That isn't the way things work. People don't just get together one day and decide to cover an area equivelent to the size of Alaska with solar cells.
Where did I say that this had to be done all at once? Nobody got together decided to suddenly pump and refine 70 million barrels of oil per day. It built up gradually. I was just demonstrating one way that it could eventually grow beyond the limitations people bring up about available land area.
No offense, but we haven't even made the cells themselves generally practical, much less large deployments of them.
Nothing we have was "practical" until someone started working on it. Since this was a story about someone claiming (yes, it's an unproven claim) to have made a step in that direction, it makes sense to talk about what could be done if it were practical.
Just print out solar cells on platic wrap, glue it to large styrofoam balls, put up some chicken wire fences in the ocean, run some wires back to shore... PROFIT!
That's the idea. I'm saying don't assume that you need to make it expensive or complicated. Why would you want to do that if you can figure out a better way? (Except wires would be silly; it would be better to collect storable fuel and ship it to where it's needed.)
Why does any one solution need to be 100%?
Because the original point I was replying to was that solar power could "never supply all of our energy needs".
At any rate, nuclear power couldn't provide even a significant fraction of our energy needs for more than a few decades without switching to breeder reactors.
Actually, I'd assume each one is about 1 square meter, so you'd have 1 trillion of these things, probably corralled in floating pens. Each one would be treated like a farmer treats a stalk of corn: totally automatically with big equipment. Like I said somewhere up near the top of the thread, photosynthesis makes the most sense since it *is* the "chemical factory". Each collector would produce ~1 gallon of oil per year, and might only be visited once per year.
An implementation with photovoltaics instead of photosynthesis would have to produce hydrogen, which would be a trickier problem. It would need a tiny electrolysis cell, which would probably jack up the price a bit. You would probably have to extract hydrogen gas from each collector several times per year, or else figure out how to link collectors up to collect it continuously.
There are no hurricanes anywhere near the equator (due to lack of Coriolis effect). At any rate, I envision small independent balloon-like collectors floating in the water that wouldn't be effected much by wind or waves. The trickiest part would be building suitable floating fences to corral them. They wouldn't produce electricity for direct consumption; they would generate and store up hydrogen or hydrocarbon fuel that would be "harvested" periodically.
The numbers quoted for the particular cells in this story were contradictory and confusing everybody. I would assume that 10% raw efficiency would be the minimum practical for large deployments. Maybe this company has achieved that, maybe not. Given that high-tech cells are pushing 30% efficiency, cheap cells at 10% shouldn't be impossible.
As I mentioned in another rely to you, the estimated cost of solar power is almost always limited to the cost of the cell itself.
You're correct about that. However, at this massive deployment level, I'm assuming that a plastic-based solar cell technology or bioengineered photosynthesis medium would have an insignificant cost; the material would be spewed out like newsprint or plastic garbage bags are currently produced. My $30/m^2 WAG assumes that almost all of the cost is in the support systems.
Put the cells on a floating platform requiring extra resources and mainanence and the cost per square meter of solar power skyrockets.
I'm not assuming that it has to be on an expensive floating platform. For example, individual self-contained ~1 meter spheres floating on the water could be coralled in large floating pens and managed with ships that work similar to combine harvesters. That needn't be much more expensive than land-based solutions.
Well, there is nuclear power.
There's not enough uranium available to provide 100% of our energy needs unless we switch to using nothing but unproven and WMD proliferation-prone breeder reactors. After 50 years, we're still having problems dealing with the waste from and containing rogue states who play with simpler normal reactors. I don't see scaling up nuclear power production by the orders of magnitude required while maintaining reasonable safety and security as being any easier than alternative energy solutions.
Or taking the land away from someone else - that's always a good choice, right?
*Sigh* You're about the third person who didn't read closely enough to see that I was talking about putting the collectors ON THE OCEANS.
Now, this ignores the fact that the specified land area requires sunlight 24-7. Which it won't get. As a minimum, you have to double that.
