I think that saying that non-religious people are rational and that religious people aren't rational is anywhere from unfair to just plain wrong. I've seen just as many emotional, irrational reactions from the non-religious side as the religious side.
I do see religious people who have to abandon reason occasionally, but I've also seen that from the other side as well. The problem is that for nearly all people I've encountered - no matter which side of the argument they're on - is that it is an emotional issue, not a rational one, and debating based on emotion doesn't usually result in anything useful. Neither side has a monopoly on closing their minds.
It's also funny to see how the stereotypes can sometimes break down. Not long ago, someone at my office mentioned the idea that religions are invented to soothe people about the afterlife, or lack thereof. The religious person in the conversation looked up and said "You're crazy. The idea that there is no afterlife would be the greatest thing in the world to me. Knowing that I could live my life any way I chose, with no eternal repercussions, and that I would simply die and be done with, would be the most comforting thing in the world to me." Then the non-religious person chimed in, and said "I don't know, the thought that I would just be done and over with would just be so difficult for me to believe."
I do agree with you. But precisely because I do agree with you about allowing all points of view, I favor just leaving it out of school. Not because there's anything wrong with entertaining all points of view, but because there needs to be *some* time left in the school day for things like math, reading, and science.:-)
I went to school in an area where there were quite a high number of religious people, but they're not in the majority. I certainly see a good number of religious people getting offended at science, but I'm talking about situations that really are just ridicule.
Unfortunately, I have seen quite a bit of "religionism", or whatever the equivalent of "racism" is with respect to religion - on both sides of the fence - and just as much between people from different religions. Personally, I don't ususally engage in conversations about politics or religion, they're rarely much use - people's minds are pretty made up one way or the other in both cases.
As much as I believe in the seperation of church and state, I do also believe in equity. During my education, from junior high through college, there would occasionally be a teacher who would go out of their way to ridicule religion to the class. Not just talk about good or bad aspects, but just come out and ridicule religion - or even class members who were religious. I was never really involved or concerned one way or another, but the teachers were pretty mean-spirited towards some of the class members.
So, in be equitable, I think that the same standard should be applied to both sides. Either let everyone talk about religion as they please, or tell everyone to shut up about it. Just don't tell one group that they have to keep quiet, but allow the other side to keep on about it.
Wide-screen displays also fit notebooks better. Since it has to fold against a keyboard, and a keyboard is wide, they pair together nicely.
I look at it this way: My laptop is just big enough to fit a decent keyboard and touchpad. And the display is as large as can be used without adding more depth and bulk to the laptop. It works for me.
Yes, my notebook is a "paltry" 1280x800, but that's on a 12" screen. Higher resolution wouldn't really be very useful.
Glossy screens do suck. You do get used to it, though. The M1210 was the only machine that met all of my needs, so I took a chance on the screen. Now that I've used it for a while, I don't really notice unless there's sunlight glaring off of it. Had they used a non-glare screen, though, it would be perfect.
Yeah, Dell has bad press lately. But that particular model uses a Samsung battery, not a Sony model. Very low draw, very good thermal characteristics. I've accidentally put it in my bag (which is a VERY snug fit) while running apps that kept it from entering standby several times - even after running in a sealed bag for a couple of hours, it's still running nice and solid. The bad and laptop were warm, but not at all hot. Having a Core Duo, 2 gigs of RAM, built-in mobile broadband, and still getting 5 hours of real-world runtime out of it are pretty nice, too.
That makes a lot more sense, but I have to ask - 1200 watts for a crock-pot? That must be an industrial unit, all of the crock-pots I've ever used have had power draws in the 100-200 watt range, and that's on high.
It would only be fitting. If imitation IS the most sincere form of flattery, then PCs should be awfully flattered. Waaaay back in the day, Macs had a selling point of being able to read PC diskettes. Then they started boasting that they could run PC programs. After that, you were able to buy an add-in card with a Pentium CPU, on which to run your Windows apps. Now, they run on Intel hardware, and you can boot into Windows.
As much as I respect Macs for what they are and do, for all of their "We're different" attitude, they just can't seem to stop with the "Me, too!" actions.
Ah, well. Here goes nothing, Maccers, start modding me down....
