You deserve mockery for bothering to type that sentence. I would be worthy of mocking if I wrote back and suggested that you're too stupid to understand context, or because you're so dumb that you think there is the off chance that there was no context. But I won't; instead I will state my opinion that you posted that to try to get in a cheap shot, one that is so blatantly sophomoric that it deserves mockery.
> you're still likely to be wrong as nearly everyone who made bald assertions about the limits of technology
As it seems that you've missed the *entire point of the article*, I will point it out again:
The issue is that there is always more than one technology. And you don't use inferior tech if you have a choice.
Flown in a zeppelin recently? Why not? Because someone invented heavier-than-air flight? Got a lot of vacuum tubes that need replacement? None? Maybe because transistors are cheaper, more reliable, smaller and more powerful? Punch card machine OK? What, you don't use punch cards? Why not? They work fine.
And for all the other readers out there: the point of the article is that we have a long way to go from today's generation systems to fusion. There are *many* other sources of power that lie between the two price points, all of which can supply all the energy the world needs. Fusion is way down a long list, even if it ever works.
> The device does not need to have an economic value exceeding the value of the energy it produces
Putting aside the opening for mockery in this statement for the moment, it appears you again missing the entire point of the article.
There are hundreds and hundreds of ways to generate power on industrial scales. Most of those are cheaper than fusion. And because of that, we have a long stack of things to get through, long enough that its effectively infinite.
For instance, it's technically trivial to make a gas turbine run on peanut oil. Peanuts are 100% renewable and burning them releases no net CO2. Yet we don't do that, because peanuts sell for about $1/kg, which gives heating costs well above NG.
Now you might say that NG prices might go up and up, and someday that means it's possible that we might want to run on peanut oil. But the problem is that it's not just NG and peanuts, there's also soy, sunflower, corn oil, all sorts of things. And soy will always be cheaper than peanuts.
Before we get to peanut turbines you have to go through soy, and only after we get through NG. Before we get to fusion, we have to get through wind, PV, tidal, more hydro, and dozens upon dozens of other ideas.
> there are lots of ways to make the energy it produces more valuable
Not there's only one: raising prices. Unless you are going to weasel-word your definition of "value", of course.
> and cheaper energy will actually tend to increase consumption as more applications become economically viable
Building a device that produces energy for higher prices does not lead to cheaper energy.
> As for your sucky blog
BTW, thanks for your post, I got a definite uptick in readers as soon as you posted it, Mr Streisand.
No design *ever* made can demonstrate that it can generate more *money* than it takes to run. This is important.
Everyone is focused on break-even. It is entirely possible that ITER will reach that, at which point everyone will claim the problem is solved.
No, the *actual* problem is that the device costs far, far more than that economic value of the energy it produces. The interest payments will cost more money than it could make selling power.
You are, literally, better off burning dollar bills for power.
> Progress per dollar has been roughly in line with initial predictions
Ummm, no. Initial predictions, which were made in the 1950s (I have the original papers if you want them) said 10 years and a couple of million. Ten years later it was 15 years and a couple of hundred million. Now it's 25 years and tens of billions.
Let's put this very simply: the price/performance ratio of fusion reactors has not improved at all. We went from uselessly tiny amounts of energy for minuscule amounts of money (Tuck and Ware build theirs from a surplus WWII radar and a glass tube) to reasonable amounts of power for enormous amounts of money.
"Perhaps the biggest roadblock to adopting fusion energy is that the economics haven't penciled out."
Haven't pencilled out? Sure they have, at about TEN TIMES the price of PV. Why would I want to build a reactor here when I can just download for 1/10th the cost. You know, napster.
"They have designed a concept for a fusion reactor that, when scaled up to the size of a large electrical power plant"
Like every other plant that said the same thing but then ran into intractable problems when scaled up?
Never forget why we don't have flying cars already. After all, strapping wings to a car is not particularly difficult. Doing so and not dying in the process is another matter.