But you're only the first person to not understand why I included a 1% overall system efficiency ratio which accounts for all of those losses.
but you're talking about four orders of magnitude bigger than any other engineering project in history....
It doesn't need to be a single large project, but a bunch of smaller scale individual operations. Current agricultural activities add up to a much larger overall area, and in the US, all of this is managed by ~1% of the population. It's not necessarily an insurmountable challenge.
Now, how much of that usable area is land (or close enough to land)?
It doesn't matter, since I proposed putting the collectors on the oceans. Presumably they would generate hydrocarbon or hydrogen fuel which would be transported by ship or pipeline to the location of use just like we do today.
That doesn't include the cost of deploying floating solar platforms with maintenance.
That's what I was addressing when I talked about massive highly automated deployment and maintenence equipment.
Isn't it possible that sea-life dependen on the sun, would get affected?
We're talking about less than 1/2 of 1% of the total ocean area. Did anybody consider what would happen before we altered 25% or more of the total land area, or before we started harvesting 90% of the population of various ocean species? Why the sudden interest in side effects?
If the worst case global warming scenarios are correct and a lot of glaciers melt, the size of the oceans will be altered by much more than 0.5% anyway.
Here's my viewpoint: If you put collectors up over 0.5% of the ocean, you create side effects with that order of magnitude. If you release CO2, it continually accumulates in the atmosphere, and it hasn't been determined if natural processes will remove it in any reasonable amount of time. Some scientists predict that its level will double over pre-existing levels; that's a 100% increase in an important climactic variable. The side effects from our current activities will likely to be much greater than anything that would happen with solar collectors.
Will it not become a burden to the sea-routes and a danger to ships?
That's why it's good modern technology has brought us GPS, radar and RFID.
Who would be legally responsable? What if they are layed in international waters?
Some treaties would probably have to be created. Since they would involve something constructive, they would have a more positive tone than the proscriptive Kyoto treaty, and people would be more willing to participate. (We'll see if anybody actually abides by the Kyoto treaty when push comes to shove, or if it's all just talk.)
What is the cost of maintainance? How many will get wrecked by storms? Will it be economical viable?
Those are good questions. There are similar questions about fossil fuels, like would it be economically viable to dig thousands of wells from floating ocean platforms miles into the earth's crust. People did the hard work to find out, and the answer was yes. If people had given up just because the questions existed, we wouldn't have any energy supply today.
You mention wind power and wave power a lot. I agree that they won't ever add up to a large fraction of total energy supply, and that's because there is a limited supply of windy land area and shorelines. Solar collectors don't need to have that limitation. I'm all for fusion power too, but IMO its technical feasibility is currently even more questionable than my "crazy" proposal.
If you reread my post without being distracted by trying to come up with an oversimplified knee-jerk dittohead response, you'll see that I said that the collectors would float on oceans. No "paving".
Solar can't do it, not even a tenth of the required energy.
Sure it can. The problem is that people just don't think big enough.
Generally, current solar technology can harness and deliver to the consumer about 1% of overall solar influx per square meter (this applies to photovoltaics, thermal collectors or other means). With an overall world consumption of about 5e20 Joules/year and solar intensity of 1.4kW/m^2, you end up needing a total collector area about the size of Alaska.
That sounds big, but get out a globe and look at it. Alaska isn't all that big compared to the size of the earth, and we already utilize much more than that space just to grow food. Just the amount of space we've allocated for paved roads and parking lots worldwide adds up to a noticeable fraction of this amount.
If plastic photovoltaic or photosynthesis-based solar power collection systems were deployed in small patches floating on the oceans, all energy needs for the world could be supplied without much noticeable impact on the environment or people. (I think photosynthesis makes more sense because it can generate more convenient and storable hydrocarbon fuels and it can create the plastics used to build the systems out of thin air.)