Unfortunately for everyone, I'm still holding off. With relatively low electric bills and almost no tax incentives where I'm at, I'm looking at a 28-year minimum payoff time. And to get it that short, I'd have to climb on an icy two-story roof during the winter to keep sweeping snow off of the panels, which I'm not really excited about...
Also, it doesn't help with the finances that out of my 6-member family, I'm the only one who hasn't needed surgery at least once during the past 18 months... hopefully that run of bad luck is past.
It doesn't matter if your roof is a mirror, when it's >100 degrees outside, and that's while it's dry. When it's hot *and* humid, you're even worse off.
Yeah, it's possible to do without AC. I've lived in places where it was 95-100 and 100% humidity, and places that were 110+ in low humidity (I even used a bicycle as transportation in that heat...), and you *can* do it, but that doesn't mean that we *need* to do it.
I don't think that energy use is the problem. It's our way of generating and delivering that is the problem. If we have environmentally-sound ways of generating and delivering the power, I really don't mind how much power people use at all, they could run electric heaters and AC units together, letting them battle it out all day long for all I care.
Most city folks don't have the room to enough water to a sufficient height to handle this sort of thing. Let's say your AC has to run through the night (not all places have nice, cool nights in the summer, you know), figure out how much water you have to raise to generate 2 kilowatts through the night. Think you're just going to put up that sort of tower in your backyard, and a sub-T pool to hold it in during the day? I doubt it. Besides, even though gravity is a conservative force, the pumping and regeneration incur significant losses.
Disregarding the space needed, the economies of scale make it MUCH cheaper for one location to use that type of energy storage for 100 homes than for each home to do it themself.
Once we're in the dozens-of-kilowatt territory, this might break down, but the research that I did showed that for any given size of installation I was interested in, the time to pay back initial investment was exactly the same.
The cost of the array scales linearly, the inverters are close to that, and my electric rates are linear (no scaling). Whether the system was 1.5, 2.1, or 3 kilowatts, my time to pay back was exactly 28 years.
So, if people are looking to make money, things will work out about as well covering their 600 sq-ft roof as 100 sq-ft - higher initial cost, but a correspondingly higher revenues over time.
Either way, though, you're right, prices for solar still need to come down. Luckily, there's still lots of room for that to happen, but it will continue to happen slowly. The reason that we have much cheaper prices now is because of the forward-thinking people who bit the bullet and bought solar at much higher prices 10 years ago, driving continual R&D, and bringing about simple economy-of-scale price decreases. As they get cheaper, more people will buy them, and hopefully the cycle will continue.
That doesn't mean that it's useless. More electricity is used during the day, when solar works best.
Even if we kept the fossil-generators for surge and nighttime, if we managed to produce 35% of our electricity through solar, we'd have cut down our pollution rate considerably. Potentially even more than 35%, because generating 1 kilowatt at a home means that the power plant 20 miles away (or more) can reduce production my significantly more than 1 kilowatt.
Even with the grid-tie, it isn't an economic joke. It's currently between "somewhat practical" and "not quite practical", and as time goes on, it gets more and more practical every year.
I'm not one of the people who thinks that we should simply abandon all energy usage, I think that we need to find clean, environmentally sound ways of meeting our energy needs. While solar won't completely fill that need, it goes farther toward making that happen than *almost* anything else out there.
"Considering the price of PV systems, that's typically the first thing homeowners are advised to do when buying one. It's a lot cheaper to buy high-efficiency appliances than it is to buy enough PV to power low-efficiency ones."
Yes, and no. Within reasaonable limits, any size solar array will pay itself off in pretty much the same amount of time in energy savings. A 1.5 kW solar system will pay for itself in the same amount of time as a 3.0 kW setup, provided you use all of the energy it creates. (*)
So, if you half the draw of your appliance and half the size of the array, the break-even point will be the same amount of time. The only difference is that you pay more upfront for a larger array, vs. paying more over 30 years in higher electrical bills.
(*)There is one difference - if you're using lots of energy and live where electricity costs are tiered, the smaller array may be enough to keep you in the lower electricity costs, and any additional capacity after that won't result in as much of a savings.
In any event, larger inverters don't exist simply because there isn't a demand. As solar and other technologies become cheaper, people will install larger arrays, the demand will appear, and they'll produce them.
