The gas is actually a ripening agent. Its function is to make all the fruit in the same vicinity ripen at about the same time. Want your bananas to ripen faster? Stick 'em in a bag. The bag holds in the gas, which concentrates, quickening and syncronizing the ripening.
Stick a fruit that's a bit riper in a crate? The others will start catching up, because of the gas released by the riper fruit.
One bad apple. . .
That's why they try not to do that when they pack 'em.
I'm not trying to escape the grid, just trying to turn the solar energy hitting my roof into useful energy
Ok, I'm about as green as they come without having to have a lobotomy, but, if you've got a nuke plant . ..why? Sounds like a job for a solar water heater, not solar cells.
raise the water when you have excess, drive a gravity turbine when you need more
I like cement blocks on a rope and a pully. The pendulum clock model of power.
They don't have to go down that much to become cost-effective. ..
Payback in about 20 years at current current (ain't English grand?) and panel prices. The higher current (there's that English again) prices go after install, the quicker the payback. Not taking into account what you might earn if you just invested the money. A good panel is expected to last about 40 years, but they aren't maintanence free. I hope you like climbing up on the roof. If you pay someone to do it for you, add that to the payback time.
From the article linked:
the soaring cost of fuels burned to make electricity.
Well there ya go!
If average power need of a house is on the order of 1000 Watts. ..
Don't turn on your A/C and your desktop at the same time.
. . . if they drop to $300. ..
I wouldn't bet on it. Besides the shortage, increases in fuel prices increase solar panel prices. That's just the way it is. Food, clothing, movies, action figures, lumber, iron, aluminum, paper . ..all going up. Salaries won't be. It's crunch time.
. . . if installation and wiring doesn't vastly increase the cost.
You're going to need batteries (or cement blocks and a generator), a charge (or cement block) controler and an inverter. Labor to get the panels on the roof and an electrician to hook it all up. The permits of course. The permit people might not like the cement blocks. People are funny critters. If you want to run your house just as you do when drawing from mains (doing a load of wash without turning off the A/C) figure $30,000.
A third to half that if you just want to save some coal.
If you radically change the way you run your house things change, but the permits people don't always like that.
What happens when a vehicle with a drunk driver collides with your vehicle?
Took my friend George three days to die. I got away with a broken collarbone, because I didn't get hit head on at 90 mph. Maybe 'cause the driver wasn't drunk, just an asshole.
On the other hand my next door neighbor went for a drive and didn't make it home alive. There was no other car even involved in the accident. No one knows why it happened. Wasn't drunk, doesn't appear to have been speeding. No skidmarks. Not a heart attack. Just. ..went off the road, turned upside down and died and shit.
I've been hit three times in about as many hundred thousand miles. I'm still alive. Same number of arms, legs and heads that I used to have. Neat little dimple in my collarbone though. Fiddle nestles right into it so I don't need a shoulder pad for comfort. Every dark cloud I guess.
Life is uncertain, except for the fact that sooner or later it's going to end, even if you buckle up and refuse to shower. Maybe it means I'll have my geek card revoked, but I like to shower once a month or so, whether I need it or not. I'm willing to take the risk.
It doesn't run on hydrogen only a lithium ion battery. What is so special about this?
The fact that it could run on hydrogen, if, ummmmmm, it had any, uuuuuuuuuuuh, and a fuel cell to convert it to electricity and, errrrrrrrrr, FWD?
The FWD is especially cool, 'cause, like, on slick roads? Instead of a controled rear wheel slide you'll , like, wash out the front end, lose steering and crash and shit?
And I think you missed my point: iron, steel, and aluminum, despite needing these high-temperature industrial processes, are all fairly cheap.
But iron ore costs less than iron costs less than steel; and always will. No amount of scale can ever reduce the price of steel to that of iron. Aluminum costs more than iron, despite the ore being in greater supply. The differences in the costs are energy costs.
If you want to build a bridge you do not buy ingots of pig iron (singularly usless stuff in and of itself, except maybe as a doorstop). Nor do you even buy steel. You buy steel beams. A steel beam costs rather more than steel ingots of the same weight. For starters, of course, it needs a good deal more energy put into it to form it into a beam.
