk acids and solutes used in the process. C is an essential component in a number of the industrial processes use. F may be the most critical component, as it's through hydrofluoric acid reductionleaching that they propose to extract metals. N is part of NH3 (more H), also used in the critical leach process. And so on. And recovery of gasses is hard enough even here on Earth; it'd be even harder on the moon. As for how rare these elements are, we're talking ppm quantities, all less common than, say, strontium is on Earth, and without any evidence of clustering in particular regions like we have on Earth that lets rare things like copper be economically mineable (the moon is much more uniform). Of those minerals that they show as inputs, some have never been found on the moon even in trace quantities. These aren't "optional"; they're required for the industrial processes. And even if all of these can be found on the moon as a whole, the odds of them all being in the same region of the moon are tiny.
Energy also has a long tail on the moon. What's the simplest way you could generate power -- imported solar panels? That'd a staggering import cost just to do our earthbound production methods, let alone to ionize every last atom of your mined ore on the moon. And they're not zero maintenance on the moon -- far from it. The moon is an incredibly "dirty" environment of abrasive, static-clinging dust that gets into everything.
You don't need to fast charge at home. If you want a fast charge, you can go to a fast charge station. Or, if you really want a fast charge at home, get a fast charger. Basically, a second set of batteries that trickle charges from the grid, and rapid charges your vehicle whenever you plug in. It'd have the added bonus of providing backup power for your house and even potentially helping with grid load balancing (in exchange for a discount on electricity purchase prices).
If most people just charge their cars at home over night, then there won't be any charging stations, because it will economically unviable to keep one going due to the shortage of customers.
Sure there will be. Just a lot less of them. People will still need them on cross-country trips, so they'll mostly be gathered near highways. If there's still a demand, there will still be people around looking to profit off of it.
Divide 1e9 with 9.3e6 and you have 107,5USD / kWh. Oops.
Oops indeed. You assumed that the pool only works once. Need a towel for the egg on your face?
You admitted it yourself the $1/W figure is completely meaningless.
The hell it is! It's how you tell how much power a cell produces in standard conditions costs per watt. The less it costs for the same amount in standard conditions, the more valuable the cell is. You punch the number in and adjust from standard conditions to your actual operating conditions. You can't get much more meaningful than that.
What matters is what's the average cost for kWh in any given region in average.
Which depends on the region, which is why you give solar cell output numbers relative to a standard set of operating conditions (1kW/m^2, 25C) so that you can adjust based on your local insolation. Do you expect every solar cell that comes on the market to have to have an entire table of how it performs in different regions to explain what can easily be represented with a single number, all because someome like you has trouble understanding simple conversions?
but over here we need more heating when we get f- all sunlight for months during winter
You use electric home heating? A) Tsk, tsk, and B) you're majorly in the minority.
I'm sure your amortization calculations factor in a modest profit for capital for the projected 50 year service life and add to the cost of the energy accordingly?
That's what IRR is -- your rate of return on the investment averaged over the lifespan of the project. If you want to see all of the factors that are taken into account by a typical solar economics calculator, check one out.
Indeed they have. Now, see each one of the arrows in this graph? That's an entire industrial process, few of which are particularly simple. See each of those inputs? Each is an entire mining operation and/or recovery circuit from another mining operation. See all of those "C"s, "F"s, "N"s, "P"s, and "H"s? Those are in incredibly miniscule quantities on the moon.
Getting the picture of the scale that's being talked about?
This poster is dead-on. There's a "long tail" for almost everything produced by human society today, things ranging from consumable parts or fluids for mining and processing equipment to all sorts of random chemicals that can be involved in the process. And each of those parts and chemicals has their own long tail.
Look at aluminum. The above poster was kind enough not to mention all of what you need to convert aluminum ores like bauxite into aluminum. Let's assume bauxite. First, you have to mine it, then crush it, likely in multiple stages, down to powder (Insert Maintenance Long Tail Here). You then wash the powder in a solution of sodium hydroxide (Insert Long Tail Here) to produce soluable AlOH. You then filter out the other components (Insert Maintenance Long Tail Here). You then cool it (on the moon, this would involve extensive radiators) to preciptate out the AlOH. You then filter out the precipitate (Insert Maintenance Long Tail Here). You then heat the AlOH to 1050C (Insert Long Tails For Heat And Furnace Maintenance Here) to drive the water off (Insert Long Tail For Water Recovery Circuit Here). You then cycle the alumina out. The alumina then gets deposited in a hot bath (Insert Long Tail For Heat And Crucible Maintenance) of molten cryolite (Na3AlF6). The cryolite is steadily consumed (Insert Long Tail Here), as is the carbon anode (Insert Long Tail Here); the anode is consumed rather quickly. A tremendous amount of electricity is consumed (Insert Long Tail Here) in the electrolysis. The aluminum settles to the bottom, where it can be drained and sent to casting (Insert Maintenance Long Tail Here). I'm not even going to bother with casting and forging.
