I've filed a bug report on this but at this point I'm not even sure its a bug... could be a hardware issue..
If anyone is running Adaptec SCSI 2940 controllers with more than one SCSI hard drive and it works then I'd like to know... if anyone is having problems I'd like to know.
The issue is that I have one 2940 fast narrow card and it won't boot... says there is no O/S. In the same machine... swap that card out to a 2940 fast wide and it boots just fine. Perhaps this is a firmware card issue. I have so far only tested these two cards... I plan to go get a handfull more.
Next issue. With the fast wide all seems 100%. Then I start an rsync from another machine and within seconds I get a kernel panic. There is a bug report here: http://paste.lisp.org/display/49908#1
Is OpenBSD bug report # 5616
I'm not at this point asking anyone to debug this. I want to know if others have a similar setup and it works.
This machine is a Pentium I, with two fast narrow SCSI disks and in this case an AHA 2940 FW card. There is nothing else on the bus.
O/S version was 4.1 and now I can try the new version. Since OpenBSD is such a great O/S I sure would like to get to the bottom of this without wasting people's time. If we have a problem we need to know about it and potentially fix it. If its an isolated issue then I need to know this so I can shelve the hardware if in fact it is flakey hardware.
Note: With that fast wide controller... dd if=/dev/sd1 of=/dev/sd1 bs=2048 will run 100% and never glitch at all. But try that rsync on the system.. kernel panics 100% of the time within seconds.
I like the mini mac. The issue is that it doesn't support my dual monitors. It does support my SCSI DLT7000 and all the other SCSI peripherals I have which include optical discs. Sure I can transfer to some other media but these MO discs are actually a rather good archival media. It doesn't support my SCSI Exabyte tapes and I happen to have a lot of them.
One thing I will point out is a few months ago a friend who dinigrates Linux and Unix came over with his old 8mmm Exabyte tape which he recorded on a Sun. It contained some software he wrote a little over a decade ago. He runs XP of course.
I was able to read it on my exabyte under Linux and burn a CD for him and within 1/2 an hour he was off with a big smile on his face.
On that MiniMac I think we were screwed before we started.
Backward compatibility and expandability are very important. My Keyboard is even an issue. Its an IBM PC 101 and if the computer doesn't support this keyboard then I won't buy the computer.
I don't agree with the nay sayers on this. I do agree that it is a racket.
The issue is that this will likely cost IBM a great deal of money in both litigation and administration. Unfortunately the facts are that the extortion is already taking place and its by the legal community.
We might note that patent trolls often come from the legal community.
I think this will serve to highlight the problems.
They presumably made a profit from the installation of the lines. It is the customers who paid for them. Further more most of the POTS lines were installed by our parents and the existing generation of Telco employees inherited them.
Furthermore if you look at the administrations of most Telcos you will find they are filled with non-productive people and paper pushers who sit around all day drinking coffee while they scheme more ways to suck book out of the customers they hold hostage. This is why we see telephone plan after plan after plan. This is why only a few years back we had horendous Long Distance rates. It is only through competition that we start to see the benefits of modern technology filter down to benefit the public. The thing is there is not enough competition.
IMHO the telco should be restricted to line maintenance and that is it. Its their job to maintain the wires just as it is the contractors job to maintain the hyways. Suppose the road maintanence crew were allowed to look inside the trailers of every semi... what would we get? Someone saying this truck is ok but that one isn't?
Is there some way to get the lawyers out of the technology business?
What they like to do in court is select a jury that cannot possibly comprehend the case. By doing this it becomes a crap shoot and either side has an equal chance of winning. Patents like this make no sense to anyone other than lawyers who like them as a way yo retrain trade.
It puts all programmers at a disadvantage because at any time we can be attacked by someone's legal beagles.
Maybe we can ask for a patent on a business model based on patents on obvious ideas an prior art?
While Theo is very intelligent and opinionated it is important to mote he is not a lawyer. His understanding of law should be taken with a grain of salt.
The clear winner will be English. We can see this happening all over the globe. Language tends to follow money and technology.
The 2nd pony is probably Mandrin. China has a HUGE economy and with their one child policy they have a built in reduction over the next few decades which will leave the Chinese with say guess 500 million in population... about 2x the USA.
Meanwhile Europe and many parts of Asia are already speaking English. My guess is that English wins the race. It doesn't win because its best mind you.
The internet and OSS developed in English will have a lot to do with this.
The world converted to Latin a few centuries ago for the same reasons. I can still remember going to church and listening to the Priest spouting off in Latin. I was quite young and at the time I wondered what he was trying to accomplish. I always thought the purpose of Language is to facilitate communication.
I chose to not become a priest.
In comment to others who point out the history of the languages which are dying and the folklore and the culture..... yes. I agree 100%. We should record everything we can while we have the time to do it.
This is an interesting story on slashdot. Good going!
The assumption likely is that the energy is radiated in all directions. This puts the power varying as 1/d^2 which is a very small number when d gets rather large. The consequence of this is that if we get a signal of magnitude "x" then one would infer from this assumption that one must multiply by d^2 in order to calculate the energy at source.
If this energy was focused as it is say by a laser then the original power can be considerably lower. A parabolic lens will also focus the radiation but not nearly as well as a laser. One way this can be focused naturally is to simply put a large gravity well in the path the light takes between source and us.
The phenomenon may be little more complex than a gravity well which passed between us. If this gravity well is moving at the right speed then the period of time the energy remains focused can be short. It would be very interesting to find the gravitational lens (if this is what happened) is actually in orbit and we manage to pick up the pulse again.
The thing is with the proper focus all the assumptions of the size of the burst just fly out the window.
In 1985 I worked out everything that was required to do this and in fact even went so far as to track down Dialog cards so I could interface a PC to a T1 line.
There is NOTHING required that is worthy of a patent. NOTHING at all. This is all a totally obvious idea and relatively easy to implement. In fact it is so obvious that when I started working on the project I never even considered that patents would be available.
I never finished that project. I was a single parent working at home and my kids at the time decided I should not be allowed to program. Alas.
Now of course we have projects like Asterisk and its quite mature.
So how does this ruling affect projects like Asterisk? (www.asterisk.org)
Are we banned from plugging a hand held device that contains both a speaker and a microphone into a computer now? Or are we banned from connecting the computer to the telco switch, which BTW is a computer.
Maybe we are banned from connecting a computer which is called a PC to a computer which is called a switch via a network which has been in common use for decades.
To the fellow who points out that people who are too dumb to get out of jury duty are put in charge of million dollar technical decisions which they cannot possibly understand.... yes. You are 100% correct and you make an excellent post.
Its clear that lawyers have managed to turn technical progress into a game of craps. IMHO this is something the public needs to be more aware of and somehow it would be nice if our pollies could be held accountable for the bad legislation they created. We really need to get patent business out of the computer business.
I know night loads are historically less than daytime loads but I do not know by how much. It certainly is not going to be as much less based on electrical load as is reflected in the rate structure. The rate structure reflects the cost of providing peak load power in addition to base load.
So... I would conclude that solar will fit in very nicely until the peak non-solar load switches to night time. The issue is that it might peak shortly after dusk when people are making dinner... and similarly peak at dawn as people make breakfast. If so then the solar generating capacity will not reflect homeowner peak demand anyways. It will however match the demand curves of office and industrial users because most of their activity is during the daytime.
Do you know how much this is in say percent?.. or in gigawatts?