The key is to develop highly automated industrial scale deployment and maintenence methods. Just like huge cargo ships currently operate with just a couple of people on board, these huge collectors would be tended to by a few people using massive automated equipment. If deployment costs can be reduced to $30/m^2 for example, it would take about $30Trillion to build the trillion square meters of collectors required. That's less than one year of the world's gross economic output, and only equivalent to a few years of total fossil fuel expenditures.
Why do all the Linux desktops emulate the Windows interface?
Buried in the bowels of my distro CDs are almost a dozen different Linux desktops, many of which are radically different from the Windows interface.
The problem is that most people, including me, don't like them. So the interface that looks like Windows gets the most attention.
It doesn't really have as much to do with Windows itself as the fact that the vast majority of computer users have spent their whole lives using computers that work a certain way, and they expect them to keep working like that. Unless there is a huge compelling reason to throw out all of that experience, it's best to leverage it.
I've been using KDE daily for over a year, that means KDE 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, and now 3.4 beta2, and I don't know what you are talking about.
I've been using it for 5 or 6 years, and I also can't think of any truly major UI changes over that time. It's mostly been a gradual evolution of small improvements.
Certainly nothing as jarring as the Win2K -> WinXP changes, where in the defaults for navigation the directory tree mostly got replaced by wishy-washy wizards that try to second-guess what you're doing.
But keep in mind, then, that every election that deploys such a system will no doubt have hand-recounts requested in each and every jurisdiction.
That's a good thing. Until the systems have been developed to a point where they can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt to every interested party that the electronic transactions are completely accurate and untainted, there should be a manual backup recount of every election.
If it's not possible for them to ever get to that point, then the whole idea should be scrapped in favor of pencils and paper.
The putative reasoning for going with electronic systems was likely that since we have managed to design accountable and reliable electronic and computing equipment for the management of our power, medical care, money, etc., it likely was more or less assumed by the legislature that such accountable systems could also be applied to voting.
That reasoning is flawed, as Bruce Schneier explains here:
Some have argued in favor of touch-screen voting systems, citing the millions of dollars that are handled every day by ATMs and other computerized financial systems. That argument ignores another vital characteristic of voting systems: anonymity. Computerized financial systems get most of their security from audit. If a problem is suspected, auditors can go back through the records of the system and figure out what happened. And if the problem turns out to be real, the transaction can be unwound and fixed. Because elections are anonymous, that kind of security just isn't possible.
The compiler is the proper place for the optimisations, the processor should be left to do the actual processing.
On the contrary, the compiler has no insight into the actual run-time behavior of the current dataset, and compiler development can lag updates in CPU features by many years.
Nobody knows how to optimize for the exact version of the CPU that a program is being run on than the CPU itself.
Bill Gates' efforts are a clear example of the benefits of privatized education. Our current public school system is a mess; it uses up 13 long years and produces nothing more than a high-school graduate with no degree.
OTOH, Microsoft's privatized school systems can transform anybody into an actual Certified Engineer in only a few short weeks! It's nothing short of a miracle. Why are we wasting so much time on the current public education system?
We need a federal law now that replaces all public school systems with privately-run certification programs. In the time that our children spend just to obtain a single worthless high school diploma, they could be earning literally dozens of valuable certification degrees.
One could define it as the mass of some number of H2O molecules, but maybe its easier a measure a quantity of light or to count some larger atoms.
It seems to me that just counting atoms runs into problems with relativity. Due to e=mc^2, the mass of some number of H20 molecules will be slightly different depending on what state they're in. By my quick calculation, the difference in energy between water and steam vs. the intrinsic energy of a gram of water is almost 1 in 1 billion. That's not much, but it's still not a rock-solid definition because it depends on external pressure and temperature factors.
Even if constant temperature and pressure were assumed, for water the precise energy is a function of wishy-washy chemistry lab details including what fraction of the molecules disassociate.