Just from a more fundamental standpoint, ignoring the tails of manufacturing the chemicals/products associated with each, where are the consumed Na, F, and C supposed to come from? The moon is very poor in them, especially C and F. You can try for a more closed process (more massive, complex equipment and more maintenance), but you'll never do that great, especially concerning F and C (in the form of various gasseous carbon/oxygen/fluorine compounds). And there's a *lot* more energy needed, too.
It's easy to not see the forest through the trees when considering colonization of moons and planets. Unfortunately, the "forest" in this case is how tightly interlinked almost all of modern human industry is. And you can't just bootstrap it on other planets; you're dependant on it for your survival. You can't just go out with picks and expect to produce enough product to even maintain your survival, or expect to make products in a clay-brick forge that burns charcoal from a nearby forest. Bootstrapping, as we did on Earth, simply can't work there. You need modern industry, and hence have to deal with its limits.
Solar is more land efficient than coal or hydro, which together make up 60% of our generation capcity, when you consider the area used for coal mining and the lake backed up by the dam, respectively. An order of magnitude more land efficient than hydro, actually. I'm not sure how much land natural gas production/transportation/generation takes up, and likewise, for uranium mining/processing/enrichment/generation/waste storage, but I doubt they're out of the ballpark.
To top it all off, consider where solar can go. Solar thermal plants are built on the most barren and lifeless of sunburned desertscapes. Photovoltaic farms can also go there, but they can one up solar thermal -- they can go on *waste urban space*. And there's more than enough waste urban space to meet all of our needs even with inefficient panels.
There's nothing about the CIGS chemistry itself that's inherently less durable. On the contrary, since it's flexible, it can't break like silicon. On the other hand, CIGS cells can be put on any kind of substrate, and these can be less durable than other substrates. You print your cell on thin plastic, and of course it won't last as long as something with a heavy steel backing and a thick plate of glass on the front. In Nanosolar's case, if I recall correctly, they use a semi-flexible aluminum backing. I think that's probably a nice balance between durability and weight/cost.
Assume your electric car needs only 20 horsepower to maintain 60 mph. One horsepower is about 750 watts, assuming perfect efficiency. That's 15 kilowatts to keep the car going 60 mph.
It's simpler than that. A typical modern EV gets about 200Wh/mi at 60mph. Some get notably less, like the Aptera, but that's a crazy Jetsons-like car, so we won't count it;) 200*60=12kWh/h=12kW. As for range, 200Wh/mi * 300 mi = 60kWh.
But hey, let's go with your 75kWh. It's in the ballpark.
Now let's assume the 'electric station' supplies electricity to charge your car at 500 volts.
Why limit it to 500V? The EEStor's EESU, for example, is a 3500V ultracapacitor.
But hey, let's go with 500V.
To get to a 3 minute charge time (one twentieth of an hour) you need 20x the amperage, or 3000 amps.
And? You do realize that when you're filling a gasoline car, you're putting enough energy in it that if it were burned ideally, could turn a car twice its size into a pool of molten metal. Let's picture a small car, just over 1 ton -- usually as a 12 gallon or so tank. 131 MJ/gal times 12 gallons 1.6GJ. The specific heat of steel is 500J/(kg*K). Assuming a 1500 degree celcius rise in temperature, you could melt 2.1 metric tonnes of steel.
That's an awful lot of energy. Even when not burned ideally, it's still a ton of energy. Picture the damage from a molotov coctail and how it's burning less dense alcohol and a lot less of it. Regardless of the energy source, it takes a *lot* of energy to get a vehicle to go long distances. All you're changing when going from gas to electric is the form that it comes in.
By the way, 5 minute charge time is a more typical number. But let's just go with 3 minutes and thus 3000 amps.
To carry 3000 amps of current for 3 minutes without melting insulation, my numbers show you'd need copper wire about 2.5 inches in diameter
Only if the wire is passively cooled. Oh, wait, you didn't bother to think about active cooling, now did you? A mere blower circulating air through an outer sheath lets you cut that to a typical power cord size.
Why do people always assume that engineers are idiots when talking about new tech?
I would guess a Li Ion battery charges now in around four hours (probably closer to eight hours, but I'll be generous).
Don't guess.
