If I read this right, this new tech would replace the existing polarizer. As it stands, a normal LCD polarizing layer is just throwing away lots of energy-- this accomplishes the same polarization, but recovers some percentage of the light energy that's ordinarily lost. Additionally, it can apparently absorb some of the light energy coming in from outside as well.
They use the sales-weighted harmonic mean rather than the arithmetic mean-- so the CAFE average for the two hypothetical cars is 2 / (1/20 + 1/100), or 33.3mpg, not 60mpg. This is so that the average represents an equal number of miles driven per car, rather than an equal number of gallons burned per car. And since it's sales-weighted, it quite definitely *does* matter how many of each type of car is sold.
You know the layout of your plant, or at least you should. Why not just use a single camera, tracking the sun across the sky, and use that combined with a bit of geometry to determine the optimum placement of each mirror to follow it.
Because that requires, as you point out, precise knowledge of the initial and current position of all your mirrors. Doing this requires a really, really beefy support and foundation structure for each mirror, to the degree that it won't shift in wind or with ground subsidence or erosion or extra weight from rainwater or whatever combined with a positioning mechanism so accurate and slip-free that after continuous motion to different positions all day everyday that there's never any accumulated error in the position.
This lets you slap a cheap sensor on a cheap foundation with a cheap positioning motor, and get better results than the aforementionened "swiss watch attached to a fortress" even after the motor gear loses a tooth or slips half a turn and the pole's three degrees crooked in the ground.
This is just daft. Off-the-shelf consumer panels typically come with a 25-year warranty guaranteeing at least 80% of their original output at that time. Their useful life is pushing four decades. The *inverter* on the other hand, will probably need to be swapped out somewhere in the 15-year range. They typically have 10 or 12-year warranties. Fortunately, inverters are a small fraction of the system cost.
You have this backwards-- point-of-use generation *reduces* grid load right up until the point where production actually exceeds usage by a substantial amount. That's a little past "popular." We're not talking about industrial-scale solar production here. Rooftop production just reduces end-user load, which reduces the total power the grid has to carry to that house. If we get to the point where we make as much as we use... there's zero grid load during the day, and normal grid load at night. If we make double what we use, there's normal grid load (just in the other direction) during the day, and the same grid load at night. If it gets cloudy... the grid has to carry exactly what it used to carry.
There isn't any real new long-distance power transmission occurring even with very large amounts of point-of-use solar generation.
The cells are mostly pretty dark-- but there's lots of cells on a panel, and they're often octagonal and have gaps in between. SunPower, for example, has two nearly identical product lines-- one where the gaps between the octagonal cells are just silver-colored aluminum, and one where the panels are a uniform black. A lot of people prefer the look of the latter, but it reduces efficiency somewhat both due to the layer that makes it all a uniform color and because the extra heat absorbed makes them work less effectively.
Where the heck are your numbers from? In the US, full price for our 7kW system, installed, before any subsidies was $40k, or $5700/kW. This was two years ago, and used high-efficiency panels rather than the cheapest per kW, and things have gotten a bit cheaper since on top of that. That number includes everything. I don't think $5k per kW is unreasonable at all.
Yeah, there's a solar-shingle install on a model home just down the street from us. I couldn't tell you the brand-- but they're very clearly available.
We've been over the energy- and cost-payback thresholds for solar power for quite some time. Even PV, which isn't quite as cost-effective as the solar thermal setups, has energy payback time in the 1-3 year range (depending on tech) and financial payback time well within warranty (with wide variation due to local insolation and electric rates).
Which is why we went ahead and stuck some on our roof. We're two years in, and four years from financial payback, and the system has a 25-year warranty. We're in a nearly best-case situation in Arizona, mind you-- our insolation is nearly double what it is in the midwest, and our primary load (air conditioning) tracks quite nicely with how sunny it is. But you can make your money back even in the pacific northwest.
The tipping point has come and gone, and it's only going to get gradually cheaper from this point on.
