The $7/watt figure here includes storage of 6 hours at maximum output. So for a 300 watt PV panel, exactly what is the fully installed and warrantied price of each 1.8KWh battery pack, including a 30+ year warranty at 365*100% discharge cycles/yr?
The answer is "irrelevant" because we're not within a factor of 100 of having more solar energy online than we can use in real time. The only people who back their PV with battery systems are 1) fools willing to pay a fortune for the privilege of thinking they're giving the utility company "the finger", and 2) people who absolutely can't get a grid connection (and are thus paying a fortune for their battery-backed PV).
It's also "irrelevant with prejudice" because the $7/watt thermal plant in question most obviously does not come with a 30-year warranty either. In fact, no one seems to want to talk about its operating costs, which are probably staggering.
Hmm, maybe you should think before speaking next time.
I'm thinking and typing. And you're acting like an asshole in public.
How much and by what means? It's pretty well accepted that PV will be at $2/watt in 3-4 years. Thermal needs at least a 4x improvement in power/$ to be even worth considering unless it provides some unique benefits. (Storage is not one of them--we're not within a factor of 100 of having more solar online than we can use in real time.)
It's not big but it's big enough for a proof of concept.
And at three square miles it's not exactly small, either. PV has the advantage of being arbitrarily scalable, and not requiring dedicated land, which means it can be sited closer to the point of use.
So in other words this thing makes perfect sense and bitching about it [...]
It might make sense under some very specific criteria, but that is far from conclusively established. And using the brain for critical thinking and asking reasonable questions is not "bitching".
The capital costs of most central collector designs also favor going bigger.
Yeah, people keep saying that, while sidestepping the fact that this thermal plant cost >$7/watt, while photovoltaics are around $4/watt and falling fast.
Base load is the easy stuff in power generation. The peaks are vastly greater than the minimum demand at night.
Absolutely. The whole thing about the sun not shining at night is a total red herring, because that's not a problem until the day we produce more solar energy than we can use in real time, and we're a couple orders of magnitude away from that good problem too have.
PV does not scale well since if you double the size you only double the output. With thermal solutions of all types you can get a lot more heat out of stuff if you have a lot of hot stuff
No, not really. The energy available is directly proportional to the collector area, be it PV or thermal.
Besides, installed PV is around $4/watt (and falling fast), while this thermal plant was over $7/watt.
Code that's successful tends to last a lot longer than its creators anticipated, so lay that foundation carefully. It's usually worth investing effort to do it as right as possible the first time. Doing it "quick and dirty" is the equivalent of mailing somebody a bomb, and often the recipient of that bomb will be you.
That said, there are some fantastic programmers in the quick-n-dirty catagory. Use them effectively--to throw together proofs of concept and demos, to explore alternate implementations, etc. Just don't let them manage the whole damn project.
As the codebase gets larger and older, collecting dependencies along the way, it gets exponentially more expensive to redesign/rework components. Sometimes those are the only good ways to fix bugs, so you'll end up with not-so-good band-aid fixes instead. Then, your technical debt is growing exponentially along with your codebase.
Sarcasm detected successfully, but for the record: According to the National Fire Protection Agency, there were an estimated 184,500 conventional highway vehicle fires in 2010. That's an average of 505 fire per day.
Why are we paying $4500 a year to get worse results than 20-30 other countries including many 1st world countries with otherwise similar costs of living?
Just for the record, Americans actually spend nearly $9000 per capita per year on health care (without actually covering everyone, of course). The $4500 you claimed would be an enormous improvement, but still worse than the UK, which spends about $3000/year, and actually covers everyone in the process.
IAAEVE (I am an electric vehicle engineer) and I worked on Li cell, battery, and powertrain technology that was licensed to Tesla.
The real problem is that nobody's allowed to make big batteries for use in cars because the oil companies bought up all the patents
Please stop spreading this BS rumor--it's been floating around the "EV community" for long enough, and it's totally untrue.
Anyone can license those patents, and no, Chevron's not going to build you any unless you want a LOT of them, but it doesn't even matter: No one wants to build NiMH cars anyway, because we have much better cells (Li-ion) now. Even hybrids, which need power (more so than energy) and were the last NiMH holdouts have moved to Lithium.
