1. It's not like you are covering 4500 acres (that's 7 sq. miles) with solid concrete. The actual footprint of these dishes is fairly small; the main impact will be the amount of sunlight hitting the ground. judging from the area, this may not be such bad thing. Shade for the desert tortoises and the like.
2. It's reasonably scalable. Using SGS's numbers, and being conservative, let's say these things can crank out 400 kWh/m2 per annum. At 2004 US electrical consumption of roughly 1.2 trillion kWh (source: EIA), you're talking about needing ~30 billion sq. m. of collectors, which is about 12,000 square miles, to supply 100% of current electrical needs. You could fit that in about 5% of Texas- not an insignificant amount of land, but doable (you don't have to have all the collectors in one place, and you can probably install them on under-utilized land- say, parking lots- just jack up the collectors a few feet to provide SUV clearance).
So although I'm sure some people will get bent out of shape, I don't see the land area requirements as a big deal. If these things are truly economically competitive, as the article suggests, watch out.
A quick glance shows that Amazon may actually achieve a level of zero net tangible assets (they've been in the red for years) this year. Similarly, another glance shows that 2004 was the first year Amazon actually made a real profit (2003 was about breakeven).
I am impressed, though, that Amazon actually hung in there through years and years of losses and now actually has a profitable, reasonably sustainable business.
I'm too lazy to look up the exact stats, but I seem to remember that Yahoo was also around P/E = 100, with several records of increasing revenue and profits, before the bottom fell out of both in 2000-2001...
Google is frickin' awesome right now, but I personally don't think their business is defensible enough to be awesome indefinitely. They have a ton of smart people and apparently a great culture, but both of those advantages are not inherently self-sustaining, and can be reproduced (with some difficulty) elsewhere.
I hope Google the best, but won't buy at the current price.
Nevermind that your libertarian bretheren will complain that in trying to force the burden ONTO the manufacturers, you are actually *interfering* with the market. Right now, the burden IS on the market. And individuals are disposing of the equipment in the most cost-effective way they know. The trash bin.
Free markets are nice and all, but there are a billion real-world examples where markets are not perfectly efficient, for all sorts of reasons. In these cases, government intervention, though generally a pain in the butt, isn't always a bad thing.
I don't know about you, but I don't find these startling at all. Vendor lock-in generally sucks and can be a huge headache. It also supports the idea that Free (as in speech) is more important than free (as in beer).
Do you use electric heat in your house? Do you live in a cold climate?
If you live in, say, Norway, I suppose there's a good chance the answer to both questions is yes.
Otherwise, your argument doesn't stand. If you live in a warm climate, for at least part of the year, the CPU heat is at best not welcome or at worst increases your A/C load. In the winter, the production of the CPU heat may result in more energy use/pollution than what would have been produced by, say, a gas furnace, depending on the source of the electricity. In the case of a fossil fuel electrical plant, the heat your CPU generated is represents roughly 1/3 of the total heat generated (the other 2/3 is 'waste' produced at the power plant).
It sure would be nice if Macs were more affordable.
But Apple seems to be of the opinion that they can maximize profits by maintaining good margins with relatively small market share, rather than trying to increase market share substantially with much lower margins (at least for computers- portable music players is a totally different story; Apple seems to be able to command pretty good margins *and* high market share; good for them).
It's too bad, b/c the world could use more Macs, but it's a sane strategy. Apple has picked their niche and is nailing it. It'd be insane for them to try to challenge Dell and/or MS head-on; they'd get crushed (again).
That said, I will watch the evolution of the Mac Mini, presumably poised to be the (cliched) household digital hub, with much interest.
Because it's a Thinkpad, and Thinkpads are awesome. I love my T40, and I'd like it even more if the screen swiveled (there are a lot of work contexts where this would be useful. I also sometimes need to surf a little at home w/ a baby on my lap).
I even prefer my T40 over my wife's G4 Powerbook (but that's mainly because I'm addicted to the red dot thingy).
This isn't an original idea, but I can't remember where I most recently read about the concept, so I'll go ahead and say it's mine:
Trust for things like email senders and web sites shouldn't be centralized. My web of trusted entities, which should be easy to maintain (unlike, say, blacklists or whitelists) and should evolve semi-automatically, should be based on the interaction of my trusted sites/entities, and, in turn, their trusted sites/entities. Sort of like TrustRank, but where each person determines their own initial seed of trusted sites/entities. Of course, if you didn't want to deal with choosing seeds, you'd just pick Google as your trusted site.
This is of course a horribly abstract idea, and I have no idea how I'd implement this for 1 or a million users, but hey, you gotta start with the vision.
It always interests me when folks generalize their personal experiences and observations into "almost everyone/hardly anyone...".