A lot of your numbers don't add up. You say that you need 12 Kw for potential *cooking*? What do you run, a soup kitchen, or a deli?
Most electric stoves, with all four burners and the oven turned on, still won't even hit 30 amps, which is barely half of that figure. Even adding in the microwave, a blender, and a toaster oven, if you need 12 kilowatts to cook with, you must have a *really* serious setup, and you can't really complain that equipment made for people who like to conserve doesn't meet the needs of such an extravagent cook.
12 Kw is 55 amps at 220 volts. A friend of mine, who is an electrician, tells me that it takes a fairly new, large American home to hit 50 amps draw at all - and even then, it's usually for fairly short periods of time.
In any event, the grid-ties still have the grid there for supply if the inverter can't handle it, so you're still free to plug in all that you want.
Oh, you want to completely cut off from the grid? Well, before you worry about the size of the inverter, worry about what you're going to do at night to generate your 30 Kw. Once you've solved that, then the inverter isn't so much of a concern.
Besides... couldn't you just have multiple main panels, each one powered by your pair of Xantrexs? You'd have to undergo the inconvenience of spending 10 minutes planning which circuits to hook to which panel for decent balancing, but that doesn't seem that difficult.
Only millionaires can cover their roofs? I priced out a 3.5-kilowatt solar system, and it came to under $20,000 before rebates, incentives, credits, etc.. Given that almost every Tom, Dick, and Harry spends more than that on *each* of their cars, I don't think it takes a millionaire.
Now, if that is producing 3.5 kilowatts at 15% efficiency, that means that almost 20 kilowatts are being wasted as heat. It astounds me that it wouldn't be cheaper to just attach piping to the back of the PVs than to produce an entire secondary system.
People want electricity at night, too. So you still need centralized power (or something in between the two) at night.
Wind is the same, people need power when it isn't windy.
Hydrogen? Well... hydrogen is very good at achieving high energy density, but is also takes a tremendous amount of energy to produce, and is thus quite costly.
Natural-gas fuel cells are options, but natural gas is still getting more expensive, and that's centralized, too. Less pollution from the conversion is a bonus, but there are still environmental effects in the production.
Some time ago, there was a web broadcast where the CEO of one solar manuracturer (Solar Tech?) spoke about the history of solar, and one of the things he talked about was how the combination of better materials, better manufacturing techniques, and (most importantly) economies of scale have continually brought down the cost of solar cells.
The big question is: At what point do you break even compared to conventional electricity generation? Since electricity costs different amounts in different locations, it's hard to pin down, but there are some good estimates. First, in *some* areas, solar is already about on par with conventional means - but in most places, it's estimated to be anywhere from 7-15 years before it's equal or lower cost.
Not long ago, I ran some numbers on how long it would take to pay off the investment of a grid-tie inverter and a solar array, and for buying brand-new products (and 10 cents/KWh delivered), it would take me just under 30 years. However, a friend-of-a-friend, who has bargain-shopped for pieces of used equipment for his system said that his system paid for itself in under 10 years.
Carnot only deals with converting heat to motion, not necessarily with converting radiation to electricity...
But, still, your idea is right - it's unlikely that we'll ever get past - or maybe even TO - 50% on solar cells. That would still be a HUGE deal, as current cells are something like 12% or 13%, if I recall.
There was some hubbub a while back about indium nitride potentially reaching an efficiency of 50% for two layers, and up to 70% with more layers - but it's been years, and I haven't heard anything else about it. My guess would be that either they weren't able to make it work, or weren't able to get the crystals that they would need to grow together.
From my recollection, cells that are used with concentrators tend to brown, deteriorate, and lose production capacity much faster than those that aren't. That hasn't changed, has it?
"I thought.. What is it that a CPU does that a GPU doesn't?"
GPUs have dedicated circuitry to do math, math, and more math - and to do it *fast*. In a single cycle, they can perform mathematical computations that take general-purpose CPUs an eternity, in comparison.
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I think that saying that non-religious people are rational and that religious people aren't rational is anywhere from unfair to just plain wrong. I've seen just as many emotional, irrational reactions from the non-religious side as the religious side.