It seems if we're counting particles to determine energy/mass, it should be something as simple as possible. The photon idea seems best to me.
Anyway, asserting that a $100K fine levied on the operator of a nuclear power plant is going to have any significant financial impact whatsoever is just silly.
Clearchannel owns a good chunk of the overall market by itself. There are about 100 nuclear power plants in the US. If each of those is 1GW, now we're up to $75B total revenue.
Market capitalization is pretty meaningless with respect to fines. Fines are paid out of revenues.
I don't know where you get that idea. A 2GW nuclear site produces 48 million kilowatt hours per day; that's ultimately sold at retail for about $4 million per day, or about $1.5 billion per year.
A few thousand in fines is a drop in the bucket compared to that total revenue.
His sentence is probably that long because arson in general has heavy penalties. Those penalties are in force because many times arson results in deaths of firefighters and/or innocent victims caught in the fire.
If he wanted to destroy some SUVs, he would have been smarter to use a method that didn't involve fire.
If nuclear power plants didn't get government-subsidized insurance policies and had to buy them at fair market value that would tack a good chunk onto the nuclear plants' costs.
Not to mention the currently unknown costs of waste disposal, since the final plans are still up in the air after 50 years of study. It's hard to actually compare costs with wildcards like that.
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That doesn't have dual CPUs. The lowest price dual-CPU Mac I see on Apples website is $1999. That's 4X more.
Probably most of the PCs that are priced as high as a non-low-end Apple have dual CPUs as well.
Where did I say that this had to be done all at once? Nobody got together decided to suddenly pump and refine 70 million barrels of oil per day. It built up gradually. I was just demonstrating one way that it could eventually grow beyond the limitations people bring up about available land area.
No offense, but we haven't even made the cells themselves generally practical, much less large deployments of them.
Nothing we have was "practical" until someone started working on it. Since this was a story about someone claiming (yes, it's an unproven claim) to have made a step in that direction, it makes sense to talk about what could be done if it were practical.
Just print out solar cells on platic wrap, glue it to large styrofoam balls, put up some chicken wire fences in the ocean, run some wires back to shore... PROFIT!
That's the idea. I'm saying don't assume that you need to make it expensive or complicated. Why would you want to do that if you can figure out a better way? (Except wires would be silly; it would be better to collect storable fuel and ship it to where it's needed.)
Why does any one solution need to be 100%?
Because the original point I was replying to was that solar power could "never supply all of our energy needs".
At any rate, nuclear power couldn't provide even a significant fraction of our energy needs for more than a few decades without switching to breeder reactors.
An implementation with photovoltaics instead of photosynthesis would have to produce hydrogen, which would be a trickier problem. It would need a tiny electrolysis cell, which would probably jack up the price a bit. You would probably have to extract hydrogen gas from each collector several times per year, or else figure out how to link collectors up to collect it continuously.
Not if they're built like balloons with positive internal pressure.
The numbers quoted for the particular cells in this story were contradictory and confusing everybody. I would assume that 10% raw efficiency would be the minimum practical for large deployments. Maybe this company has achieved that, maybe not. Given that high-tech cells are pushing 30% efficiency, cheap cells at 10% shouldn't be impossible.
You're correct about that. However, at this massive deployment level, I'm assuming that a plastic-based solar cell technology or bioengineered photosynthesis medium would have an insignificant cost; the material would be spewed out like newsprint or plastic garbage bags are currently produced. My $30/m^2 WAG assumes that almost all of the cost is in the support systems.
Put the cells on a floating platform requiring extra resources and mainanence and the cost per square meter of solar power skyrockets.
I'm not assuming that it has to be on an expensive floating platform. For example, individual self-contained ~1 meter spheres floating on the water could be coralled in large floating pens and managed with ships that work similar to combine harvesters. That needn't be much more expensive than land-based solutions.
Well, there is nuclear power.
