I wouldn't call it 'dirty'. For a diesel they're quite clean, considering their power and size.
There's no drive between diesel engine and wheels.
I also wouldn't consider a mechanical link between the engine and the wheels a disabling factor for calling it a 'hybrid'. That's how GM is proposing the volt be set up, actually.
What would disable it is that, unlike car hybrids, current generation diesel electrics don't have any significant levels of alternative storage - they can't store energy from stopping to get started again.
Instead, the reason they use the electronics is that it's replacing the transmission - which would actually be more costly, less efficient and break sooner than the electronic setup. Oh, they'll use the electric motors to help them stop, saving brake pads, but instead of going to a battery the energy goes to a resister net on the roof of the locomotive.
Personally, given that trains normally go for non-stop travel, I wonder if it might be better to leave the batteries in the station so the train doesn't have to haul them and electrify the rails, at least in switching yards and such, instead.
Heck, Baen must love me. I've spent a couple hundred there at least.
Part of it is organizational. I often travel for extended periods of time, and can read a book in an hour. I can carry several hundred books in the space of one. I often have limited access to the internet, but little access to libraries or bookstores durng my travel. Ebooks don't take much space individually. Electronic format works quite well for me.
And I LOVE that I'm supporting the authors by purchasing there. Encourages them to write more. I also like enabling Baen to rub their successes in the face of the DRM sellers who don't make as much money. Oh, and the fact that I can't lose my collection by accident or fire*. I can download them again anytime, or even read online. As it is my house looks like a library in spots.
*Well, Baen going bankrupt might do it, but I DO have backups.
The trouble is likely going to be the bandwidth at the other end, although I can see that being resolved in time.
Probably the best answer, though a pain in the butt one, is to pay the various ISPs to have them host a media server in their data server so you can get a nice 10GBit data connection or something. The client connects to the authentication server, once it's account has been authorized and found to have permission to download the movie*, it's referred to the closest media center, preferably one sitting down at your ISP so it's not hogging bandwidth.
If you want to get tricky, make the clients network aware so they'll share with each other if possible, assuming the ISP server doesn't exist, doesn't have the video, or is busy before going all the way back to the central servers Ala bittorrent. Better answer, though it'd make 'copy protection' and watermarking more problematic(Note: I'm not in favor of CP; I'm just being aware that the studios will demand it).
Bonus for movie service - better service for the customers Bonus for the ISPs - they can oversell their external bandwidth more without pissing off their customers If the ISP is smart - they'll offer a cut rate for the access to their data center
If you think a 700MB CD of a film compares to a Blu-ray on a HDTV, then you must be fucking blind.
Naw, for blu-ray he was proposing double that, or 1.4 GB. For an hour and a halfish film, using an *advanced* codec that compresses stuff enough that you actually need a fairly grunty chip* to process it for display, I can see it.
Consider the success of MP3 over CD and non-lossy codecs for music.
Only a fraction of the population actually cares that much about quality over convenience.
Yes, there'll be artifacts. AS for bandwidth, I'll point out that fiber and 10mbit data connections are going into more and more homes, heck you can get 10mbit dsl, and a good cable connection can be even faster. As is, I can easily queue a 4GB movie in the morning and watch it when I get home with my current connection, or three if I do it the night before. Combine with a terabyte HD, I can have a 200 movie 'favorite collection' at the constant ready and 50 'swap slots' for occasional viewing/one off movies.
4GB for a 2 hour movie shouldn't have artifacting that's really visible at a good viewing distance and a viewer not looking for them.
*Any mainline computer CPU today shouldn't strain with it, but I can see it being too much for, say, a iPOD's chip.
The state of the art for CF at the moment seems to be 32GB, not 8.
And yes, the microdrives were triumphs of miniaturization, and they were produced for years. But, the smaller the form factor the drive, the more expensive it was per megabyte or gigabyte.
Due to the cost and the fact that a 1" drive isn't that much smaller than a 1.5", and the spread of a common high speed external interface(USB & Firewire), they lost their niche, became rare enough to get the 'special purpose' price tag, and died against flash.
Even the 1.5" has ceased production if I remember right - they were used in the Ipods, but now Apple(and others) can build their 40GB or so capacity with flash just as cheaply, and often cheaper(no returns due to shock failed HD).
Yes, but you're unusual. Pretty much by definition, most slashdotters are.
Consider the spread of wireless access points and such. Online storage systems allowing you to rent terabytes of storage on the cheap.
When I last worked on my family machines, they were all sitting at least 80% empty.
64GB is still a number of movies, lots and lots of music, etc... For the more 'normal' user.
If you consider the way flash has been getting cheaper and capacities increasing, in a couple years you'd be looking not at a 64GB SSD for $500 , but a 256GB SSD for $125. Going by the same trends, we might have 1TB 2.5" drives, running the same price. The SSD drive will be faster(on average), more shock resistant, and use less power. Much like the 10k RPM drives people were putting in their alienware machines. Less capacity, more cost, but they sell.
Digital cameras, MP3 players, cell phones, game stations, PDAs, etc...
A 'in the future' quote can easily refer to 10-20 years in the future. Unless something strange happens, at the current rate most laptops and many desktops would be using solid state memory for permanent storage.
They may not be the 'same thing', but I remember when you had a number of digital cameras that would use a 3.5" disk, or a CD, but today you'd have to go on ebay to find one.
In a sense, it's like a relentless march. SSDs are making inroads now, both on the expensive end(the Macbook), and the cheap(the EEE PC). To a hard drive company, that should be scary.