This is the reason they have to use 8000 tiny little flashlight batteries in cars instead of a few dozen big ones.
This is wrong in so many ways it makes my head hurt. First, you're confusing radically-different cell chemistires (NiMH vs. Li-ion). Second, the "flashlight" cells are actually 18650 Li cells, a form factor often used in notebook computers. Lastly, Telsa uses 18650 cells because they are (by a large margin) the best available in terms of energy density [Wh/kg]. If you want heavier or more expensive cells, there are plenty to choose from.
Just to add a bit to this, the verb "shot" is scarcely appropriate, because the 30mm shells the Apache fired are more like HE grenades than bullets (in both scale and effect). Totally disgusting.
$50B sounds like a lot, but for perspective keep in mind that Fukushima I generated on the order of $800,000 worth of energy every HOUR. (Assumptions: 4 GW * $0.20/kWh.)
At that rate, $50B works out to about 7 years worth of energy production.
Untill the world gets its act together and starts deploying more CANDU type reactors which by design cannot meltdown, I for one will still fight against nuclear power.
The right time to fight against nuclear power is the day after the last coal plant shuts down, because back in the real world, when nuclear shuts down, coal replaces it (immediately!) nearly 1 for 1, and coal kills many, many more people even when it is working nominally. (Coal generation also releases much more radiation into the atmosphere.)
Alternative energy proponents: Save it. I love 'em, too, and I back that up with the 7 kW of thermal and photovoltaics on my roof, but it doesn't change the fact that coal (and gas) are what ramp up (in real time) when nukes shut down. Examples abound.
Germany? Building new coal plants as it blathers about shutting down the nukes.
Japan? Partially made up for their nuclear shortfall with conservation (good!) but mostly with increased imports of coal (and especially LNG, brought to you by fracking).
Now that the last San Onofre units are offline, California will be compensating (forever) with additional coal and natural gas generation.
Until there really is a super-charger network from central Texas to California, I wish I could get one of the gas-powered (or gas-electric hybrid) Apteras.
If you're really making the Texas -> California road trip often enough that it's not an outlier, then an electric vehicle is not the right vehicle for you even if Tesla's Supercharger network (which is proprietary to Tesla, BTW) comes to fruition. The good news is that the (in)ability to make outlier trips like that doesn't have much bearing on the utility of EVs for the 3-4 standard deviations of driving that we do.
Thanks to fracking, natural gas is cheap, and unfortunately will probably remain so for a while. Yeah, it "only" emits about half as much CO2 as burning coal, which is like saying I'm "only" kicking you in the head once today, instead of twice.
Being an industry insider, I'm sometimes a little rough on Tesla, but if there's one reason I'm rooting for them, it's because I want someone to lay waste to the antiquated car dealer model in place in the US.
I just went into a [shall remain nameless] dealer over the weekend for the first time in a decade, and I'd forgotten how absolutely awful it is.
What if one of those email addresses is an old lady that gets scammed by a nigerian prince? What if it's 100 of those emails that that happens to?
If it's that serious then we need to find AT&T criminally negligent for letting absolutely anyone get all those private email address. If it's not that serious after all, then there's no point in railroading the guy who reported the problem, but we can't have it both ways.
Then sign up for Comcast, get a sweet deal because you're a new customer, pay $50 per month, and then cancel because you've used up your six strikes...
How about not giving money to ISPs like that in the first place? Out here we have sonic.net, one of the last remaining great independent ISPs (especially since Speakeasy sold out). They treat their customers like adults, and on the rare occasion that I've needed technical support, a knowledgable real person answers the phone on the first ring.
(Disclaimer--no affiliation other than as satisfied customer, blah blah blah.)
I enumerated some of them above, in the comment you replied to. Are you actually suggesting that hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") has no external costs?
AGW still is hypothetical [...]
I can see this is going to be an intellectual debate...
[...] and less severe with natural gas.
Less severe than what? Sure, natural gas releases slightly less CO2 than, say, burning coal, but remember, the comparison was to wind, here.
You have a bunch of unexamined assumptions here.
Are you actually suggesting that no one has studied global warming before?
