At current prices, this 1kW panel would produce $225/year, or payback (neglecting interest!!!) in 6 years.
I love PV, and I have a 5 kW system to prove it, but misleading analyses like this one are a disservice.
Your hypothetical 1kW system costs $3000 at your own hypothetical $3/W. Generating $225/year would pay off in 13.3 years, not 6 but it's important to include interest, because at 5%, that changes your amortized payoff time to 22 years.
"Payback time" is a poor way to assess an investment, anyway--better to use annualized ROI, like we use for practically every other investment vehicle. Mine works out to about a (tax-free) 9% annual return. Yours works out to 7.5% (or a lot less, depending on how you account for the interest for the first 30 years). I don't know about your tax structure.
So far we're all dancing around what should be the key issue: H2 is an inefficient medium.
If you make H2 from natural gas, you would get better end-to-end efficiency by simply burning the natural gas in a combustion engine--basically the same engine that's in your car, but with a different "carburetor".
On the other hand, if you make H2 using electrolysis (water + electricity), the round trip efficiency is about 25%. In this context, the H2+fuel cell is acting like a battery, and we already have MUCH more efficient batteries. (Never mind that the fuel cell uses PLATINUM, which isn't exactly going to get cheaper in quantity, and only lasts a few years.)
And in case you were planning to counter the above with "yeah but we'll just use renewables to create the electricity so efficiency doesn't matter": It still matters. Right now we get about 1% of our energy from renewables. It's utterly asinine to claim that we could (much less should) get 400% of our energy from renewables, just so we can throw 75% of it away on the electrolysis->fuel cell cycle.
Try getting anywhere in America that's not in New York City, San Diego, or Chicago without a car, and you'll be spending a lot of time waiting or being herded where others want you to go.
we'll be paying about $9.20 per gallon in 2021. That sort of cost is going to make driving a gasoline fueled car too expensive for a large chunk of the population. Even if there are millions of gas fueled cars still around (and there will be) I'd be astounded if a majority of new passenger vehicles were not electric / fully hybrid by that point.
Your portrait of the future is also known as "right now" to huge swaths of the developed world that are already paying $9.20/gal or higher, and people can afford them just fine even though outside the US hybrids are rare and electrics are statistical outliers.
Driving smaller cars (and driving them less) offer better returns than expensive new tech, but higher fuel prices will ensure that the future will involve all of the above.
Not everyone is switching now, nor will they ever. Even by optimistic estimates, electrics will remain a minority for decades.
And we should be encouraging electrification of transportation rather than worrying about tiny amounts of lost tax revenue. Anyway, electricity is already taxed, although the tax revenue is presently used for different purposes.
Adjusting the existing tax structure (or not) is dramatically simpler than any sort of "miles traveled" tax, which entrenched energy companies love, because there would no longer be a marginal tax cost for driving a huge inefficient vehicle.
I figure you're probably trolling, but enough people make your argument in earnest that I'm going to reply anyway.
By contrast, meters/centimeters make for a pain in the ass to divide by anything but multiples of 5 or 10, not to mention that common everyday occurrences that are approximately "one foot" long are then 30.5 centimeters, a measurement that divides cleanly by precisely Jack and Shit.
That's because you're choosing convenient example numbers to suit your argument. I could pick 30cm (or 32cm) as an input, convert that to 0.98425 feet (or 1.04987 feet) and make the same brain-dead argument in reverse.
Going the average highway 60mph? One minute per mile to your destination off-ramp. 96 km/h? Ah fuck.The math isn't clean even by rough estimate.
Same thing here, except you're ascribing some magic utility to 30 and 60 MPH, as if they were universal constants or something.
Unfortunately I don't have a reference for this, but I believe it's true, and I thought it was interesting: Although they have been deployed on occasion, passenger cabin oxygen masks have never in the history of commercial flight been a factor in human survival.
And according to this chart Hydrogen has the highest energy density, by far.
That's only because you're looking at the mass of the H2 gas itself. H2 is the lightest molecule, and unfortunately you will need to compress it if you want to fit it in a practical space. If you want to compare it to a battery, include the mass of the storage and fuel cell.
Setting aside the enormous amount of (usually electrical) energy required to compress the H2 (or to refrigerate it, if you're going to do cryo), you will still need to drag along an extremely heavy tank, which dominates the kg term you your Wh/kg calculation.
Again, they have a distinct advantage because they are looking to sacrifice efficiency for cost.