I haven't run the numbers yet, but there are two problems I see right off the bat:
1) the standard of living does not require the same amount of energy in different places
An good chunk of the US's 97 quads of energy goes into heating. You, obviously, don't need as much of that in Kenya as you do in Toronto. And before you say "I always heard... about aircon", the energy budget of cold areas is higher than warm:
While this article focuses on the US, its unlikely that other areas of the planet adjust this enough to account for the **3.5 times** difference in energy budgets. So if one looks at Germany and US as two bookends on an energy budget, one might expect that the same standard of living in Kenya could take half as much energy in terms of heating/cooling.
2) it assumes that future economies will be industrial
Take a look at this graph:
http://www.eia.gov/beta/MER/?tbl=T02.01#/?f=M
Note that energy use for Residential and Commercial are seasonal, peaking in the winter - that's the heating load. Note that transportation and industrial aren't really seasonal, at least nowhere near as much. Now consider that the #1 item on that list is industrial.
Ok, do you think the African economies of 2050 will use as much energy in their industrial sector as the most heavily industrialized nation does? I don't. In fact, I think that they will have both less industrialization and less energy intensity in that industrialization.
3)...and long distance
On that same graph you see that transport is the 2nd largest energy use. This is in a nation that developed when energy for transit was essentially free. That is not the case anywhere else, in the past or future. European cities, especially older ones (which tends to be most of them) are generally denser, because they were developing much of their structure in an era when transport was essentially infinitely valuable. I strongly suspect that the sort of low-density urban sprawl encountered from the 1950s through to 2000 is largely burned out. There are still suburbs going in in Toronto, but the condo boom drawfs them. And let's not forget that cars in 2050 will likely be twice as efficient as today.
So, as I said this is number free, but I strongly suspect that if one applies reasonable estimates to the figures and considers what economies might be like that different conclusions will be reached.
> I didn't see anything about how much more efficient this is than generating electricity directly, > but presumably it's better since the solar cell responds best to a specific wavelength
Single-junction cells have a single band-gap energy that defines the minimum energy of a photon that will cause photoemission. In the case of silicon that's about 1.1 eV, which corresponds to light in the near infrared (really near, basically red).
When white light shines on a cell, every that's red-or-higher can cause photoemission. This process is surprisingly efficient, real-world numbers are on the order of 90% or better. Some of those re-combine or get lost in other processes, so in terms of *current* something like 50% or better is what you aim for.
The problem is that the extra energy in, say, a blue photon will not make it to the collector on the surface of the cell. Along the way it will interact with other particles in the material and give up its extra energy, mostly as heat. So blue light, which has twice the energy of red, comes out the same as red light. So you're not losing current, you're losing voltage. This is the major loss mechanism in conventional PV.
So it's not that the cell is more *efficient* if you shine red light on it. The power coming out would be exactly the same as if you shone the same amount of white light on the cell. If you shine 1000 photons on the cell you'll get about 500 0.5V electrons out, and it doesn't make a difference what energy those photons are, as long as they're over the band gap. The difference is that it would take more energy to generate 100 photons of blue than red, but you get the same energy back out in either case - so that's a loss.
The other effect that comes into play is the thermal coefficient. If you simply shake something, electrons inside will start moving around. One easy way to do this is heat it up. When this happens you leave behind "holes" which the photoelectrons can get captured by. So there is a relationship between cell temperature and efficiency.
So if you shine red light on a cell and that causes 50% of the energy to come out, the heating effect is the other 50% (well, less, but you get the idea). If you shine white light on it and get 20% of the energy out (which is about right these days) that means 80% of the energy goes into heating. This will cause the cell to heat up, which will lower efficiency.
How much? Not *that* much. My 230W panels make about 200W on a good fall day, and maybe 185 during the height of summer.
Holy smokes Motherboard's posts suck. They don't even bother to try to understand the BS they're spewing.
"Light from the sun arrives here on Earth's surface in a wide variety of forms"
Light from the sun arrives here on Earth in exactly one form, photons. The only difference between a red photon and a blue photon is its kinetic energy. If a Honda Civic is driving down the road at 20 mph, and then speeds up to 30 mph, would you say those were two different forms of car?
"The band gap is a feature of photovoltaic solar cells in particular. "
The band gap is a feature of all semi-conductors, which is *why* they're semi-conductors.
"This collision delivers a bunch of extra force to those atoms, which respond by shedding electrons"
Gah.
'The catch with thermophotovoltaics is that in order to be suitably efficient..."