And by what means does that calculation include the external costs of burning fossil fuels such as natural gas, releasing CO2, and the hydraulic fracturing that made the gas artificially cheap to begin with?
there are more than a few wannabe Steve McQueens who won't feel complete unless they can stomp on a pedal connected to an internal-combustion engine, flick a physical dashboard knob to the radio station of their choice, and peel out their driveway in a cloud of burning rubber.
This is conflating unrelated things (internal combustion holdouts with "cloud connecteness" and other user interface aspects).
Electric drive is coming, like it or not, and it's a great thing. As for the other, there are good and bad ways to execute, and it's healthy to be wary of change.
Software UI (a la what Tesla is shipping on the model S) can be a great thing, and there are also plenty of ways to do it poorly. I don't want to have to re-learn the controls every time the manufacturer hires a new UI designer and pushes out a software update, for example.
Ditto for connectivity. There are amazing applications for vehicle connectivity, and many that have not yet been conceived, but there's also a bad potential for orphaned products (dangerously close to "planned obsolescence"). Instead of losing content when a game service goes poof, you could lose a big piece of your car's functionality at the whim of the automaker (or a partner third party).
The NYT and Musk are both missing the point. EVs aren't well suited to road trips, and it doesn't matter because that kind of driving represents a tiny fraction of the driving we humans do. (Save your personal anecdotes to the contrary--they have no bearing on the facts.)
EVs can accomplish long distance travel if you're patient and determined, and Tesla's supercharger network has dramatically lowered the bar, but it still sucks, and fixating on it ignores all the aspects of EVs that are so much better than the alternatives.
AT&T tried this on me, twice in five years. The first time was immediately after I accidentally launched the "browser" in my ancient Treo 650.
Each time a simple phone call was all that we needed to have them undo it. Annoying, yes, but probably not even on the top 20 list of things I hate about AT&T.
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The $7/watt figure here includes storage of 6 hours at maximum output. So for a 300 watt PV panel, exactly what is the fully installed and warrantied price of each 1.8KWh battery pack, including a 30+ year warranty at 365*100% discharge cycles/yr?
The answer is "irrelevant" because we're not within a factor of 100 of having more solar energy online than we can use in real time. The only people who back their PV with battery systems are 1) fools willing to pay a fortune for the privilege of thinking they're giving the utility company "the finger", and 2) people who absolutely can't get a grid connection (and are thus paying a fortune for their battery-backed PV).
It's also "irrelevant with prejudice" because the $7/watt thermal plant in question most obviously does not come with a 30-year warranty either. In fact, no one seems to want to talk about its operating costs, which are probably staggering.
Hmm, maybe you should think before speaking next time.
I'm thinking and typing. And you're acting like an asshole in public.
Make it bigger and those costs come down.
How much and by what means? It's pretty well accepted that PV will be at $2/watt in 3-4 years. Thermal needs at least a 4x improvement in power/$ to be even worth considering unless it provides some unique benefits. (Storage is not one of them--we're not within a factor of 100 of having more solar online than we can use in real time.)
It's not big but it's big enough for a proof of concept.
And at three square miles it's not exactly small, either. PV has the advantage of being arbitrarily scalable, and not requiring dedicated land, which means it can be sited closer to the point of use.
So in other words this thing makes perfect sense and bitching about it [...]
It might make sense under some very specific criteria, but that is far from conclusively established. And using the brain for critical thinking and asking reasonable questions is not "bitching".
The capital costs of most central collector designs also favor going bigger.
Yeah, people keep saying that, while sidestepping the fact that this thermal plant cost >$7/watt, while photovoltaics are around $4/watt and falling fast.
Base load is the easy stuff in power generation. The peaks are vastly greater than the minimum demand at night.
Absolutely. The whole thing about the sun not shining at night is a total red herring, because that's not a problem until the day we produce more solar energy than we can use in real time, and we're a couple orders of magnitude away from that good problem too have.
PV does not scale well since if you double the size you only double the output. With thermal solutions of all types you can get a lot more heat out of stuff if you have a lot of hot stuff
No, not really. The energy available is directly proportional to the collector area, be it PV or thermal.
Besides, installed PV is around $4/watt (and falling fast), while this thermal plant was over $7/watt.
