Is "peak equivalent Sun hours per day" a way of combining the average insolation (across weather/night/seasons/azimuth) into the number of equivalent hours at solar noon? Where can I find those ratings for various places on the Earth, and country/state averages?
Another way to calculate it is about 777.6Kj:Kg, which is 18.624Gj for the 8" wafer, in the range of what we ran down.
I left out the only 20% efficiency solar -> DC conversion factor, so the cells I described produce only about 50Gj in their lifetime, or 37% total energy inefficiency from manufacturing. Seems like a lot.
I'm not sure we'd have to put the silicon into space. I saw reports of a NASA demo a few years ago of a lunar robot making solar cells from lunar dust. There's about 20 trillion square meters of Moon facing the Sun at any time, getting about 1.3KW:m^2, or 26 petawatts. Even at 1% conversion/transmission/conversion efficiency, that's 260TW, or 17x total human energy consumption. Which means well under 6%, perhaps even 0.6%, of the Moon's surface would replace all Earth power generation. Of course, orbiting solar platforms could offer even larger energy return. And consider the amount of energy wasted on war and fuel distribution that could be saved. If the space "factories" are productive enough, the energy budget balances well in favor of doing it.
I understand the process. But what is the actual quantity of energy required to make a square meter of PV? How many joules to produce a 15%, or for a 20%, or a 23%, or even the new (not just silicon) 42% PVs?
And how much is saved by using these IBM "scrubbed chips" instead of starting from scratch, for what %efficiency?
You say about 20% of the energy the PV will produce is consumed in construction and installation - 10% in manufacturing the silicon. A square meter of PV will last maybe 30 years, getting maybe an average (across weather/night/season/daytime) of 300W, for 248Gj. Does making the silicon really consume 25Gj? The rest of the deployment takes the equivalent of 193 gallons of 34Mj:L gasoline to deploy? Somehow that seems off by 10x or more. Do PV actually take more like only 1-2% of their lifetime output to deploy? And with this new IBM process, does recycling them at the end of their life mean grinding them back to sand, or some other energy input to return them to useful PV?
FWIW, even if the 20% number is correct, it sounds to me like we should be making and deploying these things in space, where there's vast energy to exploit, and probably the costs (including the deferred costs of "pollution" byproducts) are lower, once the process is in place. Considering the benefits (like 3-5x the reliable insolation, nearly unlimited capture area, and putting us firmly in profitable space industries poised for further exploitation), the investment in launching the "factories" seems like an excellent risk.
I understand the process. But what is the actual quantity of energy required to make a square meter of PV? How many joules to produce a 15%, or for a 20%, or a 23%, or even the new (not just silicon) 42% PVs? That makes discussions of the PV energy budget actually tractable, instead of just speculations about whether the breakeven is met.
And how much is saved by using these IBM "scrubbed chips" instead of starting from scratch, for what %efficiency?
This story is tagged with "opinionpiece" - the latest BS campaign from the rightwing political PR industry. When these people refer to something controversial in the public discussion as "it's just an opinion piece", they're implying that it should be ignored. Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck offer a demented police state to tens of millions of viewers? Don't worry, "it's just an opinion piece". Al Gore says scientists are shocked at how much faster the Arctic melted this year than their worst fears? Don't worry, "it's just an opinion piece".
Yes, it's an opinion piece. The opinions based on solid facts, held together with solid logic, especially the ones offering compassion with people like you who got screwed (so you could be next), those opinion pieces are important. The Constitution is an opinion piece.
Some opinion pieces, that aren't derived from rigorous and fair thinking, are indeed worthless. But when you ignore an explanation of how the FBI is framing innocent activists with crimes that shut down their rights, you're helping destroy those rights. When you push the "ignore the opinion piece" line, you're leading the destruction.
Yeah, everyone's got one. But like asses, some are better than others, some should never see the light of day, and some should be prized by anyone who can get a look.
Every day I deal with people representing businesses who are so bad at their jobs of dealing with other people that they seem to want to be replaced by a machine. How many times do I have to tell one of these droids the equivalent of "wake up and pay attention", or "no, it's not in your script", when I discover they can barely even hear the words that aren't precisely what they were trained to hear in the transaction?