It's about three hours to fill a typical current EV that's at "empty". Tesla is 3-4. Aptera is 2-4. However, this is mostly battery limited. There are already fast charge batteries ready to hit the market -- Toshiba and AltairNano are producing them. 5-10 minutes charge time. EEStor's EESUs are also 5-10 minutes. And this is for an empty battery. It seems likely that the Stanford batteries, given nanostructured electrodes, will also be rapid charge/discharge.
And I think you'll find that electric motors already provide torque comparable or superior to gasoline engines of a similar size and weight.
Compressed air and/or pumped water storage. The prices I've seen listed are about 4c/kWh.
Have you factored in the costs of powering regions which do not get much sunlight during winter months and/or do not have sunny weather in general?
With $1/W solar cells, it doesn't really matter. I'm not sure you understand how cheap that is. Even solar power Alaska comes out cheaper than coal with $1/W cells.
You take a $/W number that everyone knows is unrealistic unless you've got orbital solar panel exposed to sunlight 24/7 in hard vacuum
Um, no. Wattage ratings of solar cells go by a fixed standard. Nanosolar and all of the CIGS manufacturers (who give similar prices) cells follow the exact same standard as silicon cells. By this standard, silicon cells are ~$4.80/W. The price per watt is *NOT* the price of the power output. It's the price of a cell producing a "standard watt". You then plug this in to how much insolation you get in a given region, factor in all of the other capital costs, and then amortize them (and maintenance) over the life of the system.
Really, you must think people are utter idiots if they can't figure out that you need to do that.
Car batteries are not ~$40, 20lb propane tanks. Car batteries are $8k, several hundred pound devices bolted to the base of your car. Not going to happen.
People rely on the "grinding" aspect because it's the easiest to develop and balance properly. It's a well-worn formula. I do believe that there is some potential for ingenuity in games (and actually have worked a bit on developing a game (Eaku) that strives toward this end, with the idea of user-level scripting controlling actions in a very malleable world), but it's a lot trickier to pull off. Probably the worst idea that I've seen in practice is the one where people create a game world with the intent of it being "an environment for role-playing, not fighting". That almost never works out. Such an environment, if well advertised, will get plenty of people logging in, asking, "How do I attack things?" and leaving when they find that they can't, day in and day out. Even if in the ads you explicitly tell them that it's just for role playing.
The article touched on game dev reactions to bug reports. I've seen negative reactions to bug reports myself. In one game I was a developer for, I once did a security audit of the code and was appalled at what I found. With almost no effort, I was able to craft an in-game exploit that would wipe the hard drive of every user logged into the game who tried to bring up a URL. I had to push and push to get it fixed. Almost any bug that was security related, they didn't want to address; they were much more afraid of introducing gameplay bugs that might come as a side effect to fixing security bugs, and more afraid of having the schedule slip. Almost none of the strings in the game were checked for length or null termination when operations were done on them. It really disturbed me (and also reinforced to me why game code shouldn't be written in C; at least use C++, people...)
You can learn the caveats to each tech if you're willing to do the research. In this case, the first caveat is cycle life. They want to get 1000 cycles out of it, and think they'll be able to. But if they can only get a dozen or cycles, this tech is dead in the water. If they can get 1000 cycles, they'll almost certainly be flooded with venture capital for commercializing it (or make a fortune selling it to an established company). Either way, commercialization will be attempted. Then there will be a set of new milestones for how commercialization is going -- facility construction, purity standards for the components, nanowire quality standards, anode standards, whole cell standards, whole cell lifecycle testing, and so forth. It could fail on any one of those, although the odds for any given one are low. All in all, if it gets to the commercialization phase, I'd give them one in two, one in three odds of being successful. If they're successful, given that this is just an anode advancement, we're only talking about a "severalfold" improvement in energy density (likely with fast charge time to go along with it). It's still be a huge revolution, however.
Stay tuned. The results from lifespan testing should be published some time this summer.
First of all, Nanosolar HOPES to make the cells at $1/W, they are nowhere near that cheap yet, and this is the price their marketing department HOPES to achieve.
And your information comes from? Nowhere, that's where, because they're not sold on the open market yet, so claims like "they are nowhere near that cheap yet" are complete BS. All of their capacity is currently going to a German municipal plant. Secondly, all of the CIGS companies are giving numbers in the same ballpark, as are the CdTe companies.
Secondly, that is the price for the cells without factoring in energy storage devices, energy conversion systems, servicing etc
Duh. That's part of a general solar economics calculation. Only an idiot would just multiply $1/W times the desired number of watts. A large, batteryless installation in Anchorage, AK of nanosolar cells gets a 30 year IRR of 7-8%. In Las Vegas, it's more like 13-14%.
Thirdly, it is the price under optimal conditions, with perfectly aligned cells. (and on, and on...)