My experience in suburbia is that plenty of people still get print newspapers delivered. But when I lived in a city, not so much. I'm guessing the parent lives in an urban area...
It's less than a year old, at least for the U.S. Northeast; the 2 trees we cut down last fall next to my house (very sad, one was the most beautiful maple) don't show up.
Actually, peak electrical load in the northeast is in the summer, also for air conditioning. It does get hot (and humid).
In fact, the electrical demand peaks and solar availability peaks are fairly well aligned, making solar power (if affordable) a decent source to help cover peak demand.
Raw electrical demand data for New England, by hour: http://www.iso-ne.com/Historical_Data/hist_data.ht ml
Most heat around here comes from natural gas or oil.
That looks like electrocution from all sources- fallen wires, etc. This is an interesting reference... shoot, I gotta stop riding my bike and get me an SUV. And keep the lights in my house nice and bright, so I don't get murdered.
We're officially in crackpot logic world here (masquerading as quantitative fact, my favorite)... thanks for the ride.
Please tell me why an alternative energy source has to be able to replace 100% of electricity to be viable?
Thanks for the newsflash. Hence my comment about *affordable solar enery). Efficiency has everything to do with figuring out if solar power could ever supply a significant portion of our energy, just based on the availability of solar power, which I think was pretty clearly the point of my calculation.
Also, efficiency indirectly impacts the economics of solar power, because it affects how much infrastructure you need to hold the cells, etc.
Finally, it just so happens that I do know something about economics... and I do get excited about potentially low-cost solar power with ~10% efficiency.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, here are some notes on this:
1. It's not like you are covering 4500 acres (that's 7 sq. miles) with solid concrete. The actual footprint of these dishes is fairly small; the main impact will be the amount of sunlight hitting the ground. judging from the area, this may not be such bad thing. Shade for the desert tortoises and the like.
2. It's reasonably scalable. Using SGS's numbers, and being conservative, let's say these things can crank out 400 kWh/m2 per annum. At 2004 US electrical consumption of roughly 1.2 trillion kWh (source: EIA), you're talking about needing ~30 billion sq. m. of collectors, which is about 12,000 square miles, to supply 100% of current electrical needs. You could fit that in about 5% of Texas- not an insignificant amount of land, but doable (you don't have to have all the collectors in one place, and you can probably install them on under-utilized land- say, parking lots- just jack up the collectors a few feet to provide SUV clearance).
So although I'm sure some people will get bent out of shape, I don't see the land area requirements as a big deal. If these things are truly economically competitive, as the article suggests, watch out.
Disagree! For some areas, Google Maps (and Google Earth) have recent, high-resolution aerial photos. See, e.g., Massachusetts:
Cranberry bog and small airport
The US (and/or the West) are not responsible exclusively, or even mostly, for the situation in the mideast.
Really? Have you read this book?
(A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East by David Fromkin)
A quick glance shows that Amazon may actually achieve a level of zero net tangible assets (they've been in the red for years) this year. Similarly, another glance shows that 2004 was the first year Amazon actually made a real profit (2003 was about breakeven).
I am impressed, though, that Amazon actually hung in there through years and years of losses and now actually has a profitable, reasonably sustainable business.
I'm really perplexed and dismayed by this decision. This is probably the 1st and only time that I agree with Scalia, Rehnquist, and Thomas...
Look at the trends, though. Power's Top 500 system share peaked in 2000. For better or worse, Intel is on the rise...
I'm too lazy to look up the exact stats, but I seem to remember that Yahoo was also around P/E = 100, with several records of increasing revenue and profits, before the bottom fell out of both in 2000-2001...
Google is frickin' awesome right now, but I personally don't think their business is defensible enough to be awesome indefinitely. They have a ton of smart people and apparently a great culture, but both of those advantages are not inherently self-sustaining, and can be reproduced (with some difficulty) elsewhere.
I hope Google the best, but won't buy at the current price.
Nevermind that your libertarian bretheren will complain that in trying to force the burden ONTO the manufacturers, you are actually *interfering* with the market. Right now, the burden IS on the market. And individuals are disposing of the equipment in the most cost-effective way they know. The trash bin.
Bloop! Externalities! Market failure alert!
Free markets are nice and all, but there are a billion real-world examples where markets are not perfectly efficient, for all sorts of reasons. In these cases, government intervention, though generally a pain in the butt, isn't always a bad thing.
The ordered results where:
I don't know about you, but I don't find these startling at all. Vendor lock-in generally sucks and can be a huge headache. It also supports the idea that Free (as in speech) is more important than free (as in beer).
Do you use electric heat in your house? Do you live in a cold climate?
If you live in, say, Norway, I suppose there's a good chance the answer to both questions is yes.