Even iron ore costs vary by purity. Purity costs energy.
They need energy, but that energy doesn't increase the price that much.
Think not? Go buy some iron ore. Now go buy some 4130 steel. In point of fact you could simply go find some iron ore. You're not going to go find some naturally occuring 4130 steel. You're going to need a furnace.
And raw silicon metal? Less than a dollar per pound.
Here's where the root of your confusion seems to lie.
That price is a commodity price. What you would pay to have your computer screen tell you you own it.
I build bicycle frames. Pig iron goes for about ten-fifteen cents a pound (I didn't bother looking up today's price) . By the time it reaches my door it is twenty five dollars a pound of steel, as delivered.
That is my cost of "raw materials." There's nothing weird or inexplicable about this, the stuff has been traded, processed, shipped, formed, shipped, traded some more. ..and that's the way it is. And all of it represents use of energy (not that some of the trading represents useful energy).
By the time I processes it and ship it to you you're paying fifteen hundred dollars for ten cent a pound iron.
The price you quote is also 10 years old. What's more that's metallurgical silicon. The equivilent of pig iron. You might want that if you're making aluminum alloy, the equivilent of steel, which will sell for rather more than raw aluminum. Solar cells aren't made from metallurgical silicon. They're made from cryastalline silicon, the same as any other semiconductor. You're going to have to . ..purify it. Crank up the "furnace."
Metallurgical silicon is 98% pure. Purifying energies are logarithmic. 90% pure, piece of cake, but 99% (just a tick more than that metallurgical stuff) costs just as much again. 99.9% pure, just as much again, talking in crude, round numbers.
We're looking for polycrystalline silicon, just to make things easy. The "low grade," cheap stuff of "consumer grade" solar cells.
Purity of one part per billion.
Formed into a bar.
This is the pig iron of the semiconductor industry. The real raw material. What you have to buy and have delivered to your factory if you want to work from raw materials, like a blacksmith. The stuff that article was talking about manufacturing.
And the cost of it doubled last year. It seems there's a shortage of the stuff, because the people who produce it are now working at capacity, but the demand keeps rising. The cost of solar cells is going to go up.
It's important to note that this doubling is a scarcity price of the raw material. More production will bring the cost down, but will not bring the manufaturing costs down. Manufacturing is already being done at maximum scale per production facility, at the maximum possible economy. More capital will need to be invested, but that capital will need to be amortized all over again.
So, anyway, now that we have had our raw material (a dominant factor in the cost of our goods) dropped off at our loading dock we can
When you hear people in the solar industry talk about reducing costs and thus prices, do you really hear them going on and on about economies of scale, or, perhaps, do you hear them talk about technological breakthroughs?
Maybe that's because they've run out of economic silver bullets and are looking for a technological silver bullet.
Come to think of it, the same thing goes for batteries too.
Iron ore into steel and bauxite into aluminum takes a lot of energy,but those metals aren't particularly expensive.. ..
Steel and aluminum are not equivilents. Iron and aluminum are. Aluminum is more expensive than iron, even though the ore is less scarce, because it requires more energy to refine it than does iron.
Of course cost itself is a swimmy issue. It depends on what units we use to measure it, which depends on what we intend to use it for.
Dollars per volume/pound/tensile strength/electrical conductance/purity . ..etc.
Simply saying "cost" is meaningless.
Is making silicon from sand that much more energy intensive?
Look at one of those linked articles, and what does it say?
"Photovoltaics are expensive to produce because of the high cost of semiconducting materials."
This is largely due to the amount of energy it takes. We also produce it at or near the limits of economies of scale, so that cost is not going to be coming down much for that reason (once upon a time aluminum was a rare and expensive metal. Now its price is not going to drop dramtically due to economies of scale. We've achieved them).
"Cost reductions can be achieved by reducing manufacturing costs."
Well of course they can. I've never denied economies of scale.
"As manufacturing capacity increases, costs of manufacturing decrease."
Indeed, but what percentage of the price does that represent and what are its limits? Economies of scale are not an arbitrary factor you can invoke to arbitrarily reduce prices. What's more, as you approach the limits the cost reductions become more and more of interest to the manufacturer, but of less interest to the consumer.