Do you think we're idiots? What's next? "Third, the cells only produce power when the sun is visible. Fourth, you need to have wires to conduct the power. Fifth, you need "humans", who can use the power...."
They are also relying on indium, an element which is thought to become scarce due to increasing demand, and of course, mass-deployment of indium based solar cells would certainly push the price up.
Indium is more common than silver, is easier to recover than silver (because of its close interrelationship with zinc ores), and CIGS cells use a miniscule amount of it (nanoscale-thickness coatings). Indium's current high price is more related to a lack of demand for it before LCD TVs started using it in bulk; this led to a few of the world's only indium recovery circuits shutting down without new circuits replacing them at other mines. It's not a problem. It only takes a few years to ramp up production.
Finally, even if they were able to start producing these at competitive costs and at a large rate, you still have the problem that you will have to increase solar photovoltaic output by a factor of 1000 just to reach 20% of current energy demand.
Huh? Did you ignore my post, above, where it already addressed this?
With most of nuclear reactors built in the west ending their licensing in about 2030 - 2040, Oil running low and gas prices rising due to low demand
Whaa? For one, nuclear is making a serious comeback in the US. Two, oil is not running low. Light sweet crude is, but light sweet crude != world petroleum production capability. Venezuelan super heavy crude and Canadian bitumen syncrude are taking off. Third, the demand for gasoline has been rising constantly year to year. Are you confusing the annual demand fluctuations with year to year growth in consumption? Demand is always lowest in the winter, highest in the summer.
[quote]But no, we're going to gamble on some hypothetical solar breakthrough.[/quote]
Hypothetical? Yeah, about two dozen companies, some of which have been selling them in smaller volume for years, is "hypothetical". What's next -- are CFLs hypothetical as well?
[quote]Despite the fact that no realistic way to overcome the problems with intermittent supply, that they don't produce energy at night, diffuse and limited output, as well as the high price, having been demonstrated.[/quote]
In the pacific northwest, and to a lesser degree the west coast as a whole, energy storage is a non-issue. The west relies a lot on hydro power, and hydro pairs perfectly with solar (it already has a low capacity factor, so there's no additional economic cost to the hydro producers). Even in the east, solar alone with no storage can eliminate the p
And, let me add, I don't say this to diminish the importance of this news. A severalfold improvement is major, major news. Not in the least because this anode likely lends itself to very rapid charging at the same time. What we're looking at is, as it stands, giving it the sort of charge time and range as a gasoline vehicle, meaning that there's no reason to stick with gasoline (when you can get lower maintenance (assuming long lifespan batteries), higher torque, quieter, more thermodynamically efficient vehicles that only require gas station visits on long trips, require hardly any new infrastructure (versus oil, which needs a lot of infrastructure construction) due to mostly off-peak charging (timer-based to get you a low rate and use our huge amount of unused off-peak capacity), lets us use domestic energy supplies instead of funding our enemies with oil imports, and even if all of the electricity came from burning fossil fuels, would still emit almost half the greenhouse gasses. An equivalent cathode improvement for electric vehicles simply means that you could then drive cross-country on a single charge.
As for lifespan, Yi Cui's team expects to be able to get at least 1,000 cycles out of this. That may not sound like much, but when you can go ~350 miles on a charge, that's 350,000 miles. And not like the battery just disintegrates up at the end of its lifespan; it simply doesn't hold as much charge.
It's not even 10fold -- at least not currently. It's only "several" times improvement without an equivalent cathode improvement. Now, that may well happen, but it hasn't happened yet. However, they think they may be able to commercialize it in five years.
Slashdot Mirror
Production improvements of low ISP vehicles contribute absolutely nothing to high ISP vehicles. Production improvements of vehicles with minimal to no TPS contribute nothing to the serious TPS challenges of actual orbital vehicles. Virtually nothing about SS1 applies to the serious challenges involved in spaceflight.
I should add that I'm only criticizing SS1/SS2. I have nothing against WK1 or WK2; they're quite nice carrier aircraft. But SS1 and SS2 are completely meaningless. If you want small companies doing meaningful rocketry, check out SpaceX. Their Falcon 9, a rocket whose heavy version will carry as much payload as NASA's beleagured (and possibly dead in the water) Ares, including its own spacecraft that can dock with the ISS, will be launching this June. The typical launch cost of payloads in the west is $10k/kg. In Russia, China, and India, $7k/kg is the standard. Sometimes you can get discounts down toi as low as $4-5k/kg. The Falcon 9 is $2-3k/kg. And looking over its construction, design, stats, etc, these numbers definitely appear credible.
Cheer for the rocketry not matters, not the irrelevant joyrides.
Oooh, yeay. Another joyride that contributes absolutely nothing to space exploration.