And it's not just me: I wait in long lines, an audience for the customer abuse or indifference that they serve to each customer indiscriminately.
These people don't care about their jobs. They don't have even the basic human social compassion with their customers to treat us differently than they treat the objects where they work. They're liable to treat the boxes of products better, because damaging those can dock their pay. Why should I care about them? To the degree that I do, I want them replaced by a machine that can do their job without bothering them. Even when the machines do a crappy job, at least they reduce the prices, and lower expectations.
Lots of people should be replaced by machines. Freeing them to work on their people skills, so they're worth paying more than the electric bill.
Well, if the limit is the electrode surface area, then why not make electrodes in elaborate thin lattices, like metal snowflakes, or concentric cylinders drilled with lasers, coated with the rechargable cell chemicals?
But the idea is that you don't just put 3A @4.2v into 2 cells in parallel instead of 1A @12.6V into 3 cells in series. The point is that you put 9A @ 4.2V into 3 in parallel, 3A @ 4.2V each.
Then discharge them in series to sum their output voltage.
Why not use the same power that currently charges a single large battery 3x as long instead to charge a battery 3x as small? That would be faster than charging the big battery with it, right? And do that to 3 different small batteries at the same time, which are then switched into series for discharging at their combined voltage. Charging is usually not limited in the amount of power available to direct into the batteries - the amount of power delivered is usually a fraction of that available. Why not use more power, in parallel, to charge the smaller units faster?
I don't understand why it takes so long to charge batteries. Why can't the charger charge little chunks of the battery independently, in parallel, then discharge the bank of batteries serially? Why not break down the bank into the maximum number of little chargeable batteries, for the fastest charging time? There might be some inefficiencies in the discharge through several separate batteries, but the slow recharge is the main obstacle to forgetting these batteries are even part of the problem.
I don't really need my politicians to be scientists, to pass anything but 1990s-caliber college science requirements.
What I need is for them to moderate debates among scientists. They need to be able to tell when scientists have valid arguments, and which is superior, and when even superior arguments still can't be trusted.
Maybe what we need is to let each candidate score some debates among scientists as judges. When they disqualify arguments relying on evolution, the big bang, or "scientific consensus" on inconclusive but compelling science like Climate Change, they disqualify themselves. Then the few who are qualified to lead can explain their various grades, and leave it to the voters to decide which one to give the power to.
Notebook drives currently cost as little as about $50:80GB, or $6.50:GB, which is a good size for a mobile device, and almost the largest available.
Flash is as little as $64:8GB (USB), $8:GB. Removing the redundant USB connectors and packaging, putting it in a single drive the size of a notebook drive, would give an 80GB Flash drive for somewhere closer to $50 than to $80.
FWIW, a 4GB microdrive is $30, or $7.50:GB.
These numbers show that a Flash drive competing directly with a disc drive is already right around the corner. By the time 2010 comes around, what will mainly be different is the upper capacity around 1TB, with probably Flash cheaper than discs.
The online survey was conducted Oct. 4-8, 2007, included 9,743 adult respondents nationwide, and carries a margin of error of +/- 1.0 percentage point.
So the whole thing is bullshit anyway. No one knows how to make an online survey statistically representative. To call any of those percentages "of Americans" is a foul lie. Zogby has turned into the kind of "research" into their own preconceived conclusions that we get from, say, Jupiter Research on Microsoft.
It's not punishing the cow that I'm considering. It's using the cow to power the laptops when the cow could be powering something else, or eating less grass (so less land required). And less dung, as you point out.
The whole thing they're planning seems like overkill. These OLPCs probably consume less than 100W. If they could cannibalize a Fiat to make something like a "self winding watch" that charges OLPC batteries while the cow is walking around grazing, that would make a lot more sense than the cow doing a lot of extra work. But nothing like the efficiency of going more directly from the Sun to the OLPC.