Once we go past the difference between daytime and night loads, solar becomes less attractive from an economic standpoint; but we are still years away from meeting even the increased electrical demand from renewable sources. Furthermore as fuel costs increase then solar becomes much more attractive.
I wanted to simply do some ball park calculations on what we can likely expect and to illustrate what some of the issues are.
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If we could only store light. Light is a lot like electricity though and its hard to store for any length of time.
Now, suppose we put a big mirror in space. Then we could light our cities all night long this way and we can probably do it quite cheaply even now. The cost of big mirrors in space can't be all that great.
The Russians did test this a few years back.
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Here is another thing to consider. Solar power can be transported via light pipes. But consider. The max solar power is about 1000 watts per square meter. If you transport this through a hole smaller than say the main element of your stove then you will have more energy in that hole than the element produces at max power. This is very dangerous. It requires considerable engineering.
I think it is quite sobering to realize that a copper NMD 14-3 electrical cable in the wall of your house can transport 1500 watts safely. Yet if we try to transport the same energy in the form of light, in a 4" (10 cm) hole there is enough power to light the house on fire in a matter of seconds.
Again, there is considerable engineering required to use things like light pipes. I think similar calculations of high efficiency fiber optics would also be true.
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Here is another point. Light is actually quite energetic and it arrives here with the same temperature as it left the surface of the sun. This means the entropy is low enough that we have lots of good opportunity to put it to work. Light is not a high entropy energy source at all. It is just as good as high quality fossil fuel sources and nuclear sources (and of course it is a nuclear energy source!)
I really think there have to be a number of good ways to improve our use of solar energy which do not involve solar panels. Even building a parabolic mirror in northern climates to shine the energy through a picture window into the living room might make sense.
I think it certainly should make sense to use mirrors to heat salts which can store the energy quite well for later use as space heating should make sense.
Then another question is can we build a fresnel lens so we can flatten a parabolic mirror. If so then a flat roof panel should be able to focus light much the same as a parabolic trough would and in this senerio one could orient the angle of the trough so that its parallel to the path of the sun and put a black pipe below it to carry the energy. Costs of something like this might be only slightly above the cost of a sheet of glass and it can have efficiencies in the 80% range and up.
If we can do this, then we should be able to take a sheet of heavy glass and make roof panels out of it and have a
I think swing loads are handled by gas turbines and they are actually on but with not much load. The idea is that if a surge comes in the asset has to be spinning because they cannot start it fast enough.
Now hydro generation should be able to very quickly respond to load changes.
A small amount of solar is not going to destabilize anything. Probably a large amount also will not be too destabilizing and neither will a reasonable amount of wind.
But the thing is suppose one extrapolates out to the most significant fraction coming say from solar. We will still need the full generating capacity required for night time. During the day it sits idle.
This is unless we find a good way to store the energy. But even so we need to build the infrastructure to store the energy and its not clear how to do it. In the past we have always created what we need as we need it. However this is done, the more solar that is added to the system the more expensive infrastructure ends up laying idle during the day. I don't think we can expect the share holders of the power companies to cover the costs of the non-performing assets... The thing is these costs are properly part of the solar system.
So I think as the solar systems are deployed then the rate structures will change to reflect the cost of buffering energy from day to night.
40+50+40+50 = 180. I made the walls about 10 feet high so that is 180*10 = 1800.
1800+2000 = 3800 and I rounded it up to 4000.
Currently we put R20 in the walls. R20 costs just under 70 cents per square foot in Rona and Home Depot.
Thus R30 will cost about $1 dollar. R20+R30 = R50 for the walls. Currently ceilings are typically insulated to about R30-R40 so we simply add another R30 to that. This gives walls which are about 1 foot thick. Walls are built of 2x6, 24" on center. It is perfectly fine to rip the 2x6 into a 2x4 + 2x2 and use a spacer to create a cavity that is the proper distance for the insulation. Hence the actual construction costs are about $1 per square foot of building envelope and a wee bit of extra labour. From this you can deduct the cost of the furnace because you won't need one. You can add the cost of a small radiant in floor heating system or even radiators around the perimeter and with a heating load this small you can use a simple hot water tank as a boiler. I did this is my garage which is 670 square feet and the tank easily heats the building even when it is 40 below. That building was built to R20 standards not R50 because at the time I listened to a contractor and like most of them, they don't know how to do these energy calculations and hence their recommendations are not worth listening to.
Another thing to note: Consider the perimeter of the house is 180 linear feet. This is about 90 studs when done 24" on center. Studs cost about $5 bux. That is less than $500 in studs on the outside walls. Even if you incur a few extra bux here it isn't going to add up to a hill of beans on a finished house. About the only difference this makes is that your window sills are say a foot deep. This is wonderful for plants. My grandfather built a house from logs and the walls were a foot thick at least. When I bought the house I am in now I was dismayed that I could not even put a plant in the windows so I built window sill extensions.
This house has R12 or even less in it. It is so hot in the summer I hate it. This illustrates just how bad construction is and most houses in North America fall into this category. We have burned off a HUGE amount of the non-renewable gas supplies and also oil supplies because of this. When we start to have shortages I hope people realize that had these resources been conserved and managed well, then our supplies would have easily lasted into the 22 century. As it stands now I think those who say we are past world oil are correct and that Mathew Simmons' estimate that oil will pass $300 per barrel shortly is also unfortunately correct. We passed the peak of North American natural gas production January 2001.
Because of this much of the North American fertilizer industry is permanently shut down. Natural Gas hit over $17 per gigajoule and it will hit this again in the not too distant future. We will be likely facing a major crisis before 2015.
Next: Garbage pickup.
The garbage truck goes down the back alley every week. IF I put that little Ssafeway bag in a big garbage bag then they are happy. If I put it all by itself in the garbage pail they leave it. They left two (2) of them all summer long as I was not in town for most of July and August and didn't realize they decided to leave them. Since there was some raw bones and a fish head in one of the bags it was pretty high by the end of August. Their excuse? They didn't like me using two little Safeway bags.
Now for the cyclist. I'm all for him. He may not make much difference but at least he's trying and I pat him on the back for the effort he and others make.
A 2 foot by 2 foot chunk of window glass in the store is $17.40 at Rona. A square meter is 10.76 square feet. So a 1 meter square piece of glass would cost $46.82 at these rates.
Even the cheapest solar cell should be expected to cost more than plain glass since it includes at a minimum plain glass.
Next.
Solar constant is 1300 watts per square meter in space and max 1000 on the surface of the earth.
One can expect on average 12 hours of darkness. Then we can expect only 50% of this max because most of the time its not high noon. One actually has to integrate the sin curve.
So we can say 12 hours at 500 watts average maximum collection and at best we can hope for about 50% of this. This 50% discount takes into account rainy days and snow blowing on it and maybe it gets a little dirty because people don't wash it often enough.... there are lots of things that can go wrong here. So I pick 50% out of the air as a practical fudge factor to convert to what is theoretically possible to what one might expect.
This is 3000 watt hours per day falling on the panel in a useful way, and the efficiency of the panel is say 10-13% so I'll use 10%. We can expect to get say 300 watt hours per day per square meter. This is 0.3 kwh which in worth say about 3 cents at a rate of 10 cents per kwh. This is still 25 watts per square meter for 12 hours and this is what a mini florescent draws.
But from the article - they say $1 per watt so I assume they mean per watt peak capacity.
This would be 100 watts per square meter since we have 10% of 1000 and the 1000 is peak. The duty cycle is at best 1/4 of this. Nevertheless, $1 per watt * 100 watts is $100 per square meter.