If you disagree with this statement, go ahead -- explain why you feel that a vehicle with this low delta-V, horrible ISP, and proportionally high mass that faces bare minimal reentry heating -- advances the state of the art.
All that work, and not a single Banksy? What a shame.
Perhaps I'm just a huge geek, but I find Celestia fun. And I've never tried Orbiter, but it looks neat as well.
I think there's a good bit of potential for a NASA game. I'll be interested in seeing what they come up with.
Well, at least their prospects for selling it look rosy. I'm sure a member of the large "creationist fossil hunters with lots of money to burn" community will come to bail them out.
"Haaretz, this is Nevuah. Come in, Haaretz. The gambit has been played. Need to castle. Over."
You know, if Fischer knew he might die there, he could at least have had some fun by writing on his hand something like:
Fischer B
Was Hijacked
In Rekjavik ICL
16.1.08, 21:00
Came to ICL
by fly BA 504
Won't require large quantities? Where on Earth are you getting that from? H is part of "H2O", as in all of the bulk acids and solutes used in the process. C is an essential component in a number of the industrial processes use. F may be the most critical component, as it's through hydrofluoric acid reductionleaching that they propose to extract metals. N is part of NH3 (more H), also used in the critical leach process. And so on. And recovery of gasses is hard enough even here on Earth; it'd be even harder on the moon. As for how rare these elements are, we're talking ppm quantities, all less common than, say, strontium is on Earth, and without any evidence of clustering in particular regions like we have on Earth that lets rare things like copper be economically mineable (the moon is much more uniform). Of those minerals that they show as inputs, some have never been found on the moon even in trace quantities. These aren't "optional"; they're required for the industrial processes. And even if all of these can be found on the moon as a whole, the odds of them all being in the same region of the moon are tiny.
Energy also has a long tail on the moon. What's the simplest way you could generate power -- imported solar panels? That'd a staggering import cost just to do our earthbound production methods, let alone to ionize every last atom of your mined ore on the moon. And they're not zero maintenance on the moon -- far from it. The moon is an incredibly "dirty" environment of abrasive, static-clinging dust that gets into everything.
You don't need to fast charge at home. If you want a fast charge, you can go to a fast charge station. Or, if you really want a fast charge at home, get a fast charger. Basically, a second set of batteries that trickle charges from the grid, and rapid charges your vehicle whenever you plug in. It'd have the added bonus of providing backup power for your house and even potentially helping with grid load balancing (in exchange for a discount on electricity purchase prices).
If most people just charge their cars at home over night, then there won't be any charging stations, because it will economically unviable to keep one going due to the shortage of customers.
Sure there will be. Just a lot less of them. People will still need them on cross-country trips, so they'll mostly be gathered near highways. If there's still a demand, there will still be people around looking to profit off of it.
Divide 1e9 with 9.3e6 and you have 107,5USD / kWh. Oops.
Oops indeed. You assumed that the pool only works once.
Need a towel for the egg on your face?
You admitted it yourself the $1/W figure is completely meaningless.
The hell it is! It's how you tell how much power a cell produces in standard conditions costs per watt. The less it costs for the same amount in standard conditions, the more valuable the cell is. You punch the number in and adjust from standard conditions to your actual operating conditions. You can't get much more meaningful than that.
What matters is what's the average cost for kWh in any given region in average.
Which depends on the region, which is why you give solar cell output numbers relative to a standard set of operating conditions (1kW/m^2, 25C) so that you can adjust based on your local insolation. Do you expect every solar cell that comes on the market to have to have an entire table of how it performs in different regions to explain what can easily be represented with a single number, all because someome like you has trouble understanding simple conversions?
but over here we need more heating when we get f- all sunlight for months during winter
You use electric home heating? A) Tsk, tsk, and B) you're majorly in the minority.
I'm sure your amortization calculations factor in a modest profit for capital for the projected 50 year service life and add to the cost of the energy accordingly?
That's what IRR is -- your rate of return on the investment averaged over the lifespan of the project. If you want to see all of the factors that are taken into account by a typical solar economics calculator, check one out.
Indeed they have. Now, see each one of the arrows in this graph? That's an entire industrial process, few of which are particularly simple. See each of those inputs? Each is an entire mining operation and/or recovery circuit from another mining operation. See all of those "C"s, "F"s, "N"s, "P"s, and "H"s? Those are in incredibly miniscule quantities on the moon.
Getting the picture of the scale that's being talked about?
This poster is dead-on. There's a "long tail" for almost everything produced by human society today, things ranging from consumable parts or fluids for mining and processing equipment to all sorts of random chemicals that can be involved in the process. And each of those parts and chemicals has their own long tail.