I may just have more stubbornly anti-learning people among the group I do family/friend tech support for. I'm not even remotely anti-Apple... I've had better success recommending iPads as alternatives for people frustrated by computers than macs. Particularly the ones with cellular data-- it removes even wifi configuration from the confusion. I think you're talking about people who have a genuine desire to find a better way to do things and are willing to do a little learning, and I'm talking about people whose primary computer issues stem from a stubborn refusal to learn, rather than from experimenting and failing. I haven't yet run into one of the people you're talking about who hadn't just bought themselves a mac on their own, but I'll keep an eye open.
I'm not likely to geek rage about anything-- it's interesting to hear it actually worked for somebody. I like macs, although I don't have one because I'm a colossal cheapskate.
You've never tried this, have you? The sort of person who is easily frustrated by technology but has been barely getting by on windows gets utterly enraged when presented with different UI paradigms. I know because I tried this "fix" a couple of times for people. The problem isn't that either UI is too difficult-- the problem is that you're dealing with somebody who is utterly refusing to learn anything, and handing them a new OS is asking them to learn quite a few things all at once.
I'll believe you can see sub-second flicker-- but I find it difficult to believe you can see the flicker from a modern 10kHz ballast, particularly when the lag on the phosphors is orders of magnitude slower than the ballast.
Also, as has been pointed out ad nauseum, the US law is not a ban. It sets an efficiency standard, one which several companies have already met with incandescent bulbs.
The Costco ones are a mixed bag. The only CFLs I've ever had burn out in 15 years (I still have the first one I bought) were from a single box from Costco. Other sets from Costco are running fine, but it's like I had a bad batch that one time.
They're under a buck each at our Costco-- it's hard not to save money. At our electric rates, they're paid for completely after 8kWh, which is reached in 166 hours, or about 2 months at 3h per day. I've *never* had one fail that quickly.
No, it's not the same thing-- and in fact the rule has spurred the creation of several brands of incandescents that *do* meet the new efficiency standards. I have four of them from Philips in a set of ceiling lights on a dimmer switch. It is, in fact, an example of a well-written government rule that dictates what we want (more efficient sources of light) without mandating specific technologies or manufacturers, letting the market sort out how best to get there.
I'm certainly not enough of a constitutional scholar to argue whether or not congress is allowed to regulate these things-- but assuming they are, they did it the right way.
The european-style measure more closely matches how many people think about fuel economy. For example-- using miles per gallon, an improvement from 10mpg to 11mpg is a much larger improvement in fuel consumed than going from 40mpg to 41mpg, but it's easy for people to think that they'll both decrease fuel consumption the same amount. After all, it's a 1mpg improvement both times, right? Using L/100km... an improvement from 2L to 1L is the same fuel savings as an improvement from 10L to 9L.
Either way, it's the same information-- it's just that people suck at math.
A little creativity goes a long way. A switch from the standard Bermuda/Rye combo traditionally planted in Phoenix to a low-water Buffalo Grass strain would drop lawn water requirements by 75% with no other changes. Pool covers reduce evaporative loss by around 90%. Proper grading and planning help reduce the lawn use further-- if you must have grass in Phoenix:
1. Use the low water types 2. Plant only a small patch 3. Grade the yard so that rainfall is concentrated into the patch 4. Route roof runoff into the patch 5. Use an irrigation controller that knows when it's raining and the ground is wet 6. cover your damn pool when you're not in it
The root problem is just that water is too cheap in Phoenix for people to give a shit about. The difference in price between using 3000 gallons a month and using 15,000 gallons a month is just a few dollars. Nobody knows or cares about the above VERY effective no-compromise fixes because there's no reason to even look into it for anybody that isn't an envirodork to start.
Slashdot Mirror
If I read this right, this new tech would replace the existing polarizer. As it stands, a normal LCD polarizing layer is just throwing away lots of energy-- this accomplishes the same polarization, but recovers some percentage of the light energy that's ordinarily lost. Additionally, it can apparently absorb some of the light energy coming in from outside as well.
They use the sales-weighted harmonic mean rather than the arithmetic mean-- so the CAFE average for the two hypothetical cars is 2 / (1/20 + 1/100), or 33.3mpg, not 60mpg. This is so that the average represents an equal number of miles driven per car, rather than an equal number of gallons burned per car. And since it's sales-weighted, it quite definitely *does* matter how many of each type of car is sold.