Have you ever found yourself thinking:
"What the hell did they do that for? It would only have cost them an extra penny per unit to make it ten times better!"
Aha!
Economies of scale can fuck the consumer as they approach the limit, because that extra penny means nothing to the consumer, but a great deal to the manufacturer. Price reductions due to economies of scale are not always a simple issue, because cost depends on the units you measure it with; and the scale you measure those units on.
. ..from that last sentence, it is at least in part a matter of relatively small production lines.
Is it? There are solar cells in wrist watches, pocket calculators, novelty hats. Solar cells are pumped out by the godzillion. At what scale do you expect prices to take some sort of relevant nose dive? The ultramegagodzillion?
Let's take a look at the obverse of the solar cell. The LED. Do you think there's going to be some sort of real reduction in cost to LEDs through economies of scale? They already make those by the ultramegagodzillion.
And they're cheap. As are solar cells. In fact, they are, effectively, the same price, because they are, effectively, the same thing.
But how do we measure the cost of solar cells?
Aha!
You have to dope the materials. ..
i.e., make steel from the iron.
As for oil to produce solar, that's because solar cells are expensive; but that's circular logic.
Huh? What I said was solar cells are expensive, that's because oil is used to produce them. Something that takes two gallons of oil to produce is going to innately be more expensive than something that takes one gallon of oil to produce, assuming equality in other factors.
And the cost of oil sure as shit isn't going to be coming down due to some economy of scale or other. We've already squeezed that puppy so hard that people are shooting each other over margins of a penny.
People are funny critters.
Anyway, now you've got your solar cell; and it's cheap.
I know of at least one case where probably millions of people came up with the same joke on the same day; the introduction of mobile answering service:
"I'm at home right now, but as soon as I go out I'll get back to you."
But perhaps these days you need to be of a certain age to appreciate that one anyway.
. ..you don't get billions of records by spying on a selected group, even if it numbers thousands of people.
Last I knew what we knew about the intelligence parameters was that they were "interested" in anyone who had had any contact with someone "of interest" out to three degrees of seperation.
That came out awhile after 9/11, when the government was still in "mollification mode."
Please note the feedback built into that. The process appears to be automated; for legal reasons (if no human being is actually looking they can claim that nobody is looking. It's "all done by computers").
In the first sweep it took in some several thousands, in the second sweep . . .
Shortly it shall try to take in more people than there are fundamental particles in the universe.
But there's no fear the party of incompetent hypocrites would ever do the right thing for the country.
It's not about the country anymore. It's about power. There are no "parties" as such. Just two teams fighting over a trophy, whose captain gets to sit in the fancy office for awhile. The Capital Building is just a locker room, a place to take a shower and trash talk the other team.
Slashdot Mirror
The gas is actually a ripening agent. Its function is to make all the fruit in the same vicinity ripen at about the same time. Want your bananas to ripen faster? Stick 'em in a bag. The bag holds in the gas, which concentrates, quickening and syncronizing the ripening.
Stick a fruit that's a bit riper in a crate? The others will start catching up, because of the gas released by the riper fruit.
One bad apple. . .
That's why they try not to do that when they pack 'em.
KFG
I'm just wondering who, way back in the days of yore, decided it would be better to measure fruit by liquid measurements and not by their mass.
The farmers who told the Mexicans they'd give 'em a dime for every basket they filled.
And buyers who came in and said "How much to fill this basket?"
A cord of wood is how much you can fit in a farm cart.
It's not a "liquid" measure. It's a farmer's dry goods measure, based on the tools they used to carry the goods.
KFG
The Hydrogen Fuel-Cell is able to both charge and provide power to the engine.
Except for the small detail that it doesn't actually have one.
KFG
I'm not trying to escape the grid, just trying to turn the solar energy hitting my roof into useful energy
.why? Sounds like a job for a solar water heater, not solar cells.
.
.
.
.all going up. Salaries won't be. It's crunch time.
Ok, I'm about as green as they come without having to have a lobotomy, but, if you've got a nuke plant . .
raise the water when you have excess, drive a gravity turbine when you need more
I like cement blocks on a rope and a pully. The pendulum clock model of power.