...which doesn't make any sense, because efficiency is cost. Making H2 from electricity is 25% efficient. We're having trouble switching to clean sources of electricity as it is. Are you serious claiming we're going to generate 4x more electricity than we need, just so we can discard 3/4ths of it?
Batteries will never have the power density of chemical energy
I think you meant to write "energy density" because batteries already have excellent power density.
Even then, it depends on what chemical energy you're referring to--this discussion is about hydrogen, which has extremely poor energy density; chemical batteries already rival it and are improving faster.
Batteries are also expensive
If you think batteries are expensive, you should try pricing out some fuel cells. It doesn't help that the latter are made out of PLATINUM, which is not going to get cheaper in quantity. : )
From an economic P.O.V. how effective would this tech be for countries that do not have a decent power infrastructure?
If you do not have a "decent power infrastructure" then you definitely don't have a decent hydrogen power infrastructure, which is what you'd need to use these H2 leaf thingies.
So, unless there's a pretty substantial price benefit to the cell, where's the benefit?
As you have discovered, the economics are precisely the key to solar energy. The power density (Watts/m^2) is unimportant, except for installations with unique constraints (e.g. spacecraft). For terrestrial applications, Watts/$ is the most interesting term.
Similarly, for economic reasons, I don't think electrolysis (or H2) is likely to succeed on a wide scale. The dirty secret of the H2 "economy" is that the hydrogen fuel cell cycle has a round trip efficiency of about 25%. A fuel cell is effectively a battery, and we already have substantially better batteries at a tiny fraction of the cost.
I'm amazed that the foundation of life on earth is so inefficient (one tenth of 5.5% is only.55%!). Is this right?
Somewhere on that order, yes.
Also, if this is true, then isn't this a major reason against using biofuels?
Exactly. Plants are ~1% efficient at harvesting solar energy, and we have much better collectors (photovoltaics) that are much more efficient (15-20% in mass production) and generate energy in a more versatile form (electricity).
Nukes will still be needed, but unless something can be done about their high costs, coal will sadly stay in use.
Nukes only seem expensive because you're comparing them to coal, which has massive external costs not accounted for. Compare nukes to other massively-scalable generating technology that emits low CO2 (e.g. what, again?) and they start to look pretty good.
Uh. Smart meters don't fix shortages of electricity. All they do is cost the consumer more money when they're using it at peak. That's a retrograde punishment system.
Your "retrograde punishment system" is also called the free market. Smart meters by themselves don't fix anything, but they do enable real-time energy pricing (or its simper cousin: time-of-use metering).
Market forces then move energy consumed at peak demand times toward the demand valleys. Closing the gap between min and max daily demand makes more efficient use of the grid, and that is often a more cost-effective solution than building new infrastructure.
If you live in Ontario and Quebec you already know this, since we sell most of our power to the US.
We buy your energy (not power) because you have a surplus of cheap energy. It is far from a frictionless market, but these are basic market forces at work.
you tell me what to do when the stupidest moronic statement is encountered, yet again. "yeah but cars kill more..."
For starters, you could explain why it's more moronic than your own claim, which I believe was (paraphrasing) "nukes could kill more..." I don't see why inverting the logic and expressing it as a potential makes it any more intellectual.
I think we're done, here, so for the record I agree entirely with your original premise (now many levels up) that poor designs in the 50s and 60s are largely to blame for nuclear's bad image today. Unfortunately (and ironically) public hysteria is the only reason we're still stuck with those designs, when instead we could have moved on to better designs decades ago.
Slashdot Mirror
"people I wish to see die in the most painstakingly way possible"
Sounds very thorough, but I don't think it means what you think it means.
But let's ballpark these at $3/W.
In sunny Scotland, I pay $.25/kWh of power.
A 1kW panel produces around 900kWh/year of electricity.
( http://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvgis/apps4/pvest.php)
At current prices, this 1kW panel would produce $225/year, or payback (neglecting interest!!!) in 6 years.
I love PV, and I have a 5 kW system to prove it, but misleading analyses like this one are a disservice.
Your hypothetical 1kW system costs $3000 at your own hypothetical $3/W. Generating $225/year would pay off in 13.3 years, not 6 but it's important to include interest, because at 5%, that changes your amortized payoff time to 22 years.