I do see religious people who have to abandon reason occasionally, but I've also seen that from the other side as well. The problem is that for nearly all people I've encountered - no matter which side of the argument they're on - is that it is an emotional issue, not a rational one, and debating based on emotion doesn't usually result in anything useful. Neither side has a monopoly on closing their minds.
It's also funny to see how the stereotypes can sometimes break down. Not long ago, someone at my office mentioned the idea that religions are invented to soothe people about the afterlife, or lack thereof. The religious person in the conversation looked up and said "You're crazy. The idea that there is no afterlife would be the greatest thing in the world to me. Knowing that I could live my life any way I chose, with no eternal repercussions, and that I would simply die and be done with, would be the most comforting thing in the world to me." Then the non-religious person chimed in, and said "I don't know, the thought that I would just be done and over with would just be so difficult for me to believe."
I do agree with you. But precisely because I do agree with you about allowing all points of view, I favor just leaving it out of school. Not because there's anything wrong with entertaining all points of view, but because there needs to be *some* time left in the school day for things like math, reading, and science. :-)
I went to school in an area where there were quite a high number of religious people, but they're not in the majority. I certainly see a good number of religious people getting offended at science, but I'm talking about situations that really are just ridicule.
Unfortunately, I have seen quite a bit of "religionism", or whatever the equivalent of "racism" is with respect to religion - on both sides of the fence - and just as much between people from different religions. Personally, I don't ususally engage in conversations about politics or religion, they're rarely much use - people's minds are pretty made up one way or the other in both cases.
steve
Don't forget that Hell, Michigan is different from Hell, Michoacan. =)
As much as I believe in the seperation of church and state, I do also believe in equity. During my education, from junior high through college, there would occasionally be a teacher who would go out of their way to ridicule religion to the class. Not just talk about good or bad aspects, but just come out and ridicule religion - or even class members who were religious. I was never really involved or concerned one way or another, but the teachers were pretty mean-spirited towards some of the class members.
So, in be equitable, I think that the same standard should be applied to both sides. Either let everyone talk about religion as they please, or tell everyone to shut up about it. Just don't tell one group that they have to keep quiet, but allow the other side to keep on about it.
Wide-screen displays also fit notebooks better. Since it has to fold against a keyboard, and a keyboard is wide, they pair together nicely.
I look at it this way: My laptop is just big enough to fit a decent keyboard and touchpad. And the display is as large as can be used without adding more depth and bulk to the laptop. It works for me.
Yes, my notebook is a "paltry" 1280x800, but that's on a 12" screen. Higher resolution wouldn't really be very useful.
Glossy screens do suck. You do get used to it, though. The M1210 was the only machine that met all of my needs, so I took a chance on the screen. Now that I've used it for a while, I don't really notice unless there's sunlight glaring off of it. Had they used a non-glare screen, though, it would be perfect.
steve
Yeah, Dell has bad press lately. But that particular model uses a Samsung battery, not a Sony model. Very low draw, very good thermal characteristics. I've accidentally put it in my bag (which is a VERY snug fit) while running apps that kept it from entering standby several times - even after running in a sealed bag for a couple of hours, it's still running nice and solid. The bad and laptop were warm, but not at all hot. Having a Core Duo, 2 gigs of RAM, built-in mobile broadband, and still getting 5 hours of real-world runtime out of it are pretty nice, too.
That makes a lot more sense, but I have to ask - 1200 watts for a crock-pot? That must be an industrial unit, all of the crock-pots I've ever used have had power draws in the 100-200 watt range, and that's on high.
steve
It would only be fitting. If imitation IS the most sincere form of flattery, then PCs should be awfully flattered. Waaaay back in the day, Macs had a selling point of being able to read PC diskettes. Then they started boasting that they could run PC programs. After that, you were able to buy an add-in card with a Pentium CPU, on which to run your Windows apps. Now, they run on Intel hardware, and you can boot into Windows.
As much as I respect Macs for what they are and do, for all of their "We're different" attitude, they just can't seem to stop with the "Me, too!" actions.
Ah, well. Here goes nothing, Maccers, start modding me down....
"Meanwhile I hope you buy a system."