Look at aluminum. The above poster was kind enough not to mention all of what you need to convert aluminum ores like bauxite into aluminum. Let's assume bauxite. First, you have to mine it, then crush it, likely in multiple stages, down to powder (Insert Maintenance Long Tail Here). You then wash the powder in a solution of sodium hydroxide (Insert Long Tail Here) to produce soluable AlOH. You then filter out the other components (Insert Maintenance Long Tail Here). You then cool it (on the moon, this would involve extensive radiators) to preciptate out the AlOH. You then filter out the precipitate (Insert Maintenance Long Tail Here). You then heat the AlOH to 1050C (Insert Long Tails For Heat And Furnace Maintenance Here) to drive the water off (Insert Long Tail For Water Recovery Circuit Here). You then cycle the alumina out. The alumina then gets deposited in a hot bath (Insert Long Tail For Heat And Crucible Maintenance) of molten cryolite (Na3AlF6). The cryolite is steadily consumed (Insert Long Tail Here), as is the carbon anode (Insert Long Tail Here); the anode is consumed rather quickly. A tremendous amount of electricity is consumed (Insert Long Tail Here) in the electrolysis. The aluminum settles to the bottom, where it can be drained and sent to casting (Insert Maintenance Long Tail Here). I'm not even going to bother with casting and forging.
Just from a more fundamental standpoint, ignoring the tails of manufacturing the chemicals/products associated with each, where are the consumed Na, F, and C supposed to come from? The moon is very poor in them, especially C and F. You can try for a more closed process (more massive, complex equipment and more maintenance), but you'll never do that great, especially concerning F and C (in the form of various gasseous carbon/oxygen/fluorine compounds). And there's a *lot* more energy needed, too.
It's easy to not see the forest through the trees when considering colonization of moons and planets. Unfortunately, the "forest" in this case is how tightly interlinked almost all of modern human industry is. And you can't just bootstrap it on other planets; you're dependant on it for your survival. You can't just go out with picks and expect to produce enough product to even maintain your survival, or expect to make products in a clay-brick forge that burns charcoal from a nearby forest. Bootstrapping, as we did on Earth, simply can't work there. You need modern industry, and hence have to deal with its limits.
Solar is more land efficient than coal or hydro, which together make up 60% of our generation capcity, when you consider the area used for coal mining and the lake backed up by the dam, respectively. An order of magnitude more land efficient than hydro, actually. I'm not sure how much land natural gas production/transportation/generation takes up, and likewise, for uranium mining/processing/enrichment/generation/waste storage, but I doubt they're out of the ballpark.
To top it all off, consider where solar can go. Solar thermal plants are built on the most barren and lifeless of sunburned desertscapes. Photovoltaic farms can also go there, but they can one up solar thermal -- they can go on *waste urban space*. And there's more than enough waste urban space to meet all of our needs even with inefficient panels.
There's nothing about the CIGS chemistry itself that's inherently less durable. On the contrary, since it's flexible, it can't break like silicon. On the other hand, CIGS cells can be put on any kind of substrate, and these can be less durable than other substrates. You print your cell on thin plastic, and of course it won't last as long as something with a heavy steel backing and a thick plate of glass on the front. In Nanosolar's case, if I recall correctly, they use a semi-flexible aluminum backing. I think that's probably a nice balance between durability and weight/cost.
Assume your electric car needs only 20 horsepower to maintain 60 mph.
;) 200*60=12kWh/h=12kW. As for range, 200Wh/mi * 300 mi = 60kWh.
One horsepower is about 750 watts, assuming perfect efficiency.
That's 15 kilowatts to keep the car going 60 mph.
It's simpler than that. A typical modern EV gets about 200Wh/mi at 60mph. Some get notably less, like the Aptera, but that's a crazy Jetsons-like car, so we won't count it
But hey, let's go with your 75kWh. It's in the ballpark.
Now let's assume the 'electric station' supplies electricity to charge your car at 500 volts.
Why limit it to 500V? The EEStor's EESU, for example, is a 3500V ultracapacitor.
But hey, let's go with 500V.
To get to a 3 minute charge time (one twentieth of an hour) you need 20x the amperage, or 3000 amps.
And? You do realize that when you're filling a gasoline car, you're putting enough energy in it that if it were burned ideally, could turn a car twice its size into a pool of molten metal. Let's picture a small car, just over 1 ton -- usually as a 12 gallon or so tank. 131 MJ/gal times 12 gallons 1.6GJ. The specific heat of steel is 500J/(kg*K). Assuming a 1500 degree celcius rise in temperature, you could melt 2.1 metric tonnes of steel.