As a consumer, I've been running the math each year, at least, on various options like heat pump systems, hybrid cars, solar panels, etc...
I can afford to wait until it makes sense for me.
As a business though, I should always be aware of trends and actively engage in at least setting myself up for new markets or opportunities.
The death of hard drives isn't necessarily close, but it isn't necessarily far anymore. True contenders are rising. For many years, the cost of flash per GB has been dropping faster, percentage wise, than hard drives. It's already made a couple of the smallest form factors economically noncompetitive. Remember the little drives that you could put into PCMCIA slots? They're no longer competitive against a usb thumb drive.
The only reason they are trying to break into this market (that they continuously decry as useless, futile, and too expensive) is because they are afraid of what "might" happen ten years down the road.
I'd say they're being smart. Right now Seagate DOES have market recognition for storage. A proper, forward thinking CEO(I know, rare), should always be thinking on how to adapt to evolving markets.
Much like how, when IBM started, they were a tabulating machine company. If they had tried to stay that, they wouldn't be around today.
Much like how, if you start digging into them, you'll find many oil companies are busily attempting to become 'energy' companies, diversifying into solar, wind, biological fuel production, etc...
Sure, right now SSD doesn't make financial sense in most applications. But it's out there, it's selling. It doesn't take much work to look at a graph comparing SSD vs HD cost per gig for various form factor hard drives. It doesn't take much to look at computer usage and realize that the majority of laptop users aren't filling up their existing hard drives. It doesn't take much to look at the dropping cost of a usefully large SSD vs the more or less constant 'minimum cost' low capacity HD. Just looking at these factors a competent CEO will realize that Seagate could be relegated to special purpose needs, and maybe even bankrupt from the loss of the mass market.
Yes, but you could consider those external drives the equivalent of aftermarket turbochargers.
The vast majority of people don't need one, but those that do want the best they can afford.
In this case, the 'vast majority' of people who are getting them are the ones with enhanced storage needs. The second vast majority are the ones who simply get a 8-16GB USB stick and use that for their backup and sneakernet data transfer needs.
Plus, it's a lot more broken down that way - you only have around three factors to consider instead of the dozens for a full computer.
When it's that simple, many WILL figure out the price/GB, figuring if they end up buying a larger one for $10 more, but double the capacity, they're spending $10 as 'cheap insurance' against the unit being insufficient.
Discounting microsoft bloat, when I look at stuff like this I think about people like my parents and grandparents.
You know, people who after having and using their machine for four years still has 80% of their 80GB HD free. Where the biggest increase in HD usage in the last year was microsoft patches.
For power users like me that DO get into games, video, and music on the computer, a 250GB SSD is enough to last quite a while. Heck, from initial build I'm likely to throw my OS and programs on the SSD and get the cheapest per GB HD(or two) for the rest of the stuff.
Going from 10GB to 100GB was 'Big', it enabled the start of consumer video. Going from 100GB to 1TB enables HD storage for the movies most people would watch in a month to a year. Current broadband speeds enables the downloading of HD streams in useful periods of time with a queuing system.
Basically, I'm saying that we've reached the point with HD storage that the majority of people don't need any more. They won't use what they already get on a bargain machine. It's like with CPUs. If you're not a power gamer*, the bargain basement machines will all run a cleaned up windows** and associated software with good speed. Or even one of the easier versions of linux and open office.
*My grandmother loved bejewelled. Mom does various solitares. They 'game' a lot, but their games aren't exactly demanding on computer systems.
Remember the whole issue is the disparity between baseline and peak.
I thought I mentioned that, as well as some potential solutions. As for overhead, are you talking about uneven demand, or regulation and such?
Take making aluminum, for example. All the economical methods take electricity, lots of it. Let's say you overbuild on nuclear plants. You run the aluminum smelters during the night and such, when the electricity is relatively cheap, and provide power to the public when the call for it is there.
Off grid house DO have the same issue with storage. The difference is that the inefficiencies come primarily from the inverter and these are already factored into the quoted price.
I've seen many solutions, most quote max wattage at the panels. Going off grid makes efficiency very dependent upon the battery technology you use - from under 50% to over 80% depending on technology.
Next the difference between the baseline and peak for residential systems are significantly more favorable. Finally residential systems don[t need to store nearly as much.
It all adds up. Either you have a thousand one family storage solutions or one thousand family solution. Odds are the one thousand family solution will be better utilized, and therefore cheaper per kwh.
Now remember battery tech and solar tech has been increasing fast while the price is dropping even faster. Current projects suggest that a full off-grid system will cost 10-15K total in 10 years.
I tend to recheck solar solutions every six months or so. I'll believe it when I see it.
or you can spend 8-12K and an extra 2000 a year just for a grid connect. The economics for residentials become very different. A 10% drop in on-grip people is not unreasonable in the next decade.
A 10% drop of the percentage of people on-grid, along with a 20% overall increase of people on the grid is perfectly possible. Especially if people start abandoning the suburbs, and consequently the individual roofs that make individual installs possible.
So you have a large power plant feeding factories that are very close by and those factories operate 24/365 (with electricity and maybe waste heat). Residential systems will be significantly smaller either on an individual basis or local community. The problem with cogen plants is that everything has to be extremely close to each other for an effective use.
Not a bad idea. Yes cogen plants have some detriments, but please note that I've been suggesting industrial purposes. Putting an ethanol plant next to a power plant simply means a bit more traffic on the access roads as the ethanol plant workers come in along with the power plant workers. Meanwhile the power plant gets money for it's otherwise wasted heat and the ethanol plant gets cheap heat, helping both along.