They don't have to go down that much to become cost-effective. .
Payback in about 20 years at current current (ain't English grand?) and panel prices. The higher current (there's that English again) prices go after install, the quicker the payback. Not taking into account what you might earn if you just invested the money. A good panel is expected to last about 40 years, but they aren't maintanence free. I hope you like climbing up on the roof. If you pay someone to do it for you, add that to the payback time.
From the article linked:
the soaring cost of fuels burned to make electricity.
Well there ya go!
If average power need of a house is on the order of 1000 Watts. .
Don't turn on your A/C and your desktop at the same time.
. . . if they drop to $300. .
I wouldn't bet on it. Besides the shortage, increases in fuel prices increase solar panel prices. That's just the way it is. Food, clothing, movies, action figures, lumber, iron, aluminum, paper . .
. . . if installation and wiring doesn't vastly increase the cost.
You're going to need batteries (or cement blocks and a generator), a charge (or cement block) controler and an inverter. Labor to get the panels on the roof and an electrician to hook it all up. The permits of course. The permit people might not like the cement blocks. People are funny critters. If you want to run your house just as you do when drawing from mains (doing a load of wash without turning off the A/C) figure $30,000.
A third to half that if you just want to save some coal.
If you radically change the way you run your house things change, but the permits people don't always like that.
KFG
What happens when a vehicle with a drunk driver collides with your vehicle?
.went off the road, turned upside down and died and shit.
Took my friend George three days to die. I got away with a broken collarbone, because I didn't get hit head on at 90 mph. Maybe 'cause the driver wasn't drunk, just an asshole.
On the other hand my next door neighbor went for a drive and didn't make it home alive. There was no other car even involved in the accident. No one knows why it happened. Wasn't drunk, doesn't appear to have been speeding. No skidmarks. Not a heart attack. Just. .
I've been hit three times in about as many hundred thousand miles. I'm still alive. Same number of arms, legs and heads that I used to have. Neat little dimple in my collarbone though. Fiddle nestles right into it so I don't need a shoulder pad for comfort. Every dark cloud I guess.
Life is uncertain, except for the fact that sooner or later it's going to end, even if you buckle up and refuse to shower. Maybe it means I'll have my geek card revoked, but I like to shower once a month or so, whether I need it or not. I'm willing to take the risk.
KFG
Ahhhhhhhh, if you could only charge batteries with buzzwords. Free, limitless energy for everybody.
KFG
It doesn't run on hydrogen only a lithium ion battery. What is so special about this?
The fact that it could run on hydrogen, if, ummmmmm, it had any, uuuuuuuuuuuh, and a fuel cell to convert it to electricity and, errrrrrrrrr, FWD?
The FWD is especially cool, 'cause, like, on slick roads? Instead of a controled rear wheel slide you'll , like, wash out the front end, lose steering and crash and shit?
KFG
Personally, I think the sooner it arrives, the sooner my fellow Americans will quit buying SUVs.
.bicycle.
And the more I have to pay to fuel my . .
KFG
By the time I processes it and ship it to you you're paying fifteen hundred dollars for ten cent a pound iron.
By the time I processes it and ship it to you you're paying fifteen hundred dollars for five pounds of ten cent a pound iron.
KFG
And I think you missed my point: iron, steel, and aluminum, despite needing these high-temperature industrial processes, are all fairly cheap.
.and that's the way it is. And all of it represents use of energy (not that some of the trading represents useful energy).
.purify it. Crank up the "furnace."
But iron ore costs less than iron costs less than steel; and always will. No amount of scale can ever reduce the price of steel to that of iron. Aluminum costs more than iron, despite the ore being in greater supply. The differences in the costs are energy costs.
If you want to build a bridge you do not buy ingots of pig iron (singularly usless stuff in and of itself, except maybe as a doorstop). Nor do you even buy steel. You buy steel beams. A steel beam costs rather more than steel ingots of the same weight. For starters, of course, it needs a good deal more energy put into it to form it into a beam.
Even iron ore costs vary by purity. Purity costs energy.
They need energy, but that energy doesn't increase the price that much.