Thing is $100 per square meter is only 2x the cost of a plain glass windowpane so its actually unreasonable to expect they will be able to sell these panels at anywhere near 2x the cost of plain glass. A complete window assembly is in the order of a few $100 bux. Maybe we get the complete panel retailing at $200.
What should we expect to really get out of a $200 panel in terms of energy?
At best, 25% of max and this is about 25 watts per square meter and this is over 12 hours. Hence one should expect the thing to capture at most say 300 watt hours per day.
As I calculated before this is about 0.3 kwh = 3 cents worth of power. $0.03 * 365 = $10.90
Invest say $200 in a panel when it retails and get $10 per year from it in electricity. This is a 20 year pay back not counting installation, maintenance, and so forth. At a 5% interest rate (cost of capital) it has a ZERO Return on Investment (ROI).
Now the real issue. Suppose everyone does this. It will have the effect of destabilizing the grid because it puts the power company in the position of standing by ready to supply energy at night and when the sun doesn't shine but meanwhile when the sun is shinning their expensive infrastructure sits idle. So long before this gets deployed the rules get rewritten.
The thing is that we can already capture solar energy passively and build houses that will save way more than $1000 per year in energy and do this for a capital investment of less than $5,000. All we need to do is put R50 and R70 in the walls and ceilings. We can do a LOT more than this. To capture say $1000 per year with say these high efficiency panels will cost 100x$200 bux = $20,000 of capital and this does not include the control systems.
Consider the modern hard disk drive. These have lifetimes measured in decades. With magnetic bearings surely we can create a decent flywheel system that can do the trick for stationary service. They won't do the trick for vehicles though because the loads are too great. I have read about "air cars" and this seems quite reasonable since the internal combustion engine is basically an air pump.
Would you care to calculate what the engineering parameters for a flywheel storage system for a house might be?
A good place to start is that at 10 cents per kwh... and a 100 power bill we are looking at 1000 kwh's power consumption per month.
One might want to buffer a day's worth... say 1/25th. 1000/25 = 40 kwh.
This is 40,000 watt hours and in my battery example that is $18,250 for 1/4 of that to roast xmas dinner.
Clearly one would use say a wood stove.
One could say buffer 1/2 a day instead of a day. That would be 20 kwh and maybe nighttime electricity use for the average home owner is less than daytime usage... for me it is.
If one's power bill is $100 per month then this will finance about $12000 in capital costs at 10%. There will be maintenance expenses and operating costs and infrastructure costs as well.
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Here is my observation. It costs during construction about $1 dollar per square foot of building envelope to super insulate a house. If you do this you can save over $200 per month in peak heating / cooling and overall here in Calgary I would save over $1000 per year and would do it except I have to tear this house apart in order to do it.
If my house is 40x50 = 2000 square feet then I have a building envelope of about 4000 square feet so the additional insulation costs me say under $5,000 and I get a pay back in say 5 years (or less) and I can chuck the furnace.
Builders are not doing this yet.
After the house is finished I need to tear the walls apart and rebuild them and this is more than a $50,000 touch. A $50,000 cost to save $1000 per year at 10% has a negative ROI.... so it never gets done.
The thing is that one can save $100 per month average in energy by investing $5000 into fiberglass insulation. We can pick this insulation up in any lumber store in North America at least. It requires zero maintenance and close to zero intelligence and its operating costs are non-existant.
Hence, if one wants to be environmentally friendly it would seem to me the thing is to invest in the simplest technology possible first and especially so with such inviting numbers. Yet, the vast majority of people are not doing this.
Then we have the tragedy of the commons where the few who are concerned enough to actually build a super insulated house make no difference in the grand scheme of things.
Its the same as the cyclist. He/she might be a very energy efficient person but the waste from everyone else makes their concerns and their efforts irrelevant.
On a related subject, my city wants to charge me on an average basis for the garbage I create. I refuse to buy the over-packaged foods. I buy most things in bulk. I do not open cans. As a result I have less than 2 safeway bags of garbage per month. Still I am suppose to save this for months on end to fill up a standard trash bag because they have these rules that they don't want to pick up a little Safeway bag.
Then I am expected to pay for a service that I don't use and its my money that subsidized my neighbours' extravagance. Next the city wants to up the rates so they can institute a "better" way to handle the trash.
An intelligent solution IMHO would be to surcharge those who create mountains of trash with their clearly wasteful consumption patterns and to reward people who are fruggle.
In our society, it doesn't seem to happen that way. The guy who rides his bike to work is still expected to subsidize the guy who drives an SUV what weighs in over a tonne. Then when an oil war shows up because Britain and the USA want to liberate Iraqii oil in order to maintain an unsustainable lifestyle... that guy on his bike will be told its his duty to carry a gun and kill people.
The solar constant is about 1300 watts per square meter (in space). On earth the best you can hope for is about 1000 watts peak. So on average we will look at about say 50% of 50% and less on a cold winter day when we need both heating and more lighting. In fact on a winer day at about 51 degrees latitude we get about 8 hours of light and even then its less than 250 watts per square meter.
If we take 10% of 250 we get 25 watts. This is about as much as a high efficiency mini florescent uses.
To run a toaster we will need 40 square meters of solar panel and to roast a turkey and cook on top of the stove as well we look at 40 amps @ 240 volts (check your main panel folks) which is about 385 square meters at 25 watts per square meter.
Thing is that we might want to roast the xmas turkey after dusk, so we better plan on batteries.
A deep cycle 12 volt battery (lead acid) can be expected to hold 60 amp-hours.... at least this is what the Hawker batteries I use for my UPS system are rated for.
12*60 = 720 watts hours. To roast the turkey say takes 4 hours at a draw of say 30% of 40 * 240 which is about 11,250 watt hours. So we need 15 batteries for this. Next if we draw them down any more than about 20% the number of cycles goes into the toilet so we'll need about 5x as many so we can draw each to about 20% of their max rating. We'll need 75 batteries.
New these batteries cost more than $250 bux so that is a battery investment of $18,750.
Clearly one will not be running an electric range off that solar system.
I'm not scoffing at the idea. I think its good but one has to find a way to store that energy and perhaps the best use of it will be to create hydrogen.
The thing is that sure it can feed into the grid during the day. All this does is put idle the current generating infrastructure and we still need that infrastructure for night operation. Of course it would save the fuel needed to operate the plant.
But then what would we use the existing generating stations for when they are idle? Generating hydrogen?
Somehow it doesn't make sense to burn fuel to create electricity to make hydrogen when we can simply for instance chemically take the Methane apart and get hydrogen that way.
One really has to think about how this cheap solar technology fits into the full cycle of energy needs.
Nevertheless I think it is good and maybe we should use it to pump water up hill. Then at night we can let the water flow back through the pump and turn it into a motor-generator. Batteries are just one way to store energy. It can be stored as compressed air, water at the top of a hill, chemically such as hydrogen gas... but it will need to be stored and in great quantities if this technology is going to go anywhere.
Plants such as trees are another good solar collector. We tend not to use them. They are reasonably efficient and serve as their own battery system because if you need more heat you can chuck another log on the fire. Since most of us tend not to use the solar collectors mother nature already created for us, I suspect that there will be huge issues to overcome in order to deploy even cheap man-made ones.
Now here is another thought. The best efficiency of these collectors is say 10%. If we capture the same energy for space heating our houses we can easily get over 80%. Yet, most of us do not even do this.