Heck putting up a wind turbine next to my town would power the whole thing, on average, not to mention reduce average waste on the power lines by keeping the amps on them down. You'd loose power when the wind isn't in the right range, but the line would still be there to pick up the slack.
But given that as a fact, if 10% of RESIDENTIAL consumers move to off grid solar (or wind etc) than many power companies will have to go bankrupt.
No, they wouldn't. They'd actually make MORE money(short term), because they wouldn't have to expend as much capital to expand their generation facilities as much.
A part of our electrical problem, why we're constantly hearing about 'approaching capacity', 'nearing collapse', is that we don't have excess generation capacity. So we're having to use more expensive alternatives. Despite green alternatives, our demand for power, just like oil, is still expanding. Sure, each individual might be using less, but we have enough additional population to more than make up for it. Unless the 10% happens relatively overnight(say, less than a year), the power companies will be able to adjust. As is, I don't see them having any problems at all. At worst, they might change their charging structures a bit.
Most houses will have slow chargers but people will expect electrics to act like gasoline powered cars therefore with a 5 minute recharge people will "fuel" up while they are out and about during the day
How many will do so? Sure, you'll have a transition period where people 'demand' these things, but I figure most people who expect a vehicle to act like a gasoline one will buy a gasoline vehicle. Most people who buy the electric will treat it as an electric. Especially if it works like this: Power company deal(IE your car charges when they want it to): X. Anytime trickle: 2X. 5 minute recharge: Drive to a special facility and pay 4X. People will often change their habits to be able save money. Not to mention time. No need for a 5-10 minute drive to a refueling station, wait in line, stand or sit in your unmoving car for five minutes while it charges.
You can top off an electric car even with a trickle charge easily enough overnight. Heck, if the EV has the sought after '300 mile range', most people will only have to remember to hook it up once a week. Wouldn't you rather do that at home? For longer journeys, I think that the 'restaurant charge' would become popular. You pull into a sit down restaurant, place your order and have a good meal while your car is charged over the course of 30-60 minutes. Note: At a 300 mile range@75mph=4 hours between stops. Eat breakfast, get on road. Stop at 11 to eat&charge. Leave at 12, stop at 4 for dinner. Drive until 9, charge at hotel/motel. Want more than 12 hours? Get some driving in before breakfast.
which will just increase the disparity between baseline and peak. The 10% off grid will probably also charge during the day...
Right now it's much cheaper to stay hooked up to the grid. That theoretically allows you to sell your power to the grid during peak demand, then turn around and draw power during the night/non-peak. And we don't care about the off-grid, as they're not drawing or contributing any power to the grid. Heck, I could say that the off-balancing would be more than made up for by commercial companies using solar panels to cover some of their increased demand. No need for batteries, they need power during the day.
Power plants release extra heat because it is useless.
For producing electricity. Not because it's useless. A good portion of it is simply uneconomical to exploit. That's changing today.
Look up Carnot efficiency.
I'll respond with an assignment for you to look up 'cogeneration'
The amount of useful work in heat is directly related to the temperature difference between the heat source and heat sink. Power plants discharge the extra heat because it isn't useful.
It can be very useful, especially if all you're looking to do is heat something up. Yes, in many systems you'll loose a bit of efficiency in producing electricity. But you can use that heat in near 100% efficiency to run a distilling plant, for ex
If even 10% of residential users produced their own power you would see a huge portion (30-50%) of power companies go bankrupt.
No you wouldn't. Home power usage is only one of consumers of electricity. You also have business and industrial use. If anything, they'd make more money than ever if plug-in hybrids become common. The 80% thing depends, generally the economic portion of that is that power is cheap because most plants(coal or nuclear) can achieve that.
Because of the things you talked about, PEAK power tends to be multiple times as expensive as base load. With some incentives, you simply set up the charging circuit for the PHEV so the power company can shut off the charge when non-discretionary demands are high. My parents and grandparents have those circuits on their water heaters and AC. You can often get the power for those circuits at half cost.
Given reduced peak demand during the day(solar) and increased demand at night(PHEV), power companies would be seeing significant load leveling, and be able to increase their cheap base load power sources and turn off much of their expensive peak sources.
Of course, new nuclear power plant designs often incorporate options to also be able to use the heat directly for various uses. For example, rather than discharging waste heat into a river, why not use it to distill water? Run an ethanol plant? Produce hydrogen? Design the process so it can be interrupted or scaled back during peak demands and you have a huge load leveling ability.
There are several plugin hybrid models that are coming out in the next year for under $30K.
And you can get a new gasoline vehicle for $12-15k. That's the sort of thing I'm talking about. $15k is around 4k gallons of gasoline at the moment, or about what I'd use in around 5 years. Plus, you'd still be using substantional amounts of gasoline given your driving amounts. It'd help if you can plug in at work, of course.
This of course will strain the electric companies making them raise prices (or shift to cheaper sources like, at that point, solar).
People shifting over to grid connected solar or even disconnecting would allow them to not have to add new capacity and use their existing(cheap) sources as a larger proportion of their power. The only reason they'd have to start raising prices if they started getting so many of them that the losses in revenue exceeded growth of new power users and started cutting into money available for grid maintenance.
Are you remembering the battery packs and extra capacity due to losses because you'd be charging at night, thus needing to store enough kwh to sustain you through the night, including charging the cars?