Which they aren't. That's why we don't use them. Or the large variety of other up- and down-conversion systems that attempt to do the same thing through different means. Like photo-emissive plastics. Silicon is cheap and getting cheaper, and that's the bottom line.
There are only a few threats that wouldn't take out Mars too. A meteorite and a plague are the two that come to mind.
Others would likely effect both. A real global war would likely spill over. A passing black hole, solar system, etc, would kill both too.
And then the bigger question: who cares? I don't think anyone on Sirius would mind if we all disappeared. Nor most of the millions of species here on this planet.
> Because there isn't really a good pie yet, they take far too long to pay off and can be > dangerous to air traffic and wild life if they are A. in the wrong place, or B. installed incorrectly.
Note the conflation of a single location on the planet with every system everywhere.
> Oh, and if they don't have over spec'd components, they can cause a phenonom called "flicker" > which is destructive of delicate electronics like your fridge, washing machine, A/C, and computer
Offgrid PV systems are far *less* susceptible to flicker than the grid. Which shouldn't be surprising given that off grid PV systems are essentially a very large UPS.
Expect more AC posts like this, the power companies are paying green washers to come up with moronic arguments so people in the same tribe can re-post them thinking they actually make sense and won't look like a tool in the process:
I noticed this too. I bought Ikea and Cree "60 watt" rated bulbs, and they were much brighter than the 60W Sylvanias and Philips I took out of the fixture. A LOT brighter, I took a photo:
I had a three-lamp fixture in the kitchen and after replacing the bulbs the room was much brighter overall. Too bright at first, but we quickly got used to it.
I remember watching some show on a river in Africa that never makes it to the coast. Every spring it starts as a rushing torrent, but as the thaw ends and the water spreads out it evaporates and sinks into the land, leaving a huge inland river delta.
On can construct a similar imaginary money river for this story. $10 million? It will never see hardware, that money will disappear into the bureaucracy like water into the African plains.
To put this in perspective, $10 million is what, one hour of iPhone sales? That's how important the NSF considers this?
> While solar and wind have their place, it would be much more effective to complement them with nuclear instead.
And as soon as you figure out a way to reduce CAPEX by four times, it will.
Every reactor under construction in a country where we can believe the accounting is currently running late, and thus overbudget, and the average CAPEX is around $9/W. A wind turbine goes in for just over $1. That's just the way it is, and until someone fixes that, its going to keep being that way.
> Hydro and geothermal are cheap compared to other renewables in terms of cost per kWh.
Hydro yes, geo is generally not competitive, which is why it remains relatively rare.
> The cost for wind and solar is coming down a little as technology improves, but it is still very > high compared to gas or coal fired plants
This is simply not true. Wind generation in the US currently goes in for about 5 to 6 cents/kWh, which is *very* competitive with coal even without carbon capture pricing. PV is more expensive, but only if one compares it to baseload power, if one compares it to peakers, especially NG peakers, the price is extremely competitive.
Page 2 shows *unsubsidized* LCoE. Note that commercial PV is *significantly* cheaper than NG peakers, which is why NG+PV makes such a great combo package.
Slashdot Mirror
Well it definitely has no shielding. Or lithium blanket. Let's file that under "ummm, you can't do that".
> otherwise you deserve mockery
You deserve mockery for bothering to type that sentence. I would be worthy of mocking if I wrote back and suggested that you're too stupid to understand context, or because you're so dumb that you think there is the off chance that there was no context. But I won't; instead I will state my opinion that you posted that to try to get in a cheap shot, one that is so blatantly sophomoric that it deserves mockery.
> you're still likely to be wrong as nearly everyone who made bald assertions about the limits of technology
As it seems that you've missed the *entire point of the article*, I will point it out again:
The issue is that there is always more than one technology. And you don't use inferior tech if you have a choice.
Flown in a zeppelin recently? Why not? Because someone invented heavier-than-air flight?
Got a lot of vacuum tubes that need replacement? None? Maybe because transistors are cheaper, more reliable, smaller and more powerful?
Punch card machine OK? What, you don't use punch cards? Why not? They work fine.