Code that's successful tends to last a lot longer than its creators anticipated, so lay that foundation carefully. It's usually worth investing effort to do it as right as possible the first time. Doing it "quick and dirty" is the equivalent of mailing somebody a bomb, and often the recipient of that bomb will be you.
That said, there are some fantastic programmers in the quick-n-dirty catagory. Use them effectively--to throw together proofs of concept and demos, to explore alternate implementations, etc. Just don't let them manage the whole damn project.
As the codebase gets larger and older, collecting dependencies along the way, it gets exponentially more expensive to redesign/rework components. Sometimes those are the only good ways to fix bugs, so you'll end up with not-so-good band-aid fixes instead. Then, your technical debt is growing exponentially along with your codebase.
This word is thrown around so many times I can only think of the famous line spoken by the Inigo Montoya character in The Princess Bride.
What, prepare to die?
obviously gasoline cars never catch on fire
Sarcasm detected successfully, but for the record: According to the National Fire Protection Agency, there were an estimated 184,500 conventional highway vehicle fires in 2010. That's an average of 505 fire per day.
Do you have a link to more recent data.
Here's a good starting point.
Why are we paying $4500 a year to get worse results than 20-30 other countries including many 1st world countries with otherwise similar costs of living?
Just for the record, Americans actually spend nearly $9000 per capita per year on health care (without actually covering everyone, of course). The $4500 you claimed would be an enormous improvement, but still worse than the UK, which spends about $3000/year, and actually covers everyone in the process.
IAAEVE (I am an electric vehicle engineer) and I worked on Li cell, battery, and powertrain technology that was licensed to Tesla.
The real problem is that nobody's allowed to make big batteries for use in cars because the oil companies bought up all the patents
Please stop spreading this BS rumor--it's been floating around the "EV community" for long enough, and it's totally untrue.
Anyone can license those patents, and no, Chevron's not going to build you any unless you want a LOT of them, but it doesn't even matter: No one wants to build NiMH cars anyway, because we have much better cells (Li-ion) now. Even hybrids, which need power (more so than energy) and were the last NiMH holdouts have moved to Lithium.
This is the reason they have to use 8000 tiny little flashlight batteries in cars instead of a few dozen big ones.
This is wrong in so many ways it makes my head hurt. First, you're confusing radically-different cell chemistires (NiMH vs. Li-ion). Second, the "flashlight" cells are actually 18650 Li cells, a form factor often used in notebook computers. Lastly, Telsa uses 18650 cells because they are (by a large margin) the best available in terms of energy density [Wh/kg]. If you want heavier or more expensive cells, there are plenty to choose from.
They shot at least one child [...]
Just to add a bit to this, the verb "shot" is scarcely appropriate, because the 30mm shells the Apache fired are more like HE grenades than bullets (in both scale and effect). Totally disgusting.
$50B sounds like a lot, but for perspective keep in mind that Fukushima I generated on the order of $800,000 worth of energy every HOUR. (Assumptions: 4 GW * $0.20/kWh.)
At that rate, $50B works out to about 7 years worth of energy production.
Untill the world gets its act together and starts deploying more CANDU type reactors which by design cannot meltdown, I for one will still fight against nuclear power.
The right time to fight against nuclear power is the day after the last coal plant shuts down, because back in the real world, when nuclear shuts down, coal replaces it (immediately!) nearly 1 for 1, and coal kills many, many more people even when it is working nominally. (Coal generation also releases much more radiation into the atmosphere.)
Alternative energy proponents: Save it. I love 'em, too, and I back that up with the 7 kW of thermal and photovoltaics on my roof, but it doesn't change the fact that coal (and gas) are what ramp up (in real time) when nukes shut down. Examples abound.
Germany? Building new coal plants as it blathers about shutting down the nukes.
Japan? Partially made up for their nuclear shortfall with conservation (good!) but mostly with increased imports of coal (and especially LNG, brought to you by fracking).
Now that the last San Onofre units are offline, California will be compensating (forever) with additional coal and natural gas generation.
Until there really is a super-charger network from central Texas to California, I wish I could get one of the gas-powered (or gas-electric hybrid) Apteras.