Then there's the cost of the batteries for IN the EV.
It's the batteries tend to be a killer in off grid systems. Makes spending $3k on a sun frost freezer worth it.
By the way, what capacity system were you looking at? Perhaps a link to the $35k kit? How many kwh do you use a month? I'm guessing around a thousand.
The only source I have was a TV show I saw while visiting family a couple months ago.
The house didn't have a conventional septic system or well, it was located in a desert type area and subsisted on recycling and rain cisterns to capture the occasional rain. It also had a garden on the roof, etc...
The septic system was designed to produce fertilizer. I know off-grid stuff, if allowed, can be done cheaper.
WTF are you doing spending that much on gas for? Do you drive 5k miles a month? If so, you're wildely optimistic that another $10-15k would replace $900/month worth of fuel.
Go back to the $50k amount, and don't get rid of the gas*, and you'll see that the utilities that you're replacing don't come close to paying off the system. Yes, the 5% is a bit low, but that's because I was placing some value on not being dependent on foreign systems. If the systems were a bit riskier, I wouldn't consider 10% out of line.
*I'm assuming you're talking about gasoline and not natural gas or something used for heating your house.
Personally I think solar should be installed on "wasted" space like residential rooves, parking decks etc
Only problem with this is that photovoltiac power, right now, is too expensive when you consider all the costs for a residential system to ever pay back economically. Thus why I suggest a solar heating system, which is often up in the 90% efficient range.
And yes, I'm a big fan of nuclear power for those reasons.
Conservation is good, production is good, and you find a balance. When production costs increase, the measures you take for conservation make more sense. Sure, you can construct a home that doesn't need to be connected to any grid, electricity, gas, or even water as it provides all the 'necessities' of life. The problem? A $100k house costs $750k to build that way. Municipal water, sewer, gas, and electricity make more sense, as most people don't spend $35k/year* in utilities.
*5% 'cost of capital'. IE unless it saves you more than $35k/year it's never going to break even, even if the system lasts 'forever' without need for mainenance, replacement, or repair. You'd be better off putting the money into investments that earn 5% a year and use the proceeds to pay your bills.
The power plants themselves are protected from the regional environmental damage that directly hurts those around them (for instance acid rain and radiation exposure).
At least in the USA, enviromental requirements for new coal plants are quite stringent(good!), but the older plants are generally grandfathered, which is a pain. I consider myself a moderate enviromentalist. I fully believe that we can do better, but we need to be smart about it. As a result, I generally oppose grandfathering in favor of reasonable new requirements that encourage the replacing of old higher polluting plants with newer cleaner ones.
Coal power plants also typically get preferential treatment from the government for loans not to mention local communities often bend over backwards to attract them.
Happens in the USA as well, though communities more often have NIMBY attitudes that make placements difficult. See texas and some of the new plants they've been trying to build. They morphed from 'clean coal' to nuclear when Bush extended 'green' power loan guarentees to nuclear, and the proposing company figured out that clean coal plants would be more expensive to build than equivalent capacity nuclear plants.
Distribution power lines have a right of way over most property. A power company can put up power lines on your property and you can't refuse and you aren't compensated.
I'd argue that this is independant of coal power - you still need distribution lines for hydro, wind, nuclear, and central plant type solar systems.
There are no ongoing subsidies
Sure there is, to the tune of 42 cents a kwh. Over four times the going rate for utility power.
Coal requires ongoing subsidies in the form of legal protections or they will be sued out of existence almost immediately.
I'll agree with this, Coal is dirty, dirty power and I'd prefer to see it cleaned up or replaced. I just think that there are better options currently than massive installations of solar.
For example, here in the USA I'd look into pushing solar thermal water heating for those below the mason-dixon line. Well, I'd start south of there and work my way up. Many people here in the USA have electric water heaters. They're 4400 to 5500 watts typically. In my area it'd be 44 cents an hour to operate. That's a LOT of juice, and you can virtually turn them off for ~$2k per house. Using This calcuator, the 'average' electric water heater can be expected to cost $508 a year. Given that a solar heating system would require a little more maintenance, and that most models have a pump, call it a five year payback.
To me, that's an easy sell. Much like CFLs, additional insulation, other energy saving smart home construction techniques, etc...
I can't speak of all of Germany, of course, but at least in the USA coal is among the least subsidized power sources going. I found the article here. Traditional coal is second only to natural gas among receiving the least amount of subsidy.
Nuclear power, per kwh, only receives 5% of the subsidy compared to 'clean' coal, wind, and solar.
I have no engineering problem with wind or solar other than the fact that it's too expensive. It's also currently not good for base load power, but we can work around that.
I agree. One nuclear plant wouldn't satisfy our needs, neither would one dam, coal, wind turbine, etc... There's thousands upon thousands of gas stations.
Not to mention that diversity is good. That way one problem won't take down the entire grid, like grounding all 747s because of a discovered serious problem wouldn't stop all air travel.
Personally, I'd be building nuclear plants while encouraging those who live in more southern areas to install solar water heating systems. Might even save more electricity than replacing incandescent lights. Stuff like that.
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And that's one of the real ways to get people out of cars/planes. Make it faster and more convenient.
Offer a little hassle, cheap, car rental on the other side, or an adequate PRT system. Heck, Cab & Bus would work.
You can't forget the 'last mile' problem.
I wouldn't call it 'dirty'. For a diesel they're quite clean, considering their power and size.
There's no drive between diesel engine and wheels.