A super heated house with R70 in the ceiling and R50 in the walls costs about $1 dollar per square foot of building envelope extra during construction. This will eliminate the vast majority of summer cooling and winter heating loads. Here in Calgary for instance a house like this does not need a furnace and we can have winter days that are 40 below for weeks on end. A house like this can get by with a nice fireplace and wood heat and will burn less than 1 cord of wood per year. That wood costs about $100 dollars.
The value of your house will not decline because of inflation. Its the value of debt that declines.
In fact you win big time. If the value of your house goes up 10x and the value of your salary goes up 9x then you are probably way ahead because you now only need to pay off 10% of the cost of your house.
OTOH, the retired folks across the street who were told by a financial advisor to invest in high quality long term mortgages because they are too old to take the risk... it is these people who find the mortgage instrument and the income from it no longer has much value. They lose their retirement. They win somewhat on the value of their home of course but will find they need to sell it (usually by way of a reverse) mortgage in order to survive. So they tighten their belts and in the end their children lose their inheritance.
While I understand what you write I say for most Americans they have no reason to complain about inflation in their food costs because they eat too much anyways. So if you think your food bill is too high, then go on a diet.
How is this all that much different than a drunk complaining about the cost of his bar bill?
It was David Pimental from Cornel and others who first proposed this myth. Its simply not true. In fact the energy return is quite decent.
The thing is that an individual farmer could do quite well running his farm machinery on ethanol that he produces himself. In fact, the average farmer has lots of free time all winter long and could produce all of his required summer fuel and still have lots of time for curling, hunting, fishing and bitching about why there is no money in farming... when in fact there is.
How do I know? I grew up on a farm and brewing and making wine is something I have done since I was in grade 11.
I do know what the input costs are and I can assure you Pimental did not. He made many assumptions that are not supported by facts. Nevertheless one of the things they were doing back then was running coal fired distillation and pushing it past the Aseotrop. To be energy +ve you need high efficiency vacuum distillation.
My point is that its not practical to do this from starch sources which is basically beer making. I think from cellulose it might make sense. The cellulose costs are going to be low, but we are still talking about 1 tonne of dry plant matter is equivalent to 2 barrels of oil once we do the conversion. With oil under $200 per barrel I do not think the economics look good. Next we do not have the technology in place yet.
The best ideas seem to involve enzymes derived from Trichoderma reeshi. This is a fungus isolated in Gaum during the 1940's. It is used for Stone Washer blue jeans since it does digest cellulose and it loves it in fact. The thing is most of the plant matter we have as feedstocks are not pure cellulose. They also contain pentosans and liganins and T. reeshi doesn't like these. There are other fungii which do like them. I work with some of these but not in the area of fuel production.
My point is that we are facing a bad bad problem and we do not at this time have in place technology which will do for us what we need. I for instance will not invest in an ethanol plant other than as a trade into the hype - and I have made quite a lot of money doing this.
You need to really watch the couriers because they are experts at ripping people off. I know. I'm an importer and have imported millions of dollars of merchandise.
However if you are buying into Ryobi then IMHO it doesn't matter really what you pay because you're being silly. Still maybe its better to pay $50 bux for a POS than $80.
Good brand names include Makita, Hitachi, Bosch, and of course others.
Now I bought a Delta bench belt sander. There is a plastic belt in it that was about 1/8th of an inch wide. The plastic drive wheel had been designed to handle a belt that was about 1/4 of an inch wide.
How much do you think that company saved by putting in a plastic belt 50% of the width of that should be there? But then... what of the plastic drive wheel? I can buy metal drive wheels for a few bux. Of course they don't fit since they were not designed for the Delta.
You know... I paid for quality and I didn't get it. My response... in part warning others... and of course Delta no longer gets my business.
I have two (2) dead Black and Decker pad sanders and a dead Black and Decker belt sander and a dead Black and Decker router. Funny thing.... when I go and look at a construction site and see what the pro's are using... why don't I see much in the way of Ryobi, Black and Decker, Delta power tools?
What do I see?
Makita, Bosch, some Hitachi... there are some others of course.
So it says a lot IMHO.
BTW... you can import these other brands as well and with the net its pretty easy to find good pricing.
Hmm. I suppose for that matter I could start my import business again. But I don't think it is really worth it for $50 items. What I imported before typically retailed over $12,000. Its hard to get enough people together to organize as a $12,000 shipment of power tools. (I would expect this to be the case anyways). Note one would list $12,000 on a B3 the same as one would list $50 bux. Note that its the same number of trips to Customs and the same number of pages of paper work and the same issues with payment of GST and so forth. The only thing that changes is the size of the numbers.
Be very careful with UPS. With Air transportation they gouge but are up front but at least clear customs at an included cost. With ground transportation last I used them and I will not in the future... they try to apply a clearance tax based on the value of the item. If you were to ship say $12,000 via UPS ground your shipping costs will include a brokerage commission and hey typically don't quote this as a "shipping cost". Next, all they do is write a number on a piece of paper which is called a B3. The cost to UPS to clear an item costing $50 bux is the same as $12,000 and it takes a clerk no more than about 5-10 minutes to do it.
Think about this. The number they write on teh B3 is the cost of the item in USA currency. Then they multiply this number by the conversion rate which they have to look up for the shipment date. Then they add to this any duty and probably there is none. After that they multiply by the GST rate and add sales tax if applicable. They total these costs and you need to pay this to them if they paid the customs bill for you. The most difficult part is figuring out the classification category. This does not change regardless how much you are importing. For instance I think all power tools fall into one category.
So... I called UPS and I DO know what to ask them... What is the "Brokerage commission"?
0-20: free 20-40: $7.: $19.45 etc. 5,000: $69.03 $5,000 and up: add $5.38 per thousand.
IE. ground transportation of say $12,000 will cost $(69.03+ 7*5.38) = $106.69
Remember, the paperwork is identical in all cases. Its one (1) B3 that you need to fill in.
Well - if you add an unexpected $100 to a $12,000 shipment its maybe ok but an additional unquoted $20 bux for a $50 shipment is quite the gouge especially since you can buy i
I am not at all surprised to see parity. Canada has a strong economy and Alberta especially so.
There are many reasons for weakeness in the US currency including but not limited to a massive government debt and a glutonous appetite for foreign oil.
Yesterday T. Boone Pickens was on TV on the business channel I sometimes watch. He made a number of interesting comments:
1) World oil production is about 85 million barrels per day and T. Boone does Not think it can be increased. The best information I have comes from expertize within the Geological Survey of Canada, but this expertise is certainly not limited to the GSC, and we are now pegging the peak of work oil production at September 2006. If production increases above that level then it will not be by much. T. Boone commented that the estimated demand for 4th quarter 2007 is 88 million Barrels per day.
Hence we will see the oil price driven up in order to destroy demand. In all likelihood it will get worse.
2) T. Boone says he favours nuclear and pointed out that General Electric says they can build a reactor in 3 years plus the friction added by the regulators and dealing with opposition. Probably this is correct.
3) Canada is ramping up Tar Sands as fast as we possibly can which explains why our economy is so strong. We cannot increase production has enough to make much of a difference. Currently we are investing billions per year.
Currently the USA consumes about 23 million barrels of oil per day.
Any way you want to slice it - this is not good news. It is clear the US dollar will continue to weaken is decades of political scrapping and decades of economic mismanagement finally face their day of reconning. As has been said many times, in order to avoid the melt down of our economies due to lack of energy availablity and high cost, we have to build at break neck speed an infrastructure that can replace oil and gas. We needed to start about 15 years before the peak of world oil production. We have not done so.