Think not? Go buy some iron ore. Now go buy some 4130 steel. In point of fact you could simply go find some iron ore. You're not going to go find some naturally occuring 4130 steel. You're going to need a furnace.
And raw silicon metal? Less than a dollar per pound.
Here's where the root of your confusion seems to lie.
That price is a commodity price. What you would pay to have your computer screen tell you you own it.
I build bicycle frames. Pig iron goes for about ten-fifteen cents a pound (I didn't bother looking up today's price) . By the time it reaches my door it is twenty five dollars a pound of steel, as delivered.
That is my cost of "raw materials." There's nothing weird or inexplicable about this, the stuff has been traded, processed, shipped, formed, shipped, traded some more. .
By the time I processes it and ship it to you you're paying fifteen hundred dollars for ten cent a pound iron.
The price you quote is also 10 years old. What's more that's metallurgical silicon. The equivilent of pig iron. You might want that if you're making aluminum alloy, the equivilent of steel, which will sell for rather more than raw aluminum. Solar cells aren't made from metallurgical silicon. They're made from cryastalline silicon, the same as any other semiconductor. You're going to have to . .
Metallurgical silicon is 98% pure. Purifying energies are logarithmic. 90% pure, piece of cake, but 99% (just a tick more than that metallurgical stuff) costs just as much again. 99.9% pure, just as much again, talking in crude, round numbers.
We're looking for polycrystalline silicon, just to make things easy. The "low grade," cheap stuff of "consumer grade" solar cells.
Purity of one part per billion.
Formed into a bar.
This is the pig iron of the semiconductor industry. The real raw material. What you have to buy and have delivered to your factory if you want to work from raw materials, like a blacksmith. The stuff that article was talking about manufacturing.
And the cost of it doubled last year. It seems there's a shortage of the stuff, because the people who produce it are now working at capacity, but the demand keeps rising. The cost of solar cells is going to go up.
It's important to note that this doubling is a scarcity price of the raw material. More production will bring the cost down, but will not bring the manufaturing costs down. Manufacturing is already being done at maximum scale per production facility, at the maximum possible economy. More capital will need to be invested, but that capital will need to be amortized all over again.
So, anyway, now that we have had our raw material (a dominant factor in the cost of our goods) dropped off at our loading dock we can
500,000s sales rank to the 1,000,000s range and back over the course of a year.
We call this "noise." What you are seeing is the effect of a random event on low absolute values.
One extra person bought/did not buy the book to create the variance, whereas one extra/lost sale of a best seller doesn't even register.
One sale is a datum, not data. Noise is meaningless - unless you're an epidemiologist.
KFG
When you hear people in the solar industry talk about reducing costs and thus prices, do you really hear them going on and on about economies of scale, or, perhaps, do you hear them talk about technological breakthroughs?
Maybe that's because they've run out of economic silver bullets and are looking for a technological silver bullet.
Come to think of it, the same thing goes for batteries too.
KFG
Iron ore into steel and bauxite into aluminum takes a lot of energy,but those metals aren't particularly expensive.. . .
.etc.
.from that last sentence, it is at least in part a matter of relatively small production lines.
.
:)
Steel and aluminum are not equivilents. Iron and aluminum are. Aluminum is more expensive than iron, even though the ore is less scarce, because it requires more energy to refine it than does iron.
Of course cost itself is a swimmy issue. It depends on what units we use to measure it, which depends on what we intend to use it for.
Dollars per volume/pound/tensile strength/electrical conductance/purity . .
Simply saying "cost" is meaningless.
Is making silicon from sand that much more energy intensive?
Look at one of those linked articles, and what does it say?
"Photovoltaics are expensive to produce because of the high cost of semiconducting materials."
This is largely due to the amount of energy it takes. We also produce it at or near the limits of economies of scale, so that cost is not going to be coming down much for that reason (once upon a time aluminum was a rare and expensive metal. Now its price is not going to drop dramtically due to economies of scale. We've achieved them).
"Cost reductions can be achieved by reducing manufacturing costs."
Well of course they can. I've never denied economies of scale.
"As manufacturing capacity increases, costs of manufacturing decrease."