See the section titled "How is a manufacturer’s CAFE determined for a given model year?" and take note of how the formula is essentially a harmonic mean weighted by number of cars sold.
I will agree that the light truck exemption is stupid, but let's at least get the facts right before we start complaining about it.
Conveniently, I've also had three XBox 360s because the first two red-ringed. That brings our average failure rate to roughly 33%, or two out of six.
You know the layout of your plant, or at least you should. Why not just use a single camera, tracking the sun across the sky, and use that combined with a bit of geometry to determine the optimum placement of each mirror to follow it.
Because that requires, as you point out, precise knowledge of the initial and current position of all your mirrors. Doing this requires a really, really beefy support and foundation structure for each mirror, to the degree that it won't shift in wind or with ground subsidence or erosion or extra weight from rainwater or whatever combined with a positioning mechanism so accurate and slip-free that after continuous motion to different positions all day everyday that there's never any accumulated error in the position.
This lets you slap a cheap sensor on a cheap foundation with a cheap positioning motor, and get better results than the aforementionened "swiss watch attached to a fortress" even after the motor gear loses a tooth or slips half a turn and the pole's three degrees crooked in the ground.
This is just daft. Off-the-shelf consumer panels typically come with a 25-year warranty guaranteeing at least 80% of their original output at that time. Their useful life is pushing four decades. The *inverter* on the other hand, will probably need to be swapped out somewhere in the 15-year range. They typically have 10 or 12-year warranties. Fortunately, inverters are a small fraction of the system cost.
You have this backwards-- point-of-use generation *reduces* grid load right up until the point where production actually exceeds usage by a substantial amount. That's a little past "popular." We're not talking about industrial-scale solar production here. Rooftop production just reduces end-user load, which reduces the total power the grid has to carry to that house. If we get to the point where we make as much as we use... there's zero grid load during the day, and normal grid load at night. If we make double what we use, there's normal grid load (just in the other direction) during the day, and the same grid load at night. If it gets cloudy... the grid has to carry exactly what it used to carry.
There isn't any real new long-distance power transmission occurring even with very large amounts of point-of-use solar generation.
The cells are mostly pretty dark-- but there's lots of cells on a panel, and they're often octagonal and have gaps in between. SunPower, for example, has two nearly identical product lines-- one where the gaps between the octagonal cells are just silver-colored aluminum, and one where the panels are a uniform black. A lot of people prefer the look of the latter, but it reduces efficiency somewhat both due to the layer that makes it all a uniform color and because the extra heat absorbed makes them work less effectively.
Where the heck are your numbers from? In the US, full price for our 7kW system, installed, before any subsidies was $40k, or $5700/kW. This was two years ago, and used high-efficiency panels rather than the cheapest per kW, and things have gotten a bit cheaper since on top of that. That number includes everything. I don't think $5k per kW is unreasonable at all.
Most states have specific laws that prevent HOAs from banning solar panels.
He's hoping so hard for "breakthroughs" he's entirely missed four decades of gradual progress.
Yeah, there's a solar-shingle install on a model home just down the street from us. I couldn't tell you the brand-- but they're very clearly available.
We've been over the energy- and cost-payback thresholds for solar power for quite some time. Even PV, which isn't quite as cost-effective as the solar thermal setups, has energy payback time in the 1-3 year range (depending on tech) and financial payback time well within warranty (with wide variation due to local insolation and electric rates).
Which is why we went ahead and stuck some on our roof. We're two years in, and four years from financial payback, and the system has a 25-year warranty. We're in a nearly best-case situation in Arizona, mind you-- our insolation is nearly double what it is in the midwest, and our primary load (air conditioning) tracks quite nicely with how sunny it is. But you can make your money back even in the pacific northwest.
The tipping point has come and gone, and it's only going to get gradually cheaper from this point on.
The difference in energy between 8.2 and 8.9 on the Richter Scale would be given by the formula:
(10^0.7)^(3 / 2), or a difference of about 11x the energy.