If the peak really was last year, then all hell is about to unfold and it will not surpise me to see gas rationing in the not too distant future.
Some things to remember.
Ethanol will not solve the problem. 100% of the US corn production will provide less than 2 weeks of liquid fuel. Next, ethanol from any source lives by the equation that 1 tonne of dry plant mass yields the equivalent of about 2 barrels of oil and this if we can do the conversion for free. This includes cellulostic ethanol.
We don't have the plants build anyways.
Industry runs under much tighter constraints than consumers. A consumer will simply give up a dinner at a restaurant in order to save the money to pay for his next tank of gas. Industry shuts down the plant and lays everyone off. We have already lost most of the North American fertilizer industry and plastic feedstock production (IE the pellets that go into injection moulding machines) is also going to die. Electricity production from Natural Gas is not threatened yet but expect power costs to continue to climb as this sector pushes out weaker sectors. In all cases jobs are lost and expensive infrastructure goes idle.
If one looks at the mortgage crisis and factors in the job loses precipitated by energy issues, then it becomes clear that this picture is not yet well understood.
Next consider how a government deals with recession? They print currency. Faced with the choice of inflation or recession, which do you choose? People on fixed incomes will lose their retirement.
Of course - one way to look at this is that its the retiring generation that lived beyond their means and created the mess. Their children certainly didn't. So maybe its poetic justice. However I do not think that people realize how bad its going to be. I watched my father-in-law lose his retirement because of the inflation Pierre Elliot (Idjot) Trudeau and his henchman Jean (Cretin) Chretien during the 1970's.
You make a good post and get intelligent responses. Yet some moderator thinks it is not politically correct and mods you a troll.
I get moderator points quite frequently and recently there are few occasions where I am not using some of them to reverse stupid moderation! Gawd moderators, Get real? Why do you want to suppress the contrarian point of view? Is it against your religeon or something?
The truth with regard to global warming is that planetary climate change is due to a number of factors and these include the distribution of the continents, the amount of land at high elevation (Ie mountains and plateaus like the Colorado and Tibetian), ocean currents an connections between oceans like for instance the Isthmus of Panama.
CO2 levels are not linked to climate change in the geological record. One would think they would be if CO2 is a significant factor.
Yet of those who wish for a change in the way we live and use the non-renewable resources of Mother earth... and recognize that burning fossil fuels is both unsustainable and does add CO2 to the atmosphere... well - for these people yes, it would be correct to recognize that if we adopt a sustainable life style then at the same time we might reduce CO2 emissions.
Yet - this observation does not mean that climate change if it exists is necessarily linked to Co2 emissions.
I will say this. I think those who feel this way are going to get their wish.
The best information I have is that the world's oil production peaked in September of last year. Is this information published? Well - not really. The media has not picked up on it. Why? Because you don't get good information from the media.
My sources are very reliable. But I will caution that we need to go 5 more years past peak before we can confidently look in the mirror and say we are past peak. Even then, something unexpected could happen like finding that oil is abiogenic and there is an ocean of it sitting under say the Alberta Tar sands.
If the preliminary data is correct and we are past peak then those who want us to drive less and emit less CO2 will get their wish. This still doesn't mean that CO2 driven climate change exists.
I will point out that anyone who is really concerned about CO2 emissions should open the walls of their house and increase the insulation to about R50 in the walls and R70 in the ceiling and that they can do this during construction for about $1 buk per square foot of building envelop.
Until I see people do this I will not listen to their concerns... why? Because unless someone is concerned enough to actually do what is in their power to do - then I do not think they are much more than a hypocrite. Sorry - but that is just the way it is.
What is really too bad here is that IBM and Novel will not be compensated for what this frivolous law suit has cost them. It is really too bad that the personal assets of the management of SCOX cannot be taken.
Then, it is really too bad they can't be tossed in jail as well.
Slashdot Mirror
I've filed a bug report on this but at this point I'm not even sure its a bug... could be a hardware issue..
If anyone is running Adaptec SCSI 2940 controllers with more than one SCSI hard drive and it works then I'd like to know... if anyone is having problems I'd like to know.
The issue is that I have one 2940 fast narrow card and it won't boot... says there is no O/S. In the same machine... swap that card out to a 2940 fast wide and it boots just fine. Perhaps this is a firmware card issue. I have so far only tested these two cards... I plan to go get a handfull more.
Next issue. With the fast wide all seems 100%. Then I start an rsync from another machine and within seconds I get a kernel panic. There is a bug report here: http://paste.lisp.org/display/49908#1
Is OpenBSD bug report # 5616
I'm not at this point asking anyone to debug this. I want to know if others have a similar setup and it works.
This machine is a Pentium I, with two fast narrow SCSI disks and in this case an AHA 2940 FW card. There is nothing else on the bus.
O/S version was 4.1 and now I can try the new version. Since OpenBSD is such a great O/S I sure would like to get to the bottom of this without wasting people's time. If we have a problem we need to know about it and potentially fix it. If its an isolated issue then I need to know this so I can shelve the hardware if in fact it is flakey hardware.
Note: With that fast wide controller... dd if=/dev/sd1 of=/dev/sd1 bs=2048 will run 100% and never glitch at all. But try that rsync on the system.. kernel panics 100% of the time within seconds.
I like the mini mac. The issue is that it doesn't support my dual monitors. It does support my SCSI DLT7000 and all the other SCSI peripherals I have which include optical discs. Sure I can transfer to some other media but these MO discs are actually a rather good archival media. It doesn't support my SCSI Exabyte tapes and I happen to have a lot of them.
One thing I will point out is a few months ago a friend who dinigrates Linux and Unix came over with his old 8mmm Exabyte tape which he recorded on a Sun. It contained some software he wrote a little over a decade ago. He runs XP of course.
I was able to read it on my exabyte under Linux and burn a CD for him and within 1/2 an hour he was off with a big smile on his face.
On that MiniMac I think we were screwed before we started.
Backward compatibility and expandability are very important. My Keyboard is even an issue. Its an IBM PC 101 and if the computer doesn't support this keyboard then I won't buy the computer.
I don't agree with the nay sayers on this. I do agree that it is a racket.
The issue is that this will likely cost IBM a great deal of money in both litigation and administration. Unfortunately the facts are that the extortion is already taking place and its by the legal community.
We might note that patent trolls often come from the legal community.
I think this will serve to highlight the problems.
They presumably made a profit from the installation of the lines. It is the customers who paid for them. Further more most of the POTS lines were installed by our parents and the existing generation of Telco employees inherited them.
Furthermore if you look at the administrations of most Telcos you will find they are filled with non-productive people and paper pushers who sit around all day drinking coffee while they scheme more ways to suck book out of the customers they hold hostage. This is why we see telephone plan after plan after plan. This is why only a few years back we had horendous Long Distance rates. It is only through competition that we start to see the benefits of modern technology filter down to benefit the public. The thing is there is not enough competition.
IMHO the telco should be restricted to line maintenance and that is it. Its their job to maintain the wires just as it is the contractors job to maintain the hyways. Suppose the road maintanence crew were allowed to look inside the trailers of every semi... what would we get? Someone saying this truck is ok but that one isn't?
Basically this is what the telcos are up to.
Is there some way to get the lawyers out of the technology business?
What they like to do in court is select a jury that cannot possibly comprehend the case. By doing this it becomes a crap shoot and either side has an equal chance of winning. Patents like this make no sense to anyone other than lawyers who like them as a way yo retrain trade.