The problem is really an illusion in the minds of people who think the "cow power" is "free". It's not: it wears down the cow more than resting, and uses more land, and makes more dung. More direct solar power might look more like magic, but efficiency is always better for poor people. As is the mobility for herders.
I'd love to know what percentage of those people who say the government should censor Internet content are among the percentage who don't use the Internet. Or those who use the Internet only because someone, like their boss (or significant other) makes them use it (though that question probably wasn't asked).
I'd also like to know how many of the pro-censor people believe the government should censor printed matter. And then I'd like to ignore all those people, but preferably the much narrower fraction who can't think for themselves. And who don't clutter up the Internet.
But he thinks the Wii is the only modern console, even though it's different mostly because of its controller. Which is as much like a mouse as a mouse is like a light pen.
Speaking of which, touchscreens which can use a stylus, especially a stylus with 2 position points for angle, plus pressure, are the best input device ever, if we're not counting MIDI musical instruments.
he SX-9 closes in on the PFLOPS (one quadrillion floating point operations per second) range by achieving a processing performance of 839 TFLOPS.
Pretty fast, but IBM will release its Roadrunner at Los Alamos NL next year with 1.6PFLOPS:
The computer is designed for a performance level of 1.6 petaflops peak and to be the world's first TOP500 Linpack sustained 1.0 petaflops system. [...] It will be a hybrid design with more than 16,000 AMD Opteron cores (~2200 IBM x3755 4U servers, each holding four dual core Opterons, connected by Infiniband) to an equal number of Cell microprocessors resulting in a 1:1 ratio of Cell cores to Opteron cores.
16000 CellBE chips have a capacity of 725GFLOPS each for 11.6PFLOPS. So it's expected to operate at only about 14% of HW capacity. There's a lot of room for that Roadrunner, or a machine like it, to stay at the top of the heap.
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Is "peak equivalent Sun hours per day" a way of combining the average insolation (across weather/night/seasons/azimuth) into the number of equivalent hours at solar noon? Where can I find those ratings for various places on the Earth, and country/state averages?
Another way to calculate it is about 777.6Kj:Kg, which is 18.624Gj for the 8" wafer, in the range of what we ran down.
I left out the only 20% efficiency solar -> DC conversion factor, so the cells I described produce only about 50Gj in their lifetime, or 37% total energy inefficiency from manufacturing. Seems like a lot.
I'm not sure we'd have to put the silicon into space. I saw reports of a NASA demo a few years ago of a lunar robot making solar cells from lunar dust. There's about 20 trillion square meters of Moon facing the Sun at any time, getting about 1.3KW:m^2, or 26 petawatts. Even at 1% conversion/transmission/conversion efficiency, that's 260TW, or 17x total human energy consumption. Which means well under 6%, perhaps even 0.6%, of the Moon's surface would replace all Earth power generation. Of course, orbiting solar platforms could offer even larger energy return. And consider the amount of energy wasted on war and fuel distribution that could be saved. If the space "factories" are productive enough, the energy budget balances well in favor of doing it.
OK, so that's 684Mj:Kg * 2 = 1.296Gj:Kg *.6 = 777.6Mj:Kg.
.2 efficiency I left out) in its 30 year lifetime, about 37% inefficiency from manufacturing. Long way to go.
An 8" wafer (like the one in the IBM story's pic) at 0.5mm thick is about 16246.5736 cubic millimeters, 16.2465736 cubic centimeters, (at 2.57g:cm^3), about 41.75g, or 18.624Gj to produce. That's about 145 gallons of gasoline to make a wafer that can produce something like 50Gj (using those numbers *
Can I get a number of joules per square millimeter to produce 20% efficient PV wafers about 8" wide, like the one in the article's picture looks?
I understand the process. But what is the actual quantity of energy required to make a square meter of PV? How many joules to produce a 15%, or for a 20%, or a 23%, or even the new (not just silicon) 42% PVs?
And how much is saved by using these IBM "scrubbed chips" instead of starting from scratch, for what %efficiency?