That's an awful lot of energy. Even when not burned ideally, it's still a ton of energy. Picture the damage from a molotov coctail and how it's burning less dense alcohol and a lot less of it. Regardless of the energy source, it takes a *lot* of energy to get a vehicle to go long distances. All you're changing when going from gas to electric is the form that it comes in.
By the way, 5 minute charge time is a more typical number. But let's just go with 3 minutes and thus 3000 amps.
To carry 3000 amps of current for 3 minutes without melting insulation, my numbers show you'd need copper wire about 2.5 inches in diameter
Only if the wire is passively cooled. Oh, wait, you didn't bother to think about active cooling, now did you? A mere blower circulating air through an outer sheath lets you cut that to a typical power cord size.
Why do people always assume that engineers are idiots when talking about new tech?
I would guess a Li Ion battery charges now in around four hours (probably closer to eight hours, but I'll be generous).
Don't guess.
It's about three hours to fill a typical current EV that's at "empty". Tesla is 3-4. Aptera is 2-4. However, this is mostly battery limited. There are already fast charge batteries ready to hit the market -- Toshiba and AltairNano are producing them. 5-10 minutes charge time. EEStor's EESUs are also 5-10 minutes. And this is for an empty battery. It seems likely that the Stanford batteries, given nanostructured electrodes, will also be rapid charge/discharge.
And I think you'll find that electric motors already provide torque comparable or superior to gasoline engines of a similar size and weight.
That's what I said.
On what exactly?
Compressed air and/or pumped water storage. The prices I've seen listed are about 4c/kWh.
Have you factored in the costs of powering regions which do not get much sunlight during winter months and/or do not have sunny weather in general?
With $1/W solar cells, it doesn't really matter. I'm not sure you understand how cheap that is. Even solar power Alaska comes out cheaper than coal with $1/W cells.
You take a $/W number that everyone knows is unrealistic unless you've got orbital solar panel exposed to sunlight 24/7 in hard vacuum
Um, no. Wattage ratings of solar cells go by a fixed standard. Nanosolar and all of the CIGS manufacturers (who give similar prices) cells follow the exact same standard as silicon cells. By this standard, silicon cells are ~$4.80/W. The price per watt is *NOT* the price of the power output. It's the price of a cell producing a "standard watt". You then plug this in to how much insolation you get in a given region, factor in all of the other capital costs, and then amortize them (and maintenance) over the life of the system.
Really, you must think people are utter idiots if they can't figure out that you need to do that.
Car batteries are not ~$40, 20lb propane tanks. Car batteries are $8k, several hundred pound devices bolted to the base of your car. Not going to happen.
People rely on the "grinding" aspect because it's the easiest to develop and balance properly. It's a well-worn formula. I do believe that there is some potential for ingenuity in games (and actually have worked a bit on developing a game (Eaku) that strives toward this end, with the idea of user-level scripting controlling actions in a very malleable world), but it's a lot trickier to pull off. Probably the worst idea that I've seen in practice is the one where people create a game world with the intent of it being "an environment for role-playing, not fighting". That almost never works out. Such an environment, if well advertised, will get plenty of people logging in, asking, "How do I attack things?" and leaving when they find that they can't, day in and day out. Even if in the ads you explicitly tell them that it's just for role playing.
The article touched on game dev reactions to bug reports. I've seen negative reactions to bug reports myself. In one game I was a developer for, I once did a security audit of the code and was appalled at what I found. With almost no effort, I was able to craft an in-game exploit that would wipe the hard drive of every user logged into the game who tried to bring up a URL. I had to push and push to get it fixed. Almost any bug that was security related, they didn't want to address; they were much more afraid of introducing gameplay bugs that might come as a side effect to fixing security bugs, and more afraid of having the schedule slip. Almost none of the strings in the game were checked for length or null termination when operations were done on them. It really disturbed me (and also reinforced to me why game code shouldn't be written in C; at least use C++, people...)
You can learn the caveats to each tech if you're willing to do the research. In this case, the first caveat is cycle life. They want to get 1000 cycles out of it, and think they'll be able to. But if they can only get a dozen or cycles, this tech is dead in the water. If they can get 1000 cycles, they'll almost certainly be flooded with venture capital for commercializing it (or make a fortune selling it to an established company). Either way, commercialization will be attempted. Then there will be a set of new milestones for how commercialization is going -- facility construction, purity standards for the components, nanowire quality standards, anode standards, whole cell standards, whole cell lifecycle testing, and so forth. It could fail on any one of those, although the odds for any given one are low. All in all, if it gets to the commercialization phase, I'd give them one in two, one in three odds of being successful. If they're successful, given that this is just an anode advancement, we're only talking about a "severalfold" improvement in energy density (likely with fast charge time to go along with it). It's still be a huge revolution, however.