Unfortunately for everyone, I'm still holding off. With relatively low electric bills and almost no tax incentives where I'm at, I'm looking at a 28-year minimum payoff time. And to get it that short, I'd have to climb on an icy two-story roof during the winter to keep sweeping snow off of the panels, which I'm not really excited about...
Also, it doesn't help with the finances that out of my 6-member family, I'm the only one who hasn't needed surgery at least once during the past 18 months... hopefully that run of bad luck is past.
It doesn't matter if your roof is a mirror, when it's >100 degrees outside, and that's while it's dry. When it's hot *and* humid, you're even worse off.
Yeah, it's possible to do without AC. I've lived in places where it was 95-100 and 100% humidity, and places that were 110+ in low humidity (I even used a bicycle as transportation in that heat...), and you *can* do it, but that doesn't mean that we *need* to do it.
I don't think that energy use is the problem. It's our way of generating and delivering that is the problem. If we have environmentally-sound ways of generating and delivering the power, I really don't mind how much power people use at all, they could run electric heaters and AC units together, letting them battle it out all day long for all I care.
steve
Most city folks don't have the room to enough water to a sufficient height to handle this sort of thing. Let's say your AC has to run through the night (not all places have nice, cool nights in the summer, you know), figure out how much water you have to raise to generate 2 kilowatts through the night. Think you're just going to put up that sort of tower in your backyard, and a sub-T pool to hold it in during the day? I doubt it. Besides, even though gravity is a conservative force, the pumping and regeneration incur significant losses.
Disregarding the space needed, the economies of scale make it MUCH cheaper for one location to use that type of energy storage for 100 homes than for each home to do it themself.
steve
Once we're in the dozens-of-kilowatt territory, this might break down, but the research that I did showed that for any given size of installation I was interested in, the time to pay back initial investment was exactly the same.
The cost of the array scales linearly, the inverters are close to that, and my electric rates are linear (no scaling). Whether the system was 1.5, 2.1, or 3 kilowatts, my time to pay back was exactly 28 years.
So, if people are looking to make money, things will work out about as well covering their 600 sq-ft roof as 100 sq-ft - higher initial cost, but a correspondingly higher revenues over time.
Either way, though, you're right, prices for solar still need to come down. Luckily, there's still lots of room for that to happen, but it will continue to happen slowly. The reason that we have much cheaper prices now is because of the forward-thinking people who bit the bullet and bought solar at much higher prices 10 years ago, driving continual R&D, and bringing about simple economy-of-scale price decreases. As they get cheaper, more people will buy them, and hopefully the cycle will continue.
That doesn't mean that it's useless. More electricity is used during the day, when solar works best.
Even if we kept the fossil-generators for surge and nighttime, if we managed to produce 35% of our electricity through solar, we'd have cut down our pollution rate considerably. Potentially even more than 35%, because generating 1 kilowatt at a home means that the power plant 20 miles away (or more) can reduce production my significantly more than 1 kilowatt.
Even with the grid-tie, it isn't an economic joke. It's currently between "somewhat practical" and "not quite practical", and as time goes on, it gets more and more practical every year.
I'm not one of the people who thinks that we should simply abandon all energy usage, I think that we need to find clean, environmentally sound ways of meeting our energy needs. While solar won't completely fill that need, it goes farther toward making that happen than *almost* anything else out there.
It's even worse when your solar cells are buried under a foot or two of snow. :)
steve
"Considering the price of PV systems, that's typically the first thing homeowners are advised to do when buying one. It's a lot cheaper to buy high-efficiency appliances than it is to buy enough PV to power low-efficiency ones."
Yes, and no. Within reasaonable limits, any size solar array will pay itself off in pretty much the same amount of time in energy savings. A 1.5 kW solar system will pay for itself in the same amount of time as a 3.0 kW setup, provided you use all of the energy it creates. (*)
So, if you half the draw of your appliance and half the size of the array, the break-even point will be the same amount of time. The only difference is that you pay more upfront for a larger array, vs. paying more over 30 years in higher electrical bills.
(*)There is one difference - if you're using lots of energy and live where electricity costs are tiered, the smaller array may be enough to keep you in the lower electricity costs, and any additional capacity after that won't result in as much of a savings.
In any event, larger inverters don't exist simply because there isn't a demand. As solar and other technologies become cheaper, people will install larger arrays, the demand will appear, and they'll produce them.