You say about 20% of the energy the PV will produce is consumed in construction and installation - 10% in manufacturing the silicon. A square meter of PV will last maybe 30 years, getting maybe an average (across weather/night/season/daytime) of 300W, for 248Gj. Does making the silicon really consume 25Gj? The rest of the deployment takes the equivalent of 193 gallons of 34Mj:L gasoline to deploy? Somehow that seems off by 10x or more. Do PV actually take more like only 1-2% of their lifetime output to deploy? And with this new IBM process, does recycling them at the end of their life mean grinding them back to sand, or some other energy input to return them to useful PV?
FWIW, even if the 20% number is correct, it sounds to me like we should be making and deploying these things in space, where there's vast energy to exploit, and probably the costs (including the deferred costs of "pollution" byproducts) are lower, once the process is in place. Considering the benefits (like 3-5x the reliable insolation, nearly unlimited capture area, and putting us firmly in profitable space industries poised for further exploitation), the investment in launching the "factories" seems like an excellent risk.
I understand the process. But what is the actual quantity of energy required to make a square meter of PV? How many joules to produce a 15%, or for a 20%, or a 23%, or even the new (not just silicon) 42% PVs? That makes discussions of the PV energy budget actually tractable, instead of just speculations about whether the breakeven is met.
And how much is saved by using these IBM "scrubbed chips" instead of starting from scratch, for what %efficiency?
How much energy does it take to make a PV wafer, per usable area? Not including what it takes to deliver and install (and later recycle) it?
You "own me" the way my puppy does when it humps my leg after I say something simple enough for it to understand.
Thanks for leaping like a pet troll when I jerk your leash. Have a bath.
I know you are, but what am I?
Whatever you say bounces off me and sticks onto you.
The language already exists: it's Soviet East German.
I'm rubber, you're glue.
This story is tagged with "opinionpiece" - the latest BS campaign from the rightwing political PR industry. When these people refer to something controversial in the public discussion as "it's just an opinion piece", they're implying that it should be ignored. Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck offer a demented police state to tens of millions of viewers? Don't worry, "it's just an opinion piece". Al Gore says scientists are shocked at how much faster the Arctic melted this year than their worst fears? Don't worry, "it's just an opinion piece".
Yes, it's an opinion piece. The opinions based on solid facts, held together with solid logic, especially the ones offering compassion with people like you who got screwed (so you could be next), those opinion pieces are important. The Constitution is an opinion piece.
Some opinion pieces, that aren't derived from rigorous and fair thinking, are indeed worthless. But when you ignore an explanation of how the FBI is framing innocent activists with crimes that shut down their rights, you're helping destroy those rights. When you push the "ignore the opinion piece" line, you're leading the destruction.
Yeah, everyone's got one. But like asses, some are better than others, some should never see the light of day, and some should be prized by anyone who can get a look.
Every day I deal with people representing businesses who are so bad at their jobs of dealing with other people that they seem to want to be replaced by a machine. How many times do I have to tell one of these droids the equivalent of "wake up and pay attention", or "no, it's not in your script", when I discover they can barely even hear the words that aren't precisely what they were trained to hear in the transaction?
And it's not just me: I wait in long lines, an audience for the customer abuse or indifference that they serve to each customer indiscriminately.
These people don't care about their jobs. They don't have even the basic human social compassion with their customers to treat us differently than they treat the objects where they work. They're liable to treat the boxes of products better, because damaging those can dock their pay. Why should I care about them? To the degree that I do, I want them replaced by a machine that can do their job without bothering them. Even when the machines do a crappy job, at least they reduce the prices, and lower expectations.
Lots of people should be replaced by machines. Freeing them to work on their people skills, so they're worth paying more than the electric bill.
Well, if the limit is the electrode surface area, then why not make electrodes in elaborate thin lattices, like metal snowflakes, or concentric cylinders drilled with lasers, coated with the rechargable cell chemicals?
But the idea is that you don't just put 3A @4.2v into 2 cells in parallel instead of 1A @12.6V into 3 cells in series. The point is that you put 9A @ 4.2V into 3 in parallel, 3A @ 4.2V each.
Then discharge them in series to sum their output voltage.