I also wouldn't consider a mechanical link between the engine and the wheels a disabling factor for calling it a 'hybrid'. That's how GM is proposing the volt be set up, actually.
What would disable it is that, unlike car hybrids, current generation diesel electrics don't have any significant levels of alternative storage - they can't store energy from stopping to get started again.
Instead, the reason they use the electronics is that it's replacing the transmission - which would actually be more costly, less efficient and break sooner than the electronic setup. Oh, they'll use the electric motors to help them stop, saving brake pads, but instead of going to a battery the energy goes to a resister net on the roof of the locomotive.
Personally, given that trains normally go for non-stop travel, I wonder if it might be better to leave the batteries in the station so the train doesn't have to haul them and electrify the rails, at least in switching yards and such, instead.
Heck, Baen must love me. I've spent a couple hundred there at least.
Part of it is organizational. I often travel for extended periods of time, and can read a book in an hour. I can carry several hundred books in the space of one. I often have limited access to the internet, but little access to libraries or bookstores durng my travel. Ebooks don't take much space individually. Electronic format works quite well for me.
And I LOVE that I'm supporting the authors by purchasing there. Encourages them to write more. I also like enabling Baen to rub their successes in the face of the DRM sellers who don't make as much money. Oh, and the fact that I can't lose my collection by accident or fire*. I can download them again anytime, or even read online. As it is my house looks like a library in spots.
*Well, Baen going bankrupt might do it, but I DO have backups.
The trouble is likely going to be the bandwidth at the other end, although I can see that being resolved in time.
Probably the best answer, though a pain in the butt one, is to pay the various ISPs to have them host a media server in their data server so you can get a nice 10GBit data connection or something. The client connects to the authentication server, once it's account has been authorized and found to have permission to download the movie*, it's referred to the closest media center, preferably one sitting down at your ISP so it's not hogging bandwidth.
If you want to get tricky, make the clients network aware so they'll share with each other if possible, assuming the ISP server doesn't exist, doesn't have the video, or is busy before going all the way back to the central servers Ala bittorrent. Better answer, though it'd make 'copy protection' and watermarking more problematic(Note: I'm not in favor of CP; I'm just being aware that the studios will demand it).
Bonus for movie service - better service for the customers
Bonus for the ISPs - they can oversell their external bandwidth more without pissing off their customers
If the ISP is smart - they'll offer a cut rate for the access to their data center
*Yes, it's okay to charge for the movies.
If you think a 700MB CD of a film compares to a Blu-ray on a HDTV, then you must be fucking blind.
Naw, for blu-ray he was proposing double that, or 1.4 GB. For an hour and a halfish film, using an *advanced* codec that compresses stuff enough that you actually need a fairly grunty chip* to process it for display, I can see it.
Consider the success of MP3 over CD and non-lossy codecs for music.
Only a fraction of the population actually cares that much about quality over convenience.
Yes, there'll be artifacts. AS for bandwidth, I'll point out that fiber and 10mbit data connections are going into more and more homes, heck you can get 10mbit dsl, and a good cable connection can be even faster. As is, I can easily queue a 4GB movie in the morning and watch it when I get home with my current connection, or three if I do it the night before. Combine with a terabyte HD, I can have a 200 movie 'favorite collection' at the constant ready and 50 'swap slots' for occasional viewing/one off movies.
4GB for a 2 hour movie shouldn't have artifacting that's really visible at a good viewing distance and a viewer not looking for them.
*Any mainline computer CPU today shouldn't strain with it, but I can see it being too much for, say, a iPOD's chip.
The state of the art for CF at the moment seems to be 32GB, not 8.
And yes, the microdrives were triumphs of miniaturization, and they were produced for years. But, the smaller the form factor the drive, the more expensive it was per megabyte or gigabyte.
Due to the cost and the fact that a 1" drive isn't that much smaller than a 1.5", and the spread of a common high speed external interface(USB & Firewire), they lost their niche, became rare enough to get the 'special purpose' price tag, and died against flash.
Even the 1.5" has ceased production if I remember right - they were used in the Ipods, but now Apple(and others) can build their 40GB or so capacity with flash just as cheaply, and often cheaper(no returns due to shock failed HD).
Yes, but you're unusual. Pretty much by definition, most slashdotters are.
Consider the spread of wireless access points and such. Online storage systems allowing you to rent terabytes of storage on the cheap.
When I last worked on my family machines, they were all sitting at least 80% empty.
64GB is still a number of movies, lots and lots of music, etc... For the more 'normal' user.
If you consider the way flash has been getting cheaper and capacities increasing, in a couple years you'd be looking not at a 64GB SSD for $500 , but a 256GB SSD for $125. Going by the same trends, we might have 1TB 2.5" drives, running the same price. The SSD drive will be faster(on average), more shock resistant, and use less power. Much like the 10k RPM drives people were putting in their alienware machines. Less capacity, more cost, but they sell.
Looking at your charts, I'm thinking now that it's more a question of why seagate waited so long, more than 'why are they getting in early?'.
Digital cameras, MP3 players, cell phones, game stations, PDAs, etc...
A 'in the future' quote can easily refer to 10-20 years in the future. Unless something strange happens, at the current rate most laptops and many desktops would be using solid state memory for permanent storage.
They may not be the 'same thing', but I remember when you had a number of digital cameras that would use a 3.5" disk, or a CD, but today you'd have to go on ebay to find one.
In a sense, it's like a relentless march. SSDs are making inroads now, both on the expensive end(the Macbook), and the cheap(the EEE PC). To a hard drive company, that should be scary.