A lot of your numbers don't add up. You say that you need 12 Kw for potential *cooking*? What do you run, a soup kitchen, or a deli?
Most electric stoves, with all four burners and the oven turned on, still won't even hit 30 amps, which is barely half of that figure. Even adding in the microwave, a blender, and a toaster oven, if you need 12 kilowatts to cook with, you must have a *really* serious setup, and you can't really complain that equipment made for people who like to conserve doesn't meet the needs of such an extravagent cook.
12 Kw is 55 amps at 220 volts. A friend of mine, who is an electrician, tells me that it takes a fairly new, large American home to hit 50 amps draw at all - and even then, it's usually for fairly short periods of time.
In any event, the grid-ties still have the grid there for supply if the inverter can't handle it, so you're still free to plug in all that you want.
Oh, you want to completely cut off from the grid? Well, before you worry about the size of the inverter, worry about what you're going to do at night to generate your 30 Kw. Once you've solved that, then the inverter isn't so much of a concern.
Besides... couldn't you just have multiple main panels, each one powered by your pair of Xantrexs? You'd have to undergo the inconvenience of spending 10 minutes planning which circuits to hook to which panel for decent balancing, but that doesn't seem that difficult.
Only millionaires can cover their roofs? I priced out a 3.5-kilowatt solar system, and it came to under $20,000 before rebates, incentives, credits, etc.. Given that almost every Tom, Dick, and Harry spends more than that on *each* of their cars, I don't think it takes a millionaire.
Now, if that is producing 3.5 kilowatts at 15% efficiency, that means that almost 20 kilowatts are being wasted as heat. It astounds me that it wouldn't be cheaper to just attach piping to the back of the PVs than to produce an entire secondary system.
steve
C'est simple.
People want electricity at night, too. So you still need centralized power (or something in between the two) at night.
Wind is the same, people need power when it isn't windy.
Hydrogen? Well... hydrogen is very good at achieving high energy density, but is also takes a tremendous amount of energy to produce, and is thus quite costly.
Natural-gas fuel cells are options, but natural gas is still getting more expensive, and that's centralized, too. Less pollution from the conversion is a bonus, but there are still environmental effects in the production.
steve
Some time ago, there was a web broadcast where the CEO of one solar manuracturer (Solar Tech?) spoke about the history of solar, and one of the things he talked about was how the combination of better materials, better manufacturing techniques, and (most importantly) economies of scale have continually brought down the cost of solar cells.
The big question is: At what point do you break even compared to conventional electricity generation? Since electricity costs different amounts in different locations, it's hard to pin down, but there are some good estimates. First, in *some* areas, solar is already about on par with conventional means - but in most places, it's estimated to be anywhere from 7-15 years before it's equal or lower cost.
Not long ago, I ran some numbers on how long it would take to pay off the investment of a grid-tie inverter and a solar array, and for buying brand-new products (and 10 cents/KWh delivered), it would take me just under 30 years. However, a friend-of-a-friend, who has bargain-shopped for pieces of used equipment for his system said that his system paid for itself in under 10 years.
Carnot only deals with converting heat to motion, not necessarily with converting radiation to electricity...
But, still, your idea is right - it's unlikely that we'll ever get past - or maybe even TO - 50% on solar cells. That would still be a HUGE deal, as current cells are something like 12% or 13%, if I recall.
There was some hubbub a while back about indium nitride potentially reaching an efficiency of 50% for two layers, and up to 70% with more layers - but it's been years, and I haven't heard anything else about it. My guess would be that either they weren't able to make it work, or weren't able to get the crystals that they would need to grow together.
From my recollection, cells that are used with concentrators tend to brown, deteriorate, and lose production capacity much faster than those that aren't. That hasn't changed, has it?
steve
"I thought .. What is it that a CPU does that a GPU doesn't?"
GPUs have dedicated circuitry to do math, math, and more math - and to do it *fast*. In a single cycle, they can perform mathematical computations that take general-purpose CPUs an eternity, in comparison.
"Serious" computers won't come with fewer than 4 16x PCI-E slots for hooking in "scientific processing units"...
We used to tell our boss that we were going to do stress-testing when we stayed late to play Q3, this takes that joke to a whole new level.