And for all the other readers out there: the point of the article is that we have a long way to go from today's generation systems to fusion. There are *many* other sources of power that lie between the two price points, all of which can supply all the energy the world needs. Fusion is way down a long list, even if it ever works.
> The device does not need to have an economic value exceeding the value of the energy it produces
Putting aside the opening for mockery in this statement for the moment, it appears you again missing the entire point of the article.
There are hundreds and hundreds of ways to generate power on industrial scales. Most of those are cheaper than fusion. And because of that, we have a long stack of things to get through, long enough that its effectively infinite.
For instance, it's technically trivial to make a gas turbine run on peanut oil. Peanuts are 100% renewable and burning them releases no net CO2. Yet we don't do that, because peanuts sell for about $1/kg, which gives heating costs well above NG.
Now you might say that NG prices might go up and up, and someday that means it's possible that we might want to run on peanut oil. But the problem is that it's not just NG and peanuts, there's also soy, sunflower, corn oil, all sorts of things. And soy will always be cheaper than peanuts.
Before we get to peanut turbines you have to go through soy, and only after we get through NG. Before we get to fusion, we have to get through wind, PV, tidal, more hydro, and dozens upon dozens of other ideas.
> there are lots of ways to make the energy it produces more valuable
Not there's only one: raising prices. Unless you are going to weasel-word your definition of "value", of course.
> and cheaper energy will actually tend to increase consumption as more applications become economically viable
Building a device that produces energy for higher prices does not lead to cheaper energy.
> As for your sucky blog
BTW, thanks for your post, I got a definite uptick in readers as soon as you posted it, Mr Streisand.
> Chicken vs. Egg
No design *ever* made can demonstrate that it can generate more *money* than it takes to run. This is important.
Everyone is focused on break-even. It is entirely possible that ITER will reach that, at which point everyone will claim the problem is solved.
No, the *actual* problem is that the device costs far, far more than that economic value of the energy it produces. The interest payments will cost more money than it could make selling power.
You are, literally, better off burning dollar bills for power.
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/why-fusion-will-never-happen/
It's not a new design in that respect. Spheromak's have been around for decades. They don't work.
> That's a defining feature of a stellarator is its stability due to the lack of plasma current
LOLZ. Yeah sure, if one defines "stability" as "takes longer than 1/10th a microsecond before hitting the confinement walls".
Seriously, go get the test reports from Stellarator B, you can find them on the 'net.
Things have not changed. W7 holds the record for stellarator confinement times at a whole *40 ms*.
> Stellarators beg to differ.
Why? They've been unstable even longer than tokamaks.
> Progress per dollar has been roughly in line with initial predictions
Ummm, no. Initial predictions, which were made in the 1950s (I have the original papers if you want them) said 10 years and a couple of million.
Ten years later it was 15 years and a couple of hundred million.
Now it's 25 years and tens of billions.
Let's put this very simply: the price/performance ratio of fusion reactors has not improved at all. We went from uselessly tiny amounts of energy for minuscule amounts of money (Tuck and Ware build theirs from a surplus WWII radar and a glass tube) to reasonable amounts of power for enormous amounts of money.
"Fusion energy almost sounds too good to be true"
No it doesn't.
http://matter2energy.wordpress...
"Perhaps the biggest roadblock to adopting fusion energy is that the economics haven't penciled out."
Haven't pencilled out? Sure they have, at about TEN TIMES the price of PV. Why would I want to build a reactor here when I can just download for 1/10th the cost. You know, napster.
"They have designed a concept for a fusion reactor that, when scaled up to the size of a large electrical power plant"
Like every other plant that said the same thing but then ran into intractable problems when scaled up?
And I do mean *every* one.
"We live in a period were people generally dislike science and technology."
US people maybe. Canada has over 60% approval for sciences.
But what do you expect? Canada also lacks the billions of dollars it took for corporations to convince you science is bad.
> Red and blue LED light are great for plants, but human eyes are most sensitive to the middle of the visual spectrum, peaking around green
Yellow. The color of the sun. Obviously.
> no technology that produces an efficient green LED
Sigh.
More or less important than Invar?
Been waiting for this one for a while. Fully deserved.