As a consumer, I've been running the math each year, at least, on various options like heat pump systems, hybrid cars, solar panels, etc...
I can afford to wait until it makes sense for me.
As a business though, I should always be aware of trends and actively engage in at least setting myself up for new markets or opportunities.
The death of hard drives isn't necessarily close, but it isn't necessarily far anymore. True contenders are rising. For many years, the cost of flash per GB has been dropping faster, percentage wise, than hard drives. It's already made a couple of the smallest form factors economically noncompetitive. Remember the little drives that you could put into PCMCIA slots? They're no longer competitive against a usb thumb drive.
The only reason they are trying to break into this market (that they continuously decry as useless, futile, and too expensive) is because they are afraid of what "might" happen ten years down the road.
I'd say they're being smart. Right now Seagate DOES have market recognition for storage. A proper, forward thinking CEO(I know, rare), should always be thinking on how to adapt to evolving markets.
Much like how, when IBM started, they were a tabulating machine company. If they had tried to stay that, they wouldn't be around today.
Much like how, if you start digging into them, you'll find many oil companies are busily attempting to become 'energy' companies, diversifying into solar, wind, biological fuel production, etc...
Sure, right now SSD doesn't make financial sense in most applications. But it's out there, it's selling. It doesn't take much work to look at a graph comparing SSD vs HD cost per gig for various form factor hard drives. It doesn't take much to look at computer usage and realize that the majority of laptop users aren't filling up their existing hard drives. It doesn't take much to look at the dropping cost of a usefully large SSD vs the more or less constant 'minimum cost' low capacity HD. Just looking at these factors a competent CEO will realize that Seagate could be relegated to special purpose needs, and maybe even bankrupt from the loss of the mass market.
Yes, but you could consider those external drives the equivalent of aftermarket turbochargers.
The vast majority of people don't need one, but those that do want the best they can afford.
In this case, the 'vast majority' of people who are getting them are the ones with enhanced storage needs. The second vast majority are the ones who simply get a 8-16GB USB stick and use that for their backup and sneakernet data transfer needs.
Plus, it's a lot more broken down that way - you only have around three factors to consider instead of the dozens for a full computer.
1. Storage capacity
2. Size (3.5" requires a wall wart, 2.5" doesn't)
3. Price
When it's that simple, many WILL figure out the price/GB, figuring if they end up buying a larger one for $10 more, but double the capacity, they're spending $10 as 'cheap insurance' against the unit being insufficient.
Discounting microsoft bloat, when I look at stuff like this I think about people like my parents and grandparents.
You know, people who after having and using their machine for four years still has 80% of their 80GB HD free. Where the biggest increase in HD usage in the last year was microsoft patches.
For power users like me that DO get into games, video, and music on the computer, a 250GB SSD is enough to last quite a while. Heck, from initial build I'm likely to throw my OS and programs on the SSD and get the cheapest per GB HD(or two) for the rest of the stuff.
Going from 10GB to 100GB was 'Big', it enabled the start of consumer video. Going from 100GB to 1TB enables HD storage for the movies most people would watch in a month to a year. Current broadband speeds enables the downloading of HD streams in useful periods of time with a queuing system.
Basically, I'm saying that we've reached the point with HD storage that the majority of people don't need any more. They won't use what they already get on a bargain machine. It's like with CPUs. If you're not a power gamer*, the bargain basement machines will all run a cleaned up windows** and associated software with good speed. Or even one of the easier versions of linux and open office.
*My grandmother loved bejewelled. Mom does various solitares. They 'game' a lot, but their games aren't exactly demanding on computer systems.
Agreed. Personally, I think that in the end the increased demand for EVs will increase the number of (hopefully clean) baseload power plants.
Remember the whole issue is the disparity between baseline and peak.
I thought I mentioned that, as well as some potential solutions. As for overhead, are you talking about uneven demand, or regulation and such?
Take making aluminum, for example. All the economical methods take electricity, lots of it. Let's say you overbuild on nuclear plants. You run the aluminum smelters during the night and such, when the electricity is relatively cheap, and provide power to the public when the call for it is there.
Off grid house DO have the same issue with storage. The difference is that the inefficiencies come primarily from the inverter and these are already factored into the quoted price.
I've seen many solutions, most quote max wattage at the panels. Going off grid makes efficiency very dependent upon the battery technology you use - from under 50% to over 80% depending on technology.
Next the difference between the baseline and peak for residential systems are significantly more favorable. Finally residential systems don[t need to store nearly as much.
It all adds up. Either you have a thousand one family storage solutions or one thousand family solution. Odds are the one thousand family solution will be better utilized, and therefore cheaper per kwh.
Now remember battery tech and solar tech has been increasing fast while the price is dropping even faster. Current projects suggest that a full off-grid system will cost 10-15K total in 10 years.
I tend to recheck solar solutions every six months or so. I'll believe it when I see it.
or you can spend 8-12K and an extra 2000 a year just for a grid connect. The economics for residentials become very different. A 10% drop in on-grip people is not unreasonable in the next decade.
A 10% drop of the percentage of people on-grid, along with a 20% overall increase of people on the grid is perfectly possible. Especially if people start abandoning the suburbs, and consequently the individual roofs that make individual installs possible.
So you have a large power plant feeding factories that are very close by and those factories operate 24/365 (with electricity and maybe waste heat). Residential systems will be significantly smaller either on an individual basis or local community. The problem with cogen plants is that everything has to be extremely close to each other for an effective use.