There's not enough uranium available to provide 100% of our energy needs unless we switch to using nothing but unproven and WMD proliferation-prone breeder reactors. After 50 years, we're still having problems dealing with the waste from and containing rogue states who play with simpler normal reactors. I don't see scaling up nuclear power production by the orders of magnitude required while maintaining reasonable safety and security as being any easier than alternative energy solutions.
*Sigh* You're about the third person who didn't read closely enough to see that I was talking about putting the collectors ON THE OCEANS.
Now, this ignores the fact that the specified land area requires sunlight 24-7. Which it won't get. As a minimum, you have to double that.
But you're only the first person to not understand why I included a 1% overall system efficiency ratio which accounts for all of those losses.
but you're talking about four orders of magnitude bigger than any other engineering project in history....
It doesn't need to be a single large project, but a bunch of smaller scale individual operations. Current agricultural activities add up to a much larger overall area, and in the US, all of this is managed by ~1% of the population. It's not necessarily an insurmountable challenge.
Because the windiest areas are created by land featues.
But they do have that limitation.
I just got done explaining how they don't. Maybe you can provide some detail to back up your assertion.
Being less "questionable" doesn't make it realistic.
Ok, so we're doomed once fossil fuels run out. Do you have any better ideas?
It doesn't matter, since I proposed putting the collectors on the oceans. Presumably they would generate hydrocarbon or hydrogen fuel which would be transported by ship or pipeline to the location of use just like we do today.
That doesn't include the cost of deploying floating solar platforms with maintenance.
That's what I was addressing when I talked about massive highly automated deployment and maintenence equipment.
We're talking about less than 1/2 of 1% of the total ocean area. Did anybody consider what would happen before we altered 25% or more of the total land area, or before we started harvesting 90% of the population of various ocean species? Why the sudden interest in side effects?
If the worst case global warming scenarios are correct and a lot of glaciers melt, the size of the oceans will be altered by much more than 0.5% anyway.
Here's my viewpoint: If you put collectors up over 0.5% of the ocean, you create side effects with that order of magnitude. If you release CO2, it continually accumulates in the atmosphere, and it hasn't been determined if natural processes will remove it in any reasonable amount of time. Some scientists predict that its level will double over pre-existing levels; that's a 100% increase in an important climactic variable. The side effects from our current activities will likely to be much greater than anything that would happen with solar collectors.
Will it not become a burden to the sea-routes and a danger to ships?
That's why it's good modern technology has brought us GPS, radar and RFID.
Who would be legally responsable? What if they are layed in international waters?
Some treaties would probably have to be created. Since they would involve something constructive, they would have a more positive tone than the proscriptive Kyoto treaty, and people would be more willing to participate. (We'll see if anybody actually abides by the Kyoto treaty when push comes to shove, or if it's all just talk.)
What is the cost of maintainance? How many will get wrecked by storms? Will it be economical viable?
Those are good questions. There are similar questions about fossil fuels, like would it be economically viable to dig thousands of wells from floating ocean platforms miles into the earth's crust. People did the hard work to find out, and the answer was yes. If people had given up just because the questions existed, we wouldn't have any energy supply today.
You mention wind power and wave power a lot. I agree that they won't ever add up to a large fraction of total energy supply, and that's because there is a limited supply of windy land area and shorelines. Solar collectors don't need to have that limitation. I'm all for fusion power too, but IMO its technical feasibility is currently even more questionable than my "crazy" proposal.
If you reread my post without being distracted by trying to come up with an oversimplified knee-jerk dittohead response, you'll see that I said that the collectors would float on oceans. No "paving".
Sure it can. The problem is that people just don't think big enough.
Generally, current solar technology can harness and deliver to the consumer about 1% of overall solar influx per square meter (this applies to photovoltaics, thermal collectors or other means). With an overall world consumption of about 5e20 Joules/year and solar intensity of 1.4kW/m^2, you end up needing a total collector area about the size of Alaska.