Never forget why we don't have flying cars already. After all, strapping wings to a car is not particularly difficult. Doing so and not dying in the process is another matter.
http://world.std.com/~jlr/doom/blake.htm
I haven't run the numbers yet, but there are two problems I see right off the bat:
1) the standard of living does not require the same amount of energy in different places
An good chunk of the US's 97 quads of energy goes into heating. You, obviously, don't need as much of that in Kenya as you do in Toronto. And before you say "I always heard... about aircon", the energy budget of cold areas is higher than warm:
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/1/014050/article
While this article focuses on the US, its unlikely that other areas of the planet adjust this enough to account for the **3.5 times** difference in energy budgets. So if one looks at Germany and US as two bookends on an energy budget, one might expect that the same standard of living in Kenya could take half as much energy in terms of heating/cooling.
2) it assumes that future economies will be industrial
Take a look at this graph:
http://www.eia.gov/beta/MER/?tbl=T02.01#/?f=M
Note that energy use for Residential and Commercial are seasonal, peaking in the winter - that's the heating load. Note that transportation and industrial aren't really seasonal, at least nowhere near as much. Now consider that the #1 item on that list is industrial.
Ok, do you think the African economies of 2050 will use as much energy in their industrial sector as the most heavily industrialized nation does? I don't. In fact, I think that they will have both less industrialization and less energy intensity in that industrialization.
3) ...and long distance
On that same graph you see that transport is the 2nd largest energy use. This is in a nation that developed when energy for transit was essentially free. That is not the case anywhere else, in the past or future. European cities, especially older ones (which tends to be most of them) are generally denser, because they were developing much of their structure in an era when transport was essentially infinitely valuable. I strongly suspect that the sort of low-density urban sprawl encountered from the 1950s through to 2000 is largely burned out. There are still suburbs going in in Toronto, but the condo boom drawfs them. And let's not forget that cars in 2050 will likely be twice as efficient as today.
So, as I said this is number free, but I strongly suspect that if one applies reasonable estimates to the figures and considers what economies might be like that different conclusions will be reached.
> China and India are going to build out nuclear power and produce en
Both are building wind and solar much faster than nuclear.
MUCH faster.
> I didn't see anything about how much more efficient this is than generating electricity directly,
> but presumably it's better since the solar cell responds best to a specific wavelength
Single-junction cells have a single band-gap energy that defines the minimum energy of a photon that will cause photoemission. In the case of silicon that's about 1.1 eV, which corresponds to light in the near infrared (really near, basically red).
When white light shines on a cell, every that's red-or-higher can cause photoemission. This process is surprisingly efficient, real-world numbers are on the order of 90% or better. Some of those re-combine or get lost in other processes, so in terms of *current* something like 50% or better is what you aim for.
The problem is that the extra energy in, say, a blue photon will not make it to the collector on the surface of the cell. Along the way it will interact with other particles in the material and give up its extra energy, mostly as heat. So blue light, which has twice the energy of red, comes out the same as red light. So you're not losing current, you're losing voltage. This is the major loss mechanism in conventional PV.
So it's not that the cell is more *efficient* if you shine red light on it. The power coming out would be exactly the same as if you shone the same amount of white light on the cell. If you shine 1000 photons on the cell you'll get about 500 0.5V electrons out, and it doesn't make a difference what energy those photons are, as long as they're over the band gap. The difference is that it would take more energy to generate 100 photons of blue than red, but you get the same energy back out in either case - so that's a loss.
The other effect that comes into play is the thermal coefficient. If you simply shake something, electrons inside will start moving around. One easy way to do this is heat it up. When this happens you leave behind "holes" which the photoelectrons can get captured by. So there is a relationship between cell temperature and efficiency.
So if you shine red light on a cell and that causes 50% of the energy to come out, the heating effect is the other 50% (well, less, but you get the idea). If you shine white light on it and get 20% of the energy out (which is about right these days) that means 80% of the energy goes into heating. This will cause the cell to heat up, which will lower efficiency.
How much? Not *that* much. My 230W panels make about 200W on a good fall day, and maybe 185 during the height of summer.
Holy smokes Motherboard's posts suck. They don't even bother to try to understand the BS they're spewing.