"Payback time" is a poor way to assess an investment, anyway--better to use annualized ROI, like we use for practically every other investment vehicle. Mine works out to about a (tax-free) 9% annual return. Yours works out to 7.5% (or a lot less, depending on how you account for the interest for the first 30 years). I don't know about your tax structure.
...and the coal industry would be thrilled.
...until we have more solar energy production online than we can use in real time. And we are not with a factor of 100 of that point, yet.
The Bush people have been let off. The telecom companies got immunity. The only people Obama has prosecuted are the whistle-blowers.
So far we're all dancing around what should be the key issue: H2 is an inefficient medium.
If you make H2 from natural gas, you would get better end-to-end efficiency by simply burning the natural gas in a combustion engine--basically the same engine that's in your car, but with a different "carburetor".
On the other hand, if you make H2 using electrolysis (water + electricity), the round trip efficiency is about 25%. In this context, the H2+fuel cell is acting like a battery, and we already have MUCH more efficient batteries. (Never mind that the fuel cell uses PLATINUM, which isn't exactly going to get cheaper in quantity, and only lasts a few years.)
And in case you were planning to counter the above with "yeah but we'll just use renewables to create the electricity so efficiency doesn't matter": It still matters. Right now we get about 1% of our energy from renewables. It's utterly asinine to claim that we could (much less should) get 400% of our energy from renewables, just so we can throw 75% of it away on the electrolysis->fuel cell cycle.
Try getting anywhere in America that's not in New York City, San Diego, or Chicago without a car, and you'll be spending a lot of time waiting or being herded where others want you to go.
There. Fixed that for ya. :)
we'll be paying about $9.20 per gallon in 2021. That sort of cost is going to make driving a gasoline fueled car too expensive for a large chunk of the population. Even if there are millions of gas fueled cars still around (and there will be) I'd be astounded if a majority of new passenger vehicles were not electric / fully hybrid by that point.
Your portrait of the future is also known as "right now" to huge swaths of the developed world that are already paying $9.20/gal or higher, and people can afford them just fine even though outside the US hybrids are rare and electrics are statistical outliers.
Driving smaller cars (and driving them less) offer better returns than expensive new tech, but higher fuel prices will ensure that the future will involve all of the above.
as everyone switches from gas to electric[...]
Not everyone is switching now, nor will they ever. Even by optimistic estimates, electrics will remain a minority for decades.
And we should be encouraging electrification of transportation rather than worrying about tiny amounts of lost tax revenue. Anyway, electricity is already taxed, although the tax revenue is presently used for different purposes.
Adjusting the existing tax structure (or not) is dramatically simpler than any sort of "miles traveled" tax, which entrenched energy companies love, because there would no longer be a marginal tax cost for driving a huge inefficient vehicle.
I want to see a long form death certificate.
And none of these "Certificates of Death" either--everyone knows those are made up.
When I can get on an airplane without being groped by blueshirts, that will signify "mission accomplished".
Until we start erring on the side of liberty instead of security theater, it's "mission accomplished" for the bad guys.
I assume this means I can bring my 64 oz. tube of Aquafresh on the plane next week.
I figure you're probably trolling, but enough people make your argument in earnest that I'm going to reply anyway.
By contrast, meters/centimeters make for a pain in the ass to divide by anything but multiples of 5 or 10, not to mention that common everyday occurrences that are approximately "one foot" long are then 30.5 centimeters, a measurement that divides cleanly by precisely Jack and Shit.
That's because you're choosing convenient example numbers to suit your argument. I could pick 30cm (or 32cm) as an input, convert that to 0.98425 feet (or 1.04987 feet) and make the same brain-dead argument in reverse.
Going the average highway 60mph? One minute per mile to your destination off-ramp. 96 km/h? Ah fuck.The math isn't clean even by rough estimate.
Same thing here, except you're ascribing some magic utility to 30 and 60 MPH, as if they were universal constants or something.
Unfortunately I don't have a reference for this, but I believe it's true, and I thought it was interesting: Although they have been deployed on occasion, passenger cabin oxygen masks have never in the history of commercial flight been a factor in human survival.
Mmm. You know, I could for some wonton lifting right now.
I think you should for some.
And according to this chart Hydrogen has the highest energy density, by far.
That's only because you're looking at the mass of the H2 gas itself. H2 is the lightest molecule, and unfortunately you will need to compress it if you want to fit it in a practical space. If you want to compare it to a battery, include the mass of the storage and fuel cell.