It puts all programmers at a disadvantage because at any time we can be attacked by someone's legal beagles.
Maybe we can ask for a patent on a business model based on patents on obvious ideas an prior art?
While Theo is very intelligent and opinionated it is important to mote he is not a lawyer. His understanding of law should be taken with a grain of salt.
The clear winner will be English. We can see this happening all over the globe. Language tends to follow money and technology.
The 2nd pony is probably Mandrin. China has a HUGE economy and with their one child policy they have a built in reduction over the next few decades which will leave the Chinese with say guess 500 million in population... about 2x the USA.
Meanwhile Europe and many parts of Asia are already speaking English. My guess is that English wins the race. It doesn't win because its best mind you.
The internet and OSS developed in English will have a lot to do with this.
The world converted to Latin a few centuries ago for the same reasons. I can still remember going to church and listening to the Priest spouting off in Latin. I was quite young and at the time I wondered what he was trying to accomplish. I always thought the purpose of Language is to facilitate communication.
I chose to not become a priest.
In comment to others who point out the history of the languages which are dying and the folklore and the culture..... yes. I agree 100%. We should record everything we can while we have the time to do it.
This is an interesting story on slashdot. Good going!
The assumption likely is that the energy is radiated in all directions. This puts the power varying as 1/d^2 which is a very small number when d gets rather large. The consequence of this is that if we get a signal of magnitude "x" then one would infer from this assumption that one must multiply by d^2 in order to calculate the energy at source.
If this energy was focused as it is say by a laser then the original power can be considerably lower. A parabolic lens will also focus the radiation but not nearly as well as a laser. One way this can be focused naturally is to simply put a large gravity well in the path the light takes between source and us.
The phenomenon may be little more complex than a gravity well which passed between us. If this gravity well is moving at the right speed then the period of time the energy remains focused can be short. It would be very interesting to find the gravitational lens (if this is what happened) is actually in orbit and we manage to pick up the pulse again.
The thing is with the proper focus all the assumptions of the size of the burst just fly out the window.
This is utterly absurd.
In 1985 I worked out everything that was required to do this and in fact even went so far as to track down Dialog cards so I could interface a PC to a T1 line.
There is NOTHING required that is worthy of a patent. NOTHING at all. This is all a totally obvious idea and relatively easy to implement. In fact it is so obvious that when I started working on the project I never even considered that patents would be available.
I never finished that project. I was a single parent working at home and my kids at the time decided I should not be allowed to program. Alas.
Now of course we have projects like Asterisk and its quite mature.
So how does this ruling affect projects like Asterisk? (www.asterisk.org)
Are we banned from plugging a hand held device that contains both a speaker and a microphone into a computer now? Or are we banned from connecting the computer to the telco switch, which BTW is a computer.
Maybe we are banned from connecting a computer which is called a PC to a computer which is called a switch via a network which has been in common use for decades.
To the fellow who points out that people who are too dumb to get out of jury duty are put in charge of million dollar technical decisions which they cannot possibly understand.... yes. You are 100% correct and you make an excellent post.
Its clear that lawyers have managed to turn technical progress into a game of craps. IMHO this is something the public needs to be more aware of and somehow it would be nice if our pollies could be held accountable for the bad legislation they created. We really need to get patent business out of the computer business.
I think this brings new meaning to ancient ideas.
I know night loads are historically less than daytime loads but I do not know by how much. It certainly is not going to be as much less based on electrical load as is reflected in the rate structure. The rate structure reflects the cost of providing peak load power in addition to base load.
.. or in gigawatts?
So... I would conclude that solar will fit in very nicely until the peak non-solar load switches to night time. The issue is that it might peak shortly after dusk when people are making dinner... and similarly peak at dawn as people make breakfast. If so then the solar generating capacity will not reflect homeowner peak demand anyways. It will however match the demand curves of office and industrial users because most of their activity is during the daytime.
Do you know how much this is in say percent?
Once we go past the difference between daytime and night loads, solar becomes less attractive from an economic standpoint; but we are still years away from meeting even the increased electrical demand from renewable sources. Furthermore as fuel costs increase then solar becomes much more attractive.
I wanted to simply do some ball park calculations on what we can likely expect and to illustrate what some of the issues are.
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If we could only store light. Light is a lot like electricity though and its hard to store for any length of time.
Now, suppose we put a big mirror in space. Then we could light our cities all night long this way and we can probably do it quite cheaply even now. The cost of big mirrors in space can't be all that great.
The Russians did test this a few years back.
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Here is another thing to consider. Solar power can be transported via light pipes. But consider. The max solar power is about 1000 watts per square meter. If you transport this through a hole smaller than say the main element of your stove then you will have more energy in that hole than the element produces at max power. This is very dangerous. It requires considerable engineering.
I think it is quite sobering to realize that a copper NMD 14-3 electrical cable in the wall of your house can transport 1500 watts safely. Yet if we try to transport the same energy in the form of light, in a 4" (10 cm) hole there is enough power to light the house on fire in a matter of seconds.
Again, there is considerable engineering required to use things like light pipes. I think similar calculations of high efficiency fiber optics would also be true.
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Here is another point. Light is actually quite energetic and it arrives here with the same temperature as it left the surface of the sun. This means the entropy is low enough that we have lots of good opportunity to put it to work. Light is not a high entropy energy source at all. It is just as good as high quality fossil fuel sources and nuclear sources (and of course it is a nuclear energy source!)
I really think there have to be a number of good ways to improve our use of solar energy which do not involve solar panels. Even building a parabolic mirror in northern climates to shine the energy through a picture window into the living room might make sense.
I think it certainly should make sense to use mirrors to heat salts which can store the energy quite well for later use as space heating should make sense.
Then another question is can we build a fresnel lens so we can flatten a parabolic mirror. If so then a flat roof panel should be able to focus light much the same as a parabolic trough would and in this senerio one could orient the angle of the trough so that its parallel to the path of the sun and put a black pipe below it to carry the energy. Costs of something like this might be only slightly above the cost of a sheet of glass and it can have efficiencies in the 80% range and up.
If we can do this, then we should be able to take a sheet of heavy glass and make roof panels out of it and have a
I think swing loads are handled by gas turbines and they are actually on but with not much load. The idea is that if a surge comes in the asset has to be spinning because they cannot start it fast enough.
Now hydro generation should be able to very quickly respond to load changes.
A small amount of solar is not going to destabilize anything. Probably a large amount also will not be too destabilizing and neither will a reasonable amount of wind.
But the thing is suppose one extrapolates out to the most significant fraction coming say from solar. We will still need the full generating capacity required for night time. During the day it sits idle.
This is unless we find a good way to store the energy. But even so we need to build the infrastructure to store the energy and its not clear how to do it. In the past we have always created what we need as we need it. However this is done, the more solar that is added to the system the more expensive infrastructure ends up laying idle during the day. I don't think we can expect the share holders of the power companies to cover the costs of the non-performing assets... The thing is these costs are properly part of the solar system.
So I think as the solar systems are deployed then the rate structures will change to reflect the cost of buffering energy from day to night.
I get the building envelope as follows:
40*50 = 2000 square feet.
40+50+40+50 = 180. I made the walls about 10 feet high so that is 180*10 = 1800.
1800+2000 = 3800 and I rounded it up to 4000.
Currently we put R20 in the walls. R20 costs just under 70 cents per square foot in Rona and Home Depot.