"Light from the sun arrives here on Earth's surface in a wide variety of forms"
Light from the sun arrives here on Earth in exactly one form, photons. The only difference between a red photon and a blue photon is its kinetic energy. If a Honda Civic is driving down the road at 20 mph, and then speeds up to 30 mph, would you say those were two different forms of car?
"The band gap is a feature of photovoltaic solar cells in particular. "
The band gap is a feature of all semi-conductors, which is *why* they're semi-conductors.
"This collision delivers a bunch of extra force to those atoms, which respond by shedding electrons"
Gah.
'The catch with thermophotovoltaics is that in order to be suitably efficient..."
Which they aren't. That's why we don't use them. Or the large variety of other up- and down-conversion systems that attempt to do the same thing through different means. Like photo-emissive plastics. Silicon is cheap and getting cheaper, and that's the bottom line.
Most existential disasters are...
1) man-made
2) larger than one planet in scope
There are only a few threats that wouldn't take out Mars too. A meteorite and a plague are the two that come to mind.
Others would likely effect both. A real global war would likely spill over. A passing black hole, solar system, etc, would kill both too.
And then the bigger question: who cares? I don't think anyone on Sirius would mind if we all disappeared. Nor most of the millions of species here on this planet.
> Because there isn't really a good pie yet, they take far too long to pay off and can be
> dangerous to air traffic and wild life if they are A. in the wrong place, or B. installed incorrectly.
Note the conflation of a single location on the planet with every system everywhere.
> Oh, and if they don't have over spec'd components, they can cause a phenonom called "flicker"
> which is destructive of delicate electronics like your fridge, washing machine, A/C, and computer
Offgrid PV systems are far *less* susceptible to flicker than the grid. Which shouldn't be surprising given that off grid PV systems are essentially a very large UPS.
Expect more AC posts like this, the power companies are paying green washers to come up with moronic arguments so people in the same tribe can re-post them thinking they actually make sense and won't look like a tool in the process:
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2014/04/30/wont-anyone-think-of-the-seniors/
I noticed this too. I bought Ikea and Cree "60 watt" rated bulbs, and they were much brighter than the 60W Sylvanias and Philips I took out of the fixture. A LOT brighter, I took a photo:
http://maurysrandomproductreviews.wordpress.com/2013/12/05/leds-cree-and-ikea-ledare-60w-replacements/
I had a three-lamp fixture in the kitchen and after replacing the bulbs the room was much brighter overall. Too bright at first, but we quickly got used to it.
Well, specifically the electrolytic cap in the power converter.
I remember watching some show on a river in Africa that never makes it to the coast. Every spring it starts as a rushing torrent, but as the thaw ends and the water spreads out it evaporates and sinks into the land, leaving a huge inland river delta.
On can construct a similar imaginary money river for this story. $10 million? It will never see hardware, that money will disappear into the bureaucracy like water into the African plains.
To put this in perspective, $10 million is what, one hour of iPhone sales? That's how important the NSF considers this?
How about pandas?
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/why-fusion-will-never-happen/
> While solar and wind have their place, it would be much more effective to complement them with nuclear instead.
And as soon as you figure out a way to reduce CAPEX by four times, it will.
Every reactor under construction in a country where we can believe the accounting is currently running late, and thus overbudget, and the average CAPEX is around $9/W. A wind turbine goes in for just over $1. That's just the way it is, and until someone fixes that, its going to keep being that way.
> Hydro and geothermal are cheap compared to other renewables in terms of cost per kWh.
Hydro yes, geo is generally not competitive, which is why it remains relatively rare.
> The cost for wind and solar is coming down a little as technology improves, but it is still very
> high compared to gas or coal fired plants
This is simply not true. Wind generation in the US currently goes in for about 5 to 6 cents/kWh, which is *very* competitive with coal even without carbon capture pricing. PV is more expensive, but only if one compares it to baseload power, if one compares it to peakers, especially NG peakers, the price is extremely competitive.
Here's some relatively recent 3rd party numbers:
http://gallery.mailchimp.com/ce17780900c3d223633ecfa59/files/Lazard_Levelized_Cost_of_Energy_v7.0.1.pdf
Page 2 shows *unsubsidized* LCoE. Note that commercial PV is *significantly* cheaper than NG peakers, which is why NG+PV makes such a great combo package.