Stay tuned. The results from lifespan testing should be published some time this summer.
First of all, Nanosolar HOPES to make the cells at $1/W, they are nowhere near that cheap yet, and this is the price their marketing department HOPES to achieve.
And your information comes from? Nowhere, that's where, because they're not sold on the open market yet, so claims like "they are nowhere near that cheap yet" are complete BS. All of their capacity is currently going to a German municipal plant. Secondly, all of the CIGS companies are giving numbers in the same ballpark, as are the CdTe companies.
Secondly, that is the price for the cells without factoring in energy storage devices, energy conversion systems, servicing etc
Duh. That's part of a general solar economics calculation. Only an idiot would just multiply $1/W times the desired number of watts. A large, batteryless installation in Anchorage, AK of nanosolar cells gets a 30 year IRR of 7-8%. In Las Vegas, it's more like 13-14%.
Thirdly, it is the price under optimal conditions, with perfectly aligned cells. (and on, and on...)
(Dragnet theme)Duh, duh duh duh. Duh, duh duh duh, duh!(/Dragnet theme)
Do you think we're idiots? What's next? "Third, the cells only produce power when the sun is visible. Fourth, you need to have wires to conduct the power. Fifth, you need "humans", who can use the power...."
They are also relying on indium, an element which is thought to become scarce due to increasing demand, and of course, mass-deployment of indium based solar cells would certainly push the price up.
Indium is more common than silver, is easier to recover than silver (because of its close interrelationship with zinc ores), and CIGS cells use a miniscule amount of it (nanoscale-thickness coatings). Indium's current high price is more related to a lack of demand for it before LCD TVs started using it in bulk; this led to a few of the world's only indium recovery circuits shutting down without new circuits replacing them at other mines. It's not a problem. It only takes a few years to ramp up production.
Finally, even if they were able to start producing these at competitive costs and at a large rate, you still have the problem that you will have to increase solar photovoltaic output by a factor of 1000 just to reach 20% of current energy demand.
Huh? Did you ignore my post, above, where it already addressed this?
With most of nuclear reactors built in the west ending their licensing in about 2030 - 2040, Oil running low and gas prices rising due to low demand
Whaa? For one, nuclear is making a serious comeback in the US. Two, oil is not running low. Light sweet crude is, but light sweet crude != world petroleum production capability. Venezuelan super heavy crude and Canadian bitumen syncrude are taking off. Third, the demand for gasoline has been rising constantly year to year. Are you confusing the annual demand fluctuations with year to year growth in consumption? Demand is always lowest in the winter, highest in the summer.
[quote]But no, we're going to gamble on some hypothetical solar breakthrough.[/quote]
Hypothetical? Yeah, about two dozen companies, some of which have been selling them in smaller volume for years, is "hypothetical". What's next -- are CFLs hypothetical as well?
[quote]Despite the fact that no realistic way to overcome the problems with intermittent supply, that they don't produce energy at night, diffuse and limited output, as well as the high price, having been demonstrated.[/quote]
In the pacific northwest, and to a lesser degree the west coast as a whole, energy storage is a non-issue. The west relies a lot on hydro power, and hydro pairs perfectly with solar (it already has a low capacity factor, so there's no additional economic cost to the hydro producers). Even in the east, solar alone with no storage can eliminate the p
And, let me add, I don't say this to diminish the importance of this news. A severalfold improvement is major, major news. Not in the least because this anode likely lends itself to very rapid charging at the same time. What we're looking at is, as it stands, giving it the sort of charge time and range as a gasoline vehicle, meaning that there's no reason to stick with gasoline (when you can get lower maintenance (assuming long lifespan batteries), higher torque, quieter, more thermodynamically efficient vehicles that only require gas station visits on long trips, require hardly any new infrastructure (versus oil, which needs a lot of infrastructure construction) due to mostly off-peak charging (timer-based to get you a low rate and use our huge amount of unused off-peak capacity), lets us use domestic energy supplies instead of funding our enemies with oil imports, and even if all of the electricity came from burning fossil fuels, would still emit almost half the greenhouse gasses. An equivalent cathode improvement for electric vehicles simply means that you could then drive cross-country on a single charge.
As for lifespan, Yi Cui's team expects to be able to get at least 1,000 cycles out of this. That may not sound like much, but when you can go ~350 miles on a charge, that's 350,000 miles. And not like the battery just disintegrates up at the end of its lifespan; it simply doesn't hold as much charge.
It's not even 10fold -- at least not currently. It's only "several" times improvement without an equivalent cathode improvement. Now, that may well happen, but it hasn't happened yet. However, they think they may be able to commercialize it in five years.