Not a bad idea. Yes cogen plants have some detriments, but please note that I've been suggesting industrial purposes. Putting an ethanol plant next to a power plant simply means a bit more traffic on the access roads as the ethanol plant workers come in along with the power plant workers. Meanwhile the power plant gets money for it's otherwise wasted heat and the ethanol plant gets cheap heat, helping both along.
Heck putting up a wind turbine next to my town would power the whole thing, on average, not to mention reduce average waste on the power lines by keeping the amps on them down. You'd loose power when the wind isn't in the right range, but the line would still be there to pick up the slack.
But given that as a fact, if 10% of RESIDENTIAL consumers move to off grid solar (or wind etc) than many power companies will have to go bankrupt.
No, they wouldn't. They'd actually make MORE money(short term), because they wouldn't have to expend as much capital to expand their generation facilities as much.
A part of our electrical problem, why we're constantly hearing about 'approaching capacity', 'nearing collapse', is that we don't have excess generation capacity. So we're having to use more expensive alternatives. Despite green alternatives, our demand for power, just like oil, is still expanding. Sure, each individual might be using less, but we have enough additional population to more than make up for it. Unless the 10% happens relatively overnight(say, less than a year), the power companies will be able to adjust. As is, I don't see them having any problems at all. At worst, they might change their charging structures a bit.
Most houses will have slow chargers but people will expect electrics to act like gasoline powered cars therefore with a 5 minute recharge people will "fuel" up while they are out and about during the day
How many will do so? Sure, you'll have a transition period where people 'demand' these things, but I figure most people who expect a vehicle to act like a gasoline one will buy a gasoline vehicle. Most people who buy the electric will treat it as an electric. Especially if it works like this: Power company deal(IE your car charges when they want it to): X. Anytime trickle: 2X. 5 minute recharge: Drive to a special facility and pay 4X. People will often change their habits to be able save money. Not to mention time. No need for a 5-10 minute drive to a refueling station, wait in line, stand or sit in your unmoving car for five minutes while it charges.
You can top off an electric car even with a trickle charge easily enough overnight. Heck, if the EV has the sought after '300 mile range', most people will only have to remember to hook it up once a week. Wouldn't you rather do that at home? For longer journeys, I think that the 'restaurant charge' would become popular. You pull into a sit down restaurant, place your order and have a good meal while your car is charged over the course of 30-60 minutes. Note: At a 300 mile range@75mph=4 hours between stops. Eat breakfast, get on road. Stop at 11 to eat&charge. Leave at 12, stop at 4 for dinner. Drive until 9, charge at hotel/motel. Want more than 12 hours? Get some driving in before breakfast.
which will just increase the disparity between baseline and peak. The 10% off grid will probably also charge during the day...
Right now it's much cheaper to stay hooked up to the grid. That theoretically allows you to sell your power to the grid during peak demand, then turn around and draw power during the night/non-peak. And we don't care about the off-grid, as they're not drawing or contributing any power to the grid. Heck, I could say that the off-balancing would be more than made up for by commercial companies using solar panels to cover some of their increased demand. No need for batteries, they need power during the day.
Power plants release extra heat because it is useless.
For producing electricity. Not because it's useless. A good portion of it is simply uneconomical to exploit. That's changing today.
Look up Carnot efficiency.
I'll respond with an assignment for you to look up 'cogeneration'
The amount of useful work in heat is directly related to the temperature difference between the heat source and heat sink. Power plants discharge the extra heat because it isn't useful.
It can be very useful, especially if all you're looking to do is heat something up. Yes, in many systems you'll loose a bit of efficiency in producing electricity. But you can use that heat in near 100% efficiency to run a distilling plant, for ex
If even 10% of residential users produced their own power you would see a huge portion (30-50%) of power companies go bankrupt.
No you wouldn't. Home power usage is only one of consumers of electricity. You also have business and industrial use. If anything, they'd make more money than ever if plug-in hybrids become common. The 80% thing depends, generally the economic portion of that is that power is cheap because most plants(coal or nuclear) can achieve that.
Because of the things you talked about, PEAK power tends to be multiple times as expensive as base load. With some incentives, you simply set up the charging circuit for the PHEV so the power company can shut off the charge when non-discretionary demands are high. My parents and grandparents have those circuits on their water heaters and AC. You can often get the power for those circuits at half cost.
Given reduced peak demand during the day(solar) and increased demand at night(PHEV), power companies would be seeing significant load leveling, and be able to increase their cheap base load power sources and turn off much of their expensive peak sources.
Of course, new nuclear power plant designs often incorporate options to also be able to use the heat directly for various uses. For example, rather than discharging waste heat into a river, why not use it to distill water? Run an ethanol plant? Produce hydrogen? Design the process so it can be interrupted or scaled back during peak demands and you have a huge load leveling ability.
There are several plugin hybrid models that are coming out in the next year for under $30K.
And you can get a new gasoline vehicle for $12-15k. That's the sort of thing I'm talking about. $15k is around 4k gallons of gasoline at the moment, or about what I'd use in around 5 years. Plus, you'd still be using substantional amounts of gasoline given your driving amounts. It'd help if you can plug in at work, of course.
This of course will strain the electric companies making them raise prices (or shift to cheaper sources like, at that point, solar).
People shifting over to grid connected solar or even disconnecting would allow them to not have to add new capacity and use their existing(cheap) sources as a larger proportion of their power. The only reason they'd have to start raising prices if they started getting so many of them that the losses in revenue exceeded growth of new power users and started cutting into money available for grid maintenance.