Why not use the same power that currently charges a single large battery 3x as long instead to charge a battery 3x as small? That would be faster than charging the big battery with it, right? And do that to 3 different small batteries at the same time, which are then switched into series for discharging at their combined voltage. Charging is usually not limited in the amount of power available to direct into the batteries - the amount of power delivered is usually a fraction of that available. Why not use more power, in parallel, to charge the smaller units faster?
I don't understand why it takes so long to charge batteries. Why can't the charger charge little chunks of the battery independently, in parallel, then discharge the bank of batteries serially? Why not break down the bank into the maximum number of little chargeable batteries, for the fastest charging time? There might be some inefficiencies in the discharge through several separate batteries, but the slow recharge is the main obstacle to forgetting these batteries are even part of the problem.
I don't really need my politicians to be scientists, to pass anything but 1990s-caliber college science requirements.
What I need is for them to moderate debates among scientists. They need to be able to tell when scientists have valid arguments, and which is superior, and when even superior arguments still can't be trusted.
Maybe what we need is to let each candidate score some debates among scientists as judges. When they disqualify arguments relying on evolution, the big bang, or "scientific consensus" on inconclusive but compelling science like Climate Change, they disqualify themselves. Then the few who are qualified to lead can explain their various grades, and leave it to the voters to decide which one to give the power to.
Whoops: $50:80GB HD is $0.625:GB, not $6.50:GB.
Scratch all that: how far Flash has to go until parity is actually about 10.4x.
But those microdrives are looking like roadkill.
Notebook drives currently cost as little as about $50:80GB, or $6.50:GB, which is a good size for a mobile device, and almost the largest available.
Flash is as little as $64:8GB (USB), $8:GB. Removing the redundant USB connectors and packaging, putting it in a single drive the size of a notebook drive, would give an 80GB Flash drive for somewhere closer to $50 than to $80.
FWIW, a 4GB microdrive is $30, or $7.50:GB.
These numbers show that a Flash drive competing directly with a disc drive is already right around the corner. By the time 2010 comes around, what will mainly be different is the upper capacity around 1TB, with probably Flash cheaper than discs.
So the whole thing is bullshit anyway. No one knows how to make an online survey statistically representative. To call any of those percentages "of Americans" is a foul lie. Zogby has turned into the kind of "research" into their own preconceived conclusions that we get from, say, Jupiter Research on Microsoft.
It's not punishing the cow that I'm considering. It's using the cow to power the laptops when the cow could be powering something else, or eating less grass (so less land required). And less dung, as you point out.
The whole thing they're planning seems like overkill. These OLPCs probably consume less than 100W. If they could cannibalize a Fiat to make something like a "self winding watch" that charges OLPC batteries while the cow is walking around grazing, that would make a lot more sense than the cow doing a lot of extra work. But nothing like the efficiency of going more directly from the Sun to the OLPC.
The problem is really an illusion in the minds of people who think the "cow power" is "free". It's not: it wears down the cow more than resting, and uses more land, and makes more dung. More direct solar power might look more like magic, but efficiency is always better for poor people. As is the mobility for herders.
I'd love to know what percentage of those people who say the government should censor Internet content are among the percentage who don't use the Internet. Or those who use the Internet only because someone, like their boss (or significant other) makes them use it (though that question probably wasn't asked).
I'd also like to know how many of the pro-censor people believe the government should censor printed matter. And then I'd like to ignore all those people, but preferably the much narrower fraction who can't think for themselves. And who don't clutter up the Internet.
But he thinks the Wii is the only modern console, even though it's different mostly because of its controller. Which is as much like a mouse as a mouse is like a light pen.
Speaking of which, touchscreens which can use a stylus, especially a stylus with 2 position points for angle, plus pressure, are the best input device ever, if we're not counting MIDI musical instruments.
Pretty fast, but IBM will release its Roadrunner at Los Alamos NL next year with 1.6PFLOPS:
16000 CellBE chips have a capacity of 725GFLOPS each for 11.6PFLOPS. So it's expected to operate at only about 14% of HW capacity. There's a lot of room for that Roadrunner, or a machine like it, to stay at the top of the heap.