Setting aside the enormous amount of (usually electrical) energy required to compress the H2 (or to refrigerate it, if you're going to do cryo), you will still need to drag along an extremely heavy tank, which dominates the kg term you your Wh/kg calculation.
Again, they have a distinct advantage because they are looking to sacrifice efficiency for cost.
...which doesn't make any sense, because efficiency is cost. Making H2 from electricity is 25% efficient. We're having trouble switching to clean sources of electricity as it is. Are you serious claiming we're going to generate 4x more electricity than we need, just so we can discard 3/4ths of it?
Batteries will never have the power density of chemical energy
I think you meant to write "energy density" because batteries already have excellent power density.
Even then, it depends on what chemical energy you're referring to--this discussion is about hydrogen, which has extremely poor energy density; chemical batteries already rival it and are improving faster.
Batteries are also expensive
If you think batteries are expensive, you should try pricing out some fuel cells. It doesn't help that the latter are made out of PLATINUM, which is not going to get cheaper in quantity. : )
From an economic P.O.V. how effective would this tech be for countries that do not have a decent power infrastructure?
If you do not have a "decent power infrastructure" then you definitely don't have a decent hydrogen power infrastructure, which is what you'd need to use these H2 leaf thingies.
So, unless there's a pretty substantial price benefit to the cell, where's the benefit?
As you have discovered, the economics are precisely the key to solar energy. The power density (Watts/m^2) is unimportant, except for installations with unique constraints (e.g. spacecraft). For terrestrial applications, Watts/$ is the most interesting term.
Similarly, for economic reasons, I don't think electrolysis (or H2) is likely to succeed on a wide scale. The dirty secret of the H2 "economy" is that the hydrogen fuel cell cycle has a round trip efficiency of about 25%. A fuel cell is effectively a battery, and we already have substantially better batteries at a tiny fraction of the cost.
I'm amazed that the foundation of life on earth is so inefficient (one tenth of 5.5% is only .55%!). Is this right?
Somewhere on that order, yes.
Also, if this is true, then isn't this a major reason against using biofuels?
Exactly. Plants are ~1% efficient at harvesting solar energy, and we have much better collectors (photovoltaics) that are much more efficient (15-20% in mass production) and generate energy in a more versatile form (electricity).
Nukes will still be needed, but unless something can be done about their high costs, coal will sadly stay in use.
Nukes only seem expensive because you're comparing them to coal, which has massive external costs not accounted for. Compare nukes to other massively-scalable generating technology that emits low CO2 (e.g. what, again?) and they start to look pretty good.
WTF, they can't cut the cables and weld or clamp the wiring together?
Good point. I'm sure they didn't think of that. Pity Locutus wasn't there to explain it to them.
We're talking about tens of megawatts of thermal cooling required. This isn't exactly off-the-shelf hardware.
If you lived in Ontario or Quebec you'd know that it's a retrograde punishment system.
I have no idea how broken your utility is, but it doesn't invalidate the concept of smart metering or TOU metering.
And ah yes, you buy power. In raw kwh's, not engery.
Nice try, but kWh is a unit of energy, not power.
Power is instantaneous. Energy is power integrated over time, and is measured in units like watthours, or kilo-watthours. Go look it up sometime.
Uh. Smart meters don't fix shortages of electricity. All they do is cost the consumer more money when they're using it at peak. That's a retrograde punishment system.
Your "retrograde punishment system" is also called the free market. Smart meters by themselves don't fix anything, but they do enable real-time energy pricing (or its simper cousin: time-of-use metering).
Market forces then move energy consumed at peak demand times toward the demand valleys. Closing the gap between min and max daily demand makes more efficient use of the grid, and that is often a more cost-effective solution than building new infrastructure.
If you live in Ontario and Quebec you already know this, since we sell most of our power to the US.
We buy your energy (not power) because you have a surplus of cheap energy. It is far from a frictionless market, but these are basic market forces at work.
you tell me what to do when the stupidest moronic statement is encountered, yet again. "yeah but cars kill more..."
For starters, you could explain why it's more moronic than your own claim, which I believe was (paraphrasing) "nukes could kill more..." I don't see why inverting the logic and expressing it as a potential makes it any more intellectual.
I think we're done, here, so for the record I agree entirely with your original premise (now many levels up) that poor designs in the 50s and 60s are largely to blame for nuclear's bad image today. Unfortunately (and ironically) public hysteria is the only reason we're still stuck with those designs, when instead we could have moved on to better designs decades ago.