That sounds big, but get out a globe and look at it. Alaska isn't all that big compared to the size of the earth, and we already utilize much more than that space just to grow food. Just the amount of space we've allocated for paved roads and parking lots worldwide adds up to a noticeable fraction of this amount.
If plastic photovoltaic or photosynthesis-based solar power collection systems were deployed in small patches floating on the oceans, all energy needs for the world could be supplied without much noticeable impact on the environment or people. (I think photosynthesis makes more sense because it can generate more convenient and storable hydrocarbon fuels and it can create the plastics used to build the systems out of thin air.)
The key is to develop highly automated industrial scale deployment and maintenence methods. Just like huge cargo ships currently operate with just a couple of people on board, these huge collectors would be tended to by a few people using massive automated equipment. If deployment costs can be reduced to $30/m^2 for example, it would take about $30Trillion to build the trillion square meters of collectors required. That's less than one year of the world's gross economic output, and only equivalent to a few years of total fossil fuel expenditures.
Buried in the bowels of my distro CDs are almost a dozen different Linux desktops, many of which are radically different from the Windows interface. The problem is that most people, including me, don't like them. So the interface that looks like Windows gets the most attention.
It doesn't really have as much to do with Windows itself as the fact that the vast majority of computer users have spent their whole lives using computers that work a certain way, and they expect them to keep working like that. Unless there is a huge compelling reason to throw out all of that experience, it's best to leverage it.
I've been using it for 5 or 6 years, and I also can't think of any truly major UI changes over that time. It's mostly been a gradual evolution of small improvements.
Certainly nothing as jarring as the Win2K -> WinXP changes, where in the defaults for navigation the directory tree mostly got replaced by wishy-washy wizards that try to second-guess what you're doing.
That's a good thing. Until the systems have been developed to a point where they can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt to every interested party that the electronic transactions are completely accurate and untainted, there should be a manual backup recount of every election.
If it's not possible for them to ever get to that point, then the whole idea should be scrapped in favor of pencils and paper.
That reasoning is flawed, as Bruce Schneier explains here:
On the contrary, the compiler has no insight into the actual run-time behavior of the current dataset, and compiler development can lag updates in CPU features by many years.
Nobody knows how to optimize for the exact version of the CPU that a program is being run on than the CPU itself.
OTOH, Microsoft's privatized school systems can transform anybody into an actual Certified Engineer in only a few short weeks! It's nothing short of a miracle. Why are we wasting so much time on the current public education system?
We need a federal law now that replaces all public school systems with privately-run certification programs. In the time that our children spend just to obtain a single worthless high school diploma, they could be earning literally dozens of valuable certification degrees.
It seems to me that just counting atoms runs into problems with relativity. Due to e=mc^2, the mass of some number of H20 molecules will be slightly different depending on what state they're in. By my quick calculation, the difference in energy between water and steam vs. the intrinsic energy of a gram of water is almost 1 in 1 billion. That's not much, but it's still not a rock-solid definition because it depends on external pressure and temperature factors.
Even if constant temperature and pressure were assumed, for water the precise energy is a function of wishy-washy chemistry lab details including what fraction of the molecules disassociate.
It seems if we're counting particles to determine energy/mass, it should be something as simple as possible. The photon idea seems best to me.
Anyway, asserting that a $100K fine levied on the operator of a nuclear power plant is going to have any significant financial impact whatsoever is just silly.
Market capitalization is pretty meaningless with respect to fines. Fines are paid out of revenues.
I don't know where you get that idea. A 2GW nuclear site produces 48 million kilowatt hours per day; that's ultimately sold at retail for about $4 million per day, or about $1.5 billion per year.
A few thousand in fines is a drop in the bucket compared to that total revenue.
If he wanted to destroy some SUVs, he would have been smarter to use a method that didn't involve fire.
Not to mention the currently unknown costs of waste disposal, since the final plans are still up in the air after 50 years of study. It's hard to actually compare costs with wildcards like that.