Thus R30 will cost about $1 dollar. R20+R30 = R50 for the walls. Currently ceilings are typically insulated to about R30-R40 so we simply add another R30 to that. This gives walls which are about 1 foot thick. Walls are built of 2x6, 24" on center. It is perfectly fine to rip the 2x6 into a 2x4 + 2x2 and use a spacer to create a cavity that is the proper distance for the insulation. Hence the actual construction costs are about $1 per square foot of building envelope and a wee bit of extra labour. From this you can deduct the cost of the furnace because you won't need one. You can add the cost of a small radiant in floor heating system or even radiators around the perimeter and with a heating load this small you can use a simple hot water tank as a boiler. I did this is my garage which is 670 square feet and the tank easily heats the building even when it is 40 below. That building was built to R20 standards not R50 because at the time I listened to a contractor and like most of them, they don't know how to do these energy calculations and hence their recommendations are not worth listening to.
Another thing to note: Consider the perimeter of the house is 180 linear feet. This is about 90 studs when done 24" on center. Studs cost about $5 bux. That is less than $500 in studs on the outside walls. Even if you incur a few extra bux here it isn't going to add up to a hill of beans on a finished house. About the only difference this makes is that your window sills are say a foot deep. This is wonderful for plants. My grandfather built a house from logs and the walls were a foot thick at least. When I bought the house I am in now I was dismayed that I could not even put a plant in the windows so I built window sill extensions.
This house has R12 or even less in it. It is so hot in the summer I hate it. This illustrates just how bad construction is and most houses in North America fall into this category. We have burned off a HUGE amount of the non-renewable gas supplies and also oil supplies because of this. When we start to have shortages I hope people realize that had these resources been conserved and managed well, then our supplies would have easily lasted into the 22 century. As it stands now I think those who say we are past world oil are correct and that Mathew Simmons' estimate that oil will pass $300 per barrel shortly is also unfortunately correct. We passed the peak of North American natural gas production January 2001.
Because of this much of the North American fertilizer industry is permanently shut down. Natural Gas hit over $17 per gigajoule and it will hit this again in the not too distant future. We will be likely facing a major crisis before 2015.
Next: Garbage pickup.
The garbage truck goes down the back alley every week. IF I put that little Ssafeway bag in a big garbage bag then they are happy. If I put it all by itself in the garbage pail they leave it. They left two (2) of them all summer long as I was not in town for most of July and August and didn't realize they decided to leave them. Since there was some raw bones and a fish head in one of the bags it was pretty high by the end of August. Their excuse? They didn't like me using two little Safeway bags.
Now for the cyclist. I'm all for him. He may not make much difference but at least he's trying and I pat him on the back for the effort he and others make.
A 2 foot by 2 foot chunk of window glass in the store is $17.40 at Rona. A square meter is 10.76 square feet. So a 1 meter square piece of glass would cost $46.82 at these rates.
Even the cheapest solar cell should be expected to cost more than plain glass since it includes at a minimum plain glass.
Next.
Solar constant is 1300 watts per square meter in space and max 1000 on the surface of the earth.
One can expect on average 12 hours of darkness. Then we can expect only 50% of this max because most of the time its not high noon. One actually has to integrate the sin curve.
So we can say 12 hours at 500 watts average maximum collection and at best we can hope for about 50% of this. This 50% discount takes into account rainy days and snow blowing on it and maybe it gets a little dirty because people don't wash it often enough.... there are lots of things that can go wrong here. So I pick 50% out of the air as a practical fudge factor to convert to what is theoretically possible to what one might expect.
This is 3000 watt hours per day falling on the panel in a useful way, and the efficiency of the panel is say 10-13% so I'll use 10%. We can expect to get say 300 watt hours per day per square meter. This is 0.3 kwh which in worth say about 3 cents at a rate of 10 cents per kwh. This is still 25 watts per square meter for 12 hours and this is what a mini florescent draws.
But from the article - they say $1 per watt so I assume they mean per watt peak capacity.
This would be 100 watts per square meter since we have 10% of 1000 and the 1000 is peak. The duty cycle is at best 1/4 of this. Nevertheless, $1 per watt * 100 watts is $100 per square meter.
Thing is $100 per square meter is only 2x the cost of a plain glass windowpane so its actually unreasonable to expect they will be able to sell these panels at anywhere near 2x the cost of plain glass. A complete window assembly is in the order of a few $100 bux. Maybe we get the complete panel retailing at $200.
What should we expect to really get out of a $200 panel in terms of energy?
At best, 25% of max and this is about 25 watts per square meter and this is over 12 hours. Hence one should expect the thing to capture at most say 300 watt hours per day.
As I calculated before this is about 0.3 kwh = 3 cents worth of power. $0.03 * 365 = $10.90
Invest say $200 in a panel when it retails and get $10 per year from it in electricity. This is a 20 year pay back not counting installation, maintenance, and so forth. At a 5% interest rate (cost of capital) it has a ZERO Return on Investment (ROI).
Now the real issue. Suppose everyone does this. It will have the effect of destabilizing the grid because it puts the power company in the position of standing by ready to supply energy at night and when the sun doesn't shine but meanwhile when the sun is shinning their expensive infrastructure sits idle. So long before this gets deployed the rules get rewritten.
The thing is that we can already capture solar energy passively and build houses that will save way more than $1000 per year in energy and do this for a capital investment of less than $5,000. All we need to do is put R50 and R70 in the walls and ceilings. We can do a LOT more than this. To capture say $1000 per year with say these high efficiency panels will cost 100x$200 bux = $20,000 of capital and this does not include the control systems.
Very good point!
Consider the modern hard disk drive. These have lifetimes measured in decades. With magnetic bearings surely we can create a decent flywheel system that can do the trick for stationary service. They won't do the trick for vehicles though because the loads are too great. I have read about "air cars" and this seems quite reasonable since the internal combustion engine is basically an air pump.
Would you care to calculate what the engineering parameters for a flywheel storage system for a house might be?
A good place to start is that at 10 cents per kwh... and a 100 power bill we are looking at 1000 kwh's power consumption per month.
One might want to buffer a day's worth... say 1/25th. 1000/25 = 40 kwh.
This is 40,000 watt hours and in my battery example that is $18,250 for 1/4 of that to roast xmas dinner.
Clearly one would use say a wood stove.
One could say buffer 1/2 a day instead of a day. That would be 20 kwh and maybe nighttime electricity use for the average home owner is less than daytime usage... for me it is.
If one's power bill is $100 per month then this will finance about $12000 in capital costs at 10%. There will be maintenance expenses and operating costs and infrastructure costs as well.
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Here is my observation. It costs during construction about $1 dollar per square foot of building envelope to super insulate a house. If you do this you can save over $200 per month in peak heating / cooling and overall here in Calgary I would save over $1000 per year and would do it except I have to tear this house apart in order to do it.
If my house is 40x50 = 2000 square feet then I have a building envelope of about 4000 square feet so the additional insulation costs me say under $5,000 and I get a pay back in say 5 years (or less) and I can chuck the furnace.
Builders are not doing this yet.
After the house is finished I need to tear the walls apart and rebuild them and this is more than a $50,000 touch. A $50,000 cost to save $1000 per year at 10% has a negative ROI.... so it never gets done.
The thing is that one can save $100 per month average in energy by investing $5000 into fiberglass insulation. We can pick this insulation up in any lumber store in North America at least. It requires zero maintenance and close to zero intelligence and its operating costs are non-existant.