Indeed, but what percentage of the price does that represent and what are its limits? Economies of scale are not an arbitrary factor you can invoke to arbitrarily reduce prices. What's more, as you approach the limits the cost reductions become more and more of interest to the manufacturer, but of less interest to the consumer.
Have you ever found yourself thinking:
"What the hell did they do that for? It would only have cost them an extra penny per unit to make it ten times better!"
Aha!
Economies of scale can fuck the consumer as they approach the limit, because that extra penny means nothing to the consumer, but a great deal to the manufacturer. Price reductions due to economies of scale are not always a simple issue, because cost depends on the units you measure it with; and the scale you measure those units on.
. .
Is it? There are solar cells in wrist watches, pocket calculators, novelty hats. Solar cells are pumped out by the godzillion. At what scale do you expect prices to take some sort of relevant nose dive? The ultramegagodzillion?
Let's take a look at the obverse of the solar cell. The LED. Do you think there's going to be some sort of real reduction in cost to LEDs through economies of scale? They already make those by the ultramegagodzillion.
And they're cheap. As are solar cells. In fact, they are, effectively, the same price, because they are, effectively, the same thing.
But how do we measure the cost of solar cells?
Aha!
You have to dope the materials. .
i.e., make steel from the iron.
As for oil to produce solar, that's because solar cells are expensive; but that's circular logic.
Huh? What I said was solar cells are expensive, that's because oil is used to produce them. Something that takes two gallons of oil to produce is going to innately be more expensive than something that takes one gallon of oil to produce, assuming equality in other factors.
And the cost of oil sure as shit isn't going to be coming down due to some economy of scale or other. We've already squeezed that puppy so hard that people are shooting each other over margins of a penny.
People are funny critters.
Anyway, now you've got your solar cell; and it's cheap.
What good is it?
Aha!
We're back to the units thingy again.
KFG
I know of at least one case where probably millions of people came up with the same joke on the same day; the introduction of mobile answering service:
"I'm at home right now, but as soon as I go out I'll get back to you."
But perhaps these days you need to be of a certain age to appreciate that one anyway.
KFG
Losing is the second.
But when you do it while claiming to be someone famous they come to take you away, ho, ho, he he, ha, ha!
KFG
I guess my own rule of thumb for a good standard of living is, "Enough, but not too much to dust."
But then I like to dress in "bedsheets" too. I'm not exactly typical.
KFG
I am on that list. I don't know why
Low UID. The first digit is only one odd number lower than 9. The second is 9 upside down. The second two add up to 11, but the real kicker is:
There are 3 digits in your UID. Reiterating the middle digit 3 times is - 666!
KFG
You're going to have to seriously redefine "Standard of Living." :)
KFG
redundant
adj.
1. Taking the time to get it right.
KFG
. . .you don't get billions of records by spying on a selected group, even if it numbers thousands of people.
Last I knew what we knew about the intelligence parameters was that they were "interested" in anyone who had had any contact with someone "of interest" out to three degrees of seperation.
That came out awhile after 9/11, when the government was still in "mollification mode."
Please note the feedback built into that. The process appears to be automated; for legal reasons (if no human being is actually looking they can claim that nobody is looking. It's "all done by computers").
In the first sweep it took in some several thousands, in the second sweep . . .
Shortly it shall try to take in more people than there are fundamental particles in the universe.
KFG
But there's no fear the party of incompetent hypocrites would ever do the right thing for the country.
It's not about the country anymore. It's about power. There are no "parties" as such. Just two teams fighting over a trophy, whose captain gets to sit in the fancy office for awhile. The Capital Building is just a locker room, a place to take a shower and trash talk the other team.
KFG
. . . the executive branch of today is truly above the law.
The Justice Department has been denied security clearance. The Executive Branch won't even tell itself what it is doing.
It is official, we have dictatorship.
KFG
No true conservative could defend these trends.
They keep using that word. I do not think it means what they think it means.
KFG
That's where I came in to this movie.
KFG
It seems like the slippery slope we're riding on, that of trading freedom for security, is not going anywhere good.
.
Don't worry. Ride's over. You made it down "safe." All that's left is to round up the usual suspects.
I'm partially bitching about the sorry state of affairs here in the USA. .
Oh. Hey. . .
KFG