Are you remembering the battery packs and extra capacity due to losses because you'd be charging at night, thus needing to store enough kwh to sustain you through the night, including charging the cars?
Then there's the cost of the batteries for IN the EV.
It's the batteries tend to be a killer in off grid systems. Makes spending $3k on a sun frost freezer worth it.
By the way, what capacity system were you looking at? Perhaps a link to the $35k kit? How many kwh do you use a month? I'm guessing around a thousand.
The only source I have was a TV show I saw while visiting family a couple months ago.
The house didn't have a conventional septic system or well, it was located in a desert type area and subsisted on recycling and rain cisterns to capture the occasional rain. It also had a garden on the roof, etc...
The septic system was designed to produce fertilizer. I know off-grid stuff, if allowed, can be done cheaper.
WTF are you doing spending that much on gas for? Do you drive 5k miles a month? If so, you're wildely optimistic that another $10-15k would replace $900/month worth of fuel.
Go back to the $50k amount, and don't get rid of the gas*, and you'll see that the utilities that you're replacing don't come close to paying off the system. Yes, the 5% is a bit low, but that's because I was placing some value on not being dependent on foreign systems. If the systems were a bit riskier, I wouldn't consider 10% out of line.
*I'm assuming you're talking about gasoline and not natural gas or something used for heating your house.
Personally I think solar should be installed on "wasted" space like residential rooves, parking decks etc
Only problem with this is that photovoltiac power, right now, is too expensive when you consider all the costs for a residential system to ever pay back economically. Thus why I suggest a solar heating system, which is often up in the 90% efficient range.
And yes, I'm a big fan of nuclear power for those reasons.
Conservation is good, production is good, and you find a balance. When production costs increase, the measures you take for conservation make more sense. Sure, you can construct a home that doesn't need to be connected to any grid, electricity, gas, or even water as it provides all the 'necessities' of life. The problem? A $100k house costs $750k to build that way. Municipal water, sewer, gas, and electricity make more sense, as most people don't spend $35k/year* in utilities.
*5% 'cost of capital'. IE unless it saves you more than $35k/year it's never going to break even, even if the system lasts 'forever' without need for mainenance, replacement, or repair. You'd be better off putting the money into investments that earn 5% a year and use the proceeds to pay your bills.
The power plants themselves are protected from the regional environmental damage that directly hurts those around them (for instance acid rain and radiation exposure).
At least in the USA, enviromental requirements for new coal plants are quite stringent(good!), but the older plants are generally grandfathered, which is a pain. I consider myself a moderate enviromentalist. I fully believe that we can do better, but we need to be smart about it. As a result, I generally oppose grandfathering in favor of reasonable new requirements that encourage the replacing of old higher polluting plants with newer cleaner ones.
Coal power plants also typically get preferential treatment from the government for loans not to mention local communities often bend over backwards to attract them.
Happens in the USA as well, though communities more often have NIMBY attitudes that make placements difficult. See texas and some of the new plants they've been trying to build. They morphed from 'clean coal' to nuclear when Bush extended 'green' power loan guarentees to nuclear, and the proposing company figured out that clean coal plants would be more expensive to build than equivalent capacity nuclear plants.
Distribution power lines have a right of way over most property. A power company can put up power lines on your property and you can't refuse and you aren't compensated.
I'd argue that this is independant of coal power - you still need distribution lines for hydro, wind, nuclear, and central plant type solar systems.
There are no ongoing subsidies
Sure there is, to the tune of 42 cents a kwh. Over four times the going rate for utility power.
Coal requires ongoing subsidies in the form of legal protections or they will be sued out of existence almost immediately.
I'll agree with this, Coal is dirty, dirty power and I'd prefer to see it cleaned up or replaced. I just think that there are better options currently than massive installations of solar.
For example, here in the USA I'd look into pushing solar thermal water heating for those below the mason-dixon line. Well, I'd start south of there and work my way up. Many people here in the USA have electric water heaters. They're 4400 to 5500 watts typically. In my area it'd be 44 cents an hour to operate. That's a LOT of juice, and you can virtually turn them off for ~$2k per house. Using This calcuator, the 'average' electric water heater can be expected to cost $508 a year. Given that a solar heating system would require a little more maintenance, and that most models have a pump, call it a five year payback.
To me, that's an easy sell. Much like CFLs, additional insulation, other energy saving smart home construction techniques, etc...
Do you have a link on the dropping subsidies?
I can't speak of all of Germany, of course, but at least in the USA coal is among the least subsidized power sources going. I found the article here. Traditional coal is second only to natural gas among receiving the least amount of subsidy.
Nuclear power, per kwh, only receives 5% of the subsidy compared to 'clean' coal, wind, and solar.
I have no engineering problem with wind or solar other than the fact that it's too expensive. It's also currently not good for base load power, but we can work around that.
I agree. One nuclear plant wouldn't satisfy our needs, neither would one dam, coal, wind turbine, etc... There's thousands upon thousands of gas stations.
Not to mention that diversity is good. That way one problem won't take down the entire grid, like grounding all 747s because of a discovered serious problem wouldn't stop all air travel.
Personally, I'd be building nuclear plants while encouraging those who live in more southern areas to install solar water heating systems. Might even save more electricity than replacing incandescent lights. Stuff like that.
With the assistance of some rather massive subsidies, to include a requirement for the power companies to buy the power at $.42 a kwh, which is HUGE.