Otherwise, your argument doesn't stand. If you live in a warm climate, for at least part of the year, the CPU heat is at best not welcome or at worst increases your A/C load. In the winter, the production of the CPU heat may result in more energy use/pollution than what would have been produced by, say, a gas furnace, depending on the source of the electricity. In the case of a fossil fuel electrical plant, the heat your CPU generated is represents roughly 1/3 of the total heat generated (the other 2/3 is 'waste' produced at the power plant).
It sure would be nice if Macs were more affordable.
But Apple seems to be of the opinion that they can maximize profits by maintaining good margins with relatively small market share, rather than trying to increase market share substantially with much lower margins (at least for computers- portable music players is a totally different story; Apple seems to be able to command pretty good margins *and* high market share; good for them).
It's too bad, b/c the world could use more Macs, but it's a sane strategy. Apple has picked their niche and is nailing it. It'd be insane for them to try to challenge Dell and/or MS head-on; they'd get crushed (again).
That said, I will watch the evolution of the Mac Mini, presumably poised to be the (cliched) household digital hub, with much interest.
Because it's a Thinkpad, and Thinkpads are awesome. I love my T40, and I'd like it even more if the screen swiveled (there are a lot of work contexts where this would be useful. I also sometimes need to surf a little at home w/ a baby on my lap).
I even prefer my T40 over my wife's G4 Powerbook (but that's mainly because I'm addicted to the red dot thingy).
Let's hope Lenovo doesn't destroy the brand.
There you go. See how well that works? Now your searches won't return all of my "How to steal ideas for fun and profit" sites.
Now it occurs to me that you may *want*, for research purposes, say, search for untrusted sites, so that should be a search parameter.
This isn't an original idea, but I can't remember where I most recently read about the concept, so I'll go ahead and say it's mine:
Trust for things like email senders and web sites shouldn't be centralized. My web of trusted entities, which should be easy to maintain (unlike, say, blacklists or whitelists) and should evolve semi-automatically, should be based on the interaction of my trusted sites/entities, and, in turn, their trusted sites/entities. Sort of like TrustRank, but where each person determines their own initial seed of trusted sites/entities. Of course, if you didn't want to deal with choosing seeds, you'd just pick Google as your trusted site.
This is of course a horribly abstract idea, and I have no idea how I'd implement this for 1 or a million users, but hey, you gotta start with the vision.
It always interests me when folks generalize their personal experiences and observations into "almost everyone/hardly anyone...".
My experience in suburbia is that plenty of people still get print newspapers delivered. But when I lived in a city, not so much. I'm guessing the parent lives in an urban area...
It's less than a year old, at least for the U.S. Northeast; the 2 trees we cut down last fall next to my house (very sad, one was the most beautiful maple) don't show up.
... so it must be time to head over to ./ and BITCH about the lame April Fool's jokes!
./ for a full day. Or at least a few more hours than usual...
Me, I love April 1 because I can ignore
Looks like M&M have a blog too...
The debate is well-documented (by the Mann team, at least) here, here, here.
He's morally bankrupt but feels good about himself. Obviously a product of the publik edukashun sistim.
How does this follow? Have you by any chance ever attended a private school?
Actually, peak electrical load in the northeast is in the summer, also for air conditioning. It does get hot (and humid).
In fact, the electrical demand peaks and solar availability peaks are fairly well aligned, making solar power (if affordable) a decent source to help cover peak demand.
Raw electrical demand data for New England, by hour: http://www.iso-ne.com/Historical_Data/hist_data.h
Most heat around here comes from natural gas or oil.
Primary sources please, or at least tell me what keywords to search on.
And are we talking capital cost for capacity, or what? Shouldn't we be talking fully amortized cost per kWh?
And yes, I know that solar energy is not economically competitive today. I do disagree with your implicit argument that it never could be.
That looks like electrocution from all sources- fallen wires, etc. This is an interesting reference... shoot, I gotta stop riding my bike and get me an SUV. And keep the lights in my house nice and bright, so I don't get murdered.
... thanks for the ride.
We're officially in crackpot logic world here (masquerading as quantitative fact, my favorite)
Please tell me why an alternative energy source has to be able to replace 100% of electricity to be viable?
Thanks for the newsflash. Hence my comment about *affordable solar enery). Efficiency has everything to do with figuring out if solar power could ever supply a significant portion of our energy, just based on the availability of solar power, which I think was pretty clearly the point of my calculation.
Also, efficiency indirectly impacts the economics of solar power, because it affects how much infrastructure you need to hold the cells, etc.
Finally, it just so happens that I do know something about economics... and I do get excited about potentially low-cost solar power with ~10% efficiency.
Are you frickin serious?
So you are saying that use of solar panels will lead to the destruction of our physical infrastructure and the death of thousands?
What was I thinking?
It's a good thing tha coal mining and oil drilling are such safe industries.