Assuming, of course, that I got that formula and the math right, which may be assuming a lot.
I may just have more stubbornly anti-learning people among the group I do family/friend tech support for. I'm not even remotely anti-Apple... I've had better success recommending iPads as alternatives for people frustrated by computers than macs. Particularly the ones with cellular data-- it removes even wifi configuration from the confusion. I think you're talking about people who have a genuine desire to find a better way to do things and are willing to do a little learning, and I'm talking about people whose primary computer issues stem from a stubborn refusal to learn, rather than from experimenting and failing. I haven't yet run into one of the people you're talking about who hadn't just bought themselves a mac on their own, but I'll keep an eye open.
I'm not likely to geek rage about anything-- it's interesting to hear it actually worked for somebody. I like macs, although I don't have one because I'm a colossal cheapskate.
You've never tried this, have you? The sort of person who is easily frustrated by technology but has been barely getting by on windows gets utterly enraged when presented with different UI paradigms. I know because I tried this "fix" a couple of times for people. The problem isn't that either UI is too difficult-- the problem is that you're dealing with somebody who is utterly refusing to learn anything, and handing them a new OS is asking them to learn quite a few things all at once.
I'll believe you can see sub-second flicker-- but I find it difficult to believe you can see the flicker from a modern 10kHz ballast, particularly when the lag on the phosphors is orders of magnitude slower than the ballast.
Also, as has been pointed out ad nauseum, the US law is not a ban. It sets an efficiency standard, one which several companies have already met with incandescent bulbs.
Philips has bulbs that meet the 2012 standard on the market now, and has for several years now. I got mine at Home Depot.
The Costco ones are a mixed bag. The only CFLs I've ever had burn out in 15 years (I still have the first one I bought) were from a single box from Costco. Other sets from Costco are running fine, but it's like I had a bad batch that one time.
They're under a buck each at our Costco-- it's hard not to save money. At our electric rates, they're paid for completely after 8kWh, which is reached in 166 hours, or about 2 months at 3h per day. I've *never* had one fail that quickly.
No, it's not the same thing-- and in fact the rule has spurred the creation of several brands of incandescents that *do* meet the new efficiency standards. I have four of them from Philips in a set of ceiling lights on a dimmer switch. It is, in fact, an example of a well-written government rule that dictates what we want (more efficient sources of light) without mandating specific technologies or manufacturers, letting the market sort out how best to get there.
I'm certainly not enough of a constitutional scholar to argue whether or not congress is allowed to regulate these things-- but assuming they are, they did it the right way.
I came to make sure this was covered. Good work, sir.
I'd probably do it. I've done so damned many clean reinstalls in my life that it no longer holds any tinkerer interest for me like it once did.
The european-style measure more closely matches how many people think about fuel economy. For example-- using miles per gallon, an improvement from 10mpg to 11mpg is a much larger improvement in fuel consumed than going from 40mpg to 41mpg, but it's easy for people to think that they'll both decrease fuel consumption the same amount. After all, it's a 1mpg improvement both times, right? Using L/100km... an improvement from 2L to 1L is the same fuel savings as an improvement from 10L to 9L.
Either way, it's the same information-- it's just that people suck at math.
Pretend it stands for "Device" and move on.
A little creativity goes a long way. A switch from the standard Bermuda/Rye combo traditionally planted in Phoenix to a low-water Buffalo Grass strain would drop lawn water requirements by 75% with no other changes. Pool covers reduce evaporative loss by around 90%. Proper grading and planning help reduce the lawn use further-- if you must have grass in Phoenix:
1. Use the low water types
2. Plant only a small patch
3. Grade the yard so that rainfall is concentrated into the patch
4. Route roof runoff into the patch
5. Use an irrigation controller that knows when it's raining and the ground is wet
6. cover your damn pool when you're not in it
The root problem is just that water is too cheap in Phoenix for people to give a shit about. The difference in price between using 3000 gallons a month and using 15,000 gallons a month is just a few dollars. Nobody knows or cares about the above VERY effective no-compromise fixes because there's no reason to even look into it for anybody that isn't an envirodork to start.