If you're really making the Texas -> California road trip often enough that it's not an outlier, then an electric vehicle is not the right vehicle for you even if Tesla's Supercharger network (which is proprietary to Tesla, BTW) comes to fruition. The good news is that the (in)ability to make outlier trips like that doesn't have much bearing on the utility of EVs for the 3-4 standard deviations of driving that we do.
Thanks to fracking, natural gas is cheap, and unfortunately will probably remain so for a while. Yeah, it "only" emits about half as much CO2 as burning coal, which is like saying I'm "only" kicking you in the head once today, instead of twice.
Being an industry insider, I'm sometimes a little rough on Tesla, but if there's one reason I'm rooting for them, it's because I want someone to lay waste to the antiquated car dealer model in place in the US.
I just went into a [shall remain nameless] dealer over the weekend for the first time in a decade, and I'd forgotten how absolutely awful it is.
What if one of those email addresses is an old lady that gets scammed by a nigerian prince? What if it's 100 of those emails that that happens to?
If it's that serious then we need to find AT&T criminally negligent for letting absolutely anyone get all those private email address. If it's not that serious after all, then there's no point in railroading the guy who reported the problem, but we can't have it both ways.
If anyone should get 41 months, it's the ATT folks responsible for letting anyone with an IP address pull the private data out of a public server.
Coincidentally, 31% is how much I'd like to pay for my medical services, relative to my cost today.
Then sign up for Comcast, get a sweet deal because you're a new customer, pay $50 per month, and then cancel because you've used up your six strikes...
How about not giving money to ISPs like that in the first place? Out here we have sonic.net, one of the last remaining great independent ISPs (especially since Speakeasy sold out). They treat their customers like adults, and on the rare occasion that I've needed technical support, a knowledgable real person answers the phone on the first ring.
(Disclaimer--no affiliation other than as satisfied customer, blah blah blah.)
What external costs?
I enumerated some of them above, in the comment you replied to. Are you actually suggesting that hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") has no external costs?
AGW still is hypothetical [...]
I can see this is going to be an intellectual debate...
[...] and less severe with natural gas.
Less severe than what? Sure, natural gas releases slightly less CO2 than, say, burning coal, but remember, the comparison was to wind, here.
You have a bunch of unexamined assumptions here.
Are you actually suggesting that no one has studied global warming before?
Note, "cost of fuel."
And by what means does that calculation include the external costs of burning fossil fuels such as natural gas, releasing CO2, and the hydraulic fracturing that made the gas artificially cheap to begin with?
there are more than a few wannabe Steve McQueens who won't feel complete unless they can stomp on a pedal connected to an internal-combustion engine, flick a physical dashboard knob to the radio station of their choice, and peel out their driveway in a cloud of burning rubber.
This is conflating unrelated things (internal combustion holdouts with "cloud connecteness" and other user interface aspects).
Electric drive is coming, like it or not, and it's a great thing. As for the other, there are good and bad ways to execute, and it's healthy to be wary of change.
Software UI (a la what Tesla is shipping on the model S) can be a great thing, and there are also plenty of ways to do it poorly. I don't want to have to re-learn the controls every time the manufacturer hires a new UI designer and pushes out a software update, for example.
Ditto for connectivity. There are amazing applications for vehicle connectivity, and many that have not yet been conceived, but there's also a bad potential for orphaned products (dangerously close to "planned obsolescence"). Instead of losing content when a game service goes poof, you could lose a big piece of your car's functionality at the whim of the automaker (or a partner third party).
The NYT and Musk are both missing the point. EVs aren't well suited to road trips, and it doesn't matter because that kind of driving represents a tiny fraction of the driving we humans do. (Save your personal anecdotes to the contrary--they have no bearing on the facts.)
EVs can accomplish long distance travel if you're patient and determined, and Tesla's supercharger network has dramatically lowered the bar, but it still sucks, and fixating on it ignores all the aspects of EVs that are so much better than the alternatives.
Chelsea says it better than I can.
AT&T tried this on me, twice in five years. The first time was immediately after I accidentally launched the "browser" in my ancient Treo 650.
Each time a simple phone call was all that we needed to have them undo it. Annoying, yes, but probably not even on the top 20 list of things I hate about AT&T.