Hence, if one wants to be environmentally friendly it would seem to me the thing is to invest in the simplest technology possible first and especially so with such inviting numbers. Yet, the vast majority of people are not doing this.
Then we have the tragedy of the commons where the few who are concerned enough to actually build a super insulated house make no difference in the grand scheme of things.
Its the same as the cyclist. He/she might be a very energy efficient person but the waste from everyone else makes their concerns and their efforts irrelevant.
On a related subject, my city wants to charge me on an average basis for the garbage I create. I refuse to buy the over-packaged foods. I buy most things in bulk. I do not open cans. As a result I have less than 2 safeway bags of garbage per month. Still I am suppose to save this for months on end to fill up a standard trash bag because they have these rules that they don't want to pick up a little Safeway bag.
Then I am expected to pay for a service that I don't use and its my money that subsidized my neighbours' extravagance. Next the city wants to up the rates so they can institute a "better" way to handle the trash.
An intelligent solution IMHO would be to surcharge those who create mountains of trash with their clearly wasteful consumption patterns and to reward people who are fruggle.
In our society, it doesn't seem to happen that way. The guy who rides his bike to work is still expected to subsidize the guy who drives an SUV what weighs in over a tonne. Then when an oil war shows up because Britain and the USA want to liberate Iraqii oil in order to maintain an unsustainable lifestyle... that guy on his bike will be told its his duty to carry a gun and kill people.
The solar constant is about 1300 watts per square meter (in space). On earth the best you can hope for is about 1000 watts peak. So on average we will look at about say 50% of 50% and less on a cold winter day when we need both heating and more lighting. In fact on a winer day at about 51 degrees latitude we get about 8 hours of light and even then its less than 250 watts per square meter.
If we take 10% of 250 we get 25 watts. This is about as much as a high efficiency mini florescent uses.
To run a toaster we will need 40 square meters of solar panel and to roast a turkey and cook on top of the stove as well we look at 40 amps @ 240 volts (check your main panel folks) which is about 385 square meters at 25 watts per square meter.
Thing is that we might want to roast the xmas turkey after dusk, so we better plan on batteries.
A deep cycle 12 volt battery (lead acid) can be expected to hold 60 amp-hours.... at least this is what the Hawker batteries I use for my UPS system are rated for.
12*60 = 720 watts hours. To roast the turkey say takes 4 hours at a draw of say 30% of 40 * 240 which is about 11,250 watt hours. So we need 15 batteries for this. Next if we draw them down any more than about 20% the number of cycles goes into the toilet so we'll need about 5x as many so we can draw each to about 20% of their max rating. We'll need 75 batteries.
New these batteries cost more than $250 bux so that is a battery investment of $18,750.
Clearly one will not be running an electric range off that solar system.
I'm not scoffing at the idea. I think its good but one has to find a way to store that energy and perhaps the best use of it will be to create hydrogen.
The thing is that sure it can feed into the grid during the day. All this does is put idle the current generating infrastructure and we still need that infrastructure for night operation. Of course it would save the fuel needed to operate the plant.
But then what would we use the existing generating stations for when they are idle? Generating hydrogen?
Somehow it doesn't make sense to burn fuel to create electricity to make hydrogen when we can simply for instance chemically take the Methane apart and get hydrogen that way.
One really has to think about how this cheap solar technology fits into the full cycle of energy needs.
Nevertheless I think it is good and maybe we should use it to pump water up hill. Then at night we can let the water flow back through the pump and turn it into a motor-generator. Batteries are just one way to store energy. It can be stored as compressed air, water at the top of a hill, chemically such as hydrogen gas... but it will need to be stored and in great quantities if this technology is going to go anywhere.
Plants such as trees are another good solar collector. We tend not to use them. They are reasonably efficient and serve as their own battery system because if you need more heat you can chuck another log on the fire. Since most of us tend not to use the solar collectors mother nature already created for us, I suspect that there will be huge issues to overcome in order to deploy even cheap man-made ones.
Now here is another thought. The best efficiency of these collectors is say 10%. If we capture the same energy for space heating our houses we can easily get over 80%. Yet, most of us do not even do this.
A super heated house with R70 in the ceiling and R50 in the walls costs about $1 dollar per square foot of building envelope extra during construction. This will eliminate the vast majority of summer cooling and winter heating loads. Here in Calgary for instance a house like this does not need a furnace and we can have winter days that are 40 below for weeks on end. A house like this can get by with a nice fireplace and wood heat and will burn less than 1 cord of wood per year. That wood costs about $100 dollars.
But, most of us don't even do this.
I think solar is a great idea but a low
I see lots of typos in other posts and just correct them. I'm quite tolerant of such things. Besides I had other things to do.
Alas, you are kerrect I guess.
The value of your house will not decline because of inflation. Its the value of debt that declines.
In fact you win big time. If the value of your house goes up 10x and the value of your salary goes up 9x then you are probably way ahead because you now only need to pay off 10% of the cost of your house.
OTOH, the retired folks across the street who were told by a financial advisor to invest in high quality long term mortgages because they are too old to take the risk... it is these people who find the mortgage instrument and the income from it no longer has much value. They lose their retirement. They win somewhat on the value of their home of course but will find they need to sell it (usually by way of a reverse) mortgage in order to survive. So they tighten their belts and in the end their children lose their inheritance.
While I understand what you write I say for most Americans they have no reason to complain about inflation in their food costs because they eat too much anyways. So if you think your food bill is too high, then go on a diet.
How is this all that much different than a drunk complaining about the cost of his bar bill?
eh?
It was David Pimental from Cornel and others who first proposed this myth. Its simply not true. In fact the energy return is quite decent.
The thing is that an individual farmer could do quite well running his farm machinery on ethanol that he produces himself. In fact, the average farmer has lots of free time all winter long and could produce all of his required summer fuel and still have lots of time for curling, hunting, fishing and bitching about why there is no money in farming... when in fact there is.
How do I know? I grew up on a farm and brewing and making wine is something I have done since I was in grade 11.
I do know what the input costs are and I can assure you Pimental did not. He made many assumptions that are not supported by facts. Nevertheless one of the things they were doing back then was running coal fired distillation and pushing it past the Aseotrop. To be energy +ve you need high efficiency vacuum distillation.
My point is that its not practical to do this from starch sources which is basically beer making. I think from cellulose it might make sense. The cellulose costs are going to be low, but we are still talking about 1 tonne of dry plant matter is equivalent to 2 barrels of oil once we do the conversion. With oil under $200 per barrel I do not think the economics look good. Next we do not have the technology in place yet.
The best ideas seem to involve enzymes derived from Trichoderma reeshi. This is a fungus isolated in Gaum during the 1940's. It is used for Stone Washer blue jeans since it does digest cellulose and it loves it in fact. The thing is most of the plant matter we have as feedstocks are not pure cellulose. They also contain pentosans and liganins and T. reeshi doesn't like these. There are other fungii which do like them. I work with some of these but not in the area of fuel production.
My point is that we are facing a bad bad problem and we do not at this time have in place technology which will do for us what we need. I for instance will not invest in an ethanol plant other than as a trade into the hype - and I have made quite a lot of money doing this.
You can just import one.
You need to really watch the couriers because they are experts at ripping people off. I know. I'm an importer and have imported millions of dollars of merchandise.
However if you are buying into Ryobi then IMHO it doesn't matter really what you pay because you're being silly. Still maybe its better to pay $50 bux for a POS than $80.
Good brand names include Makita, Hitachi, Bosch, and of course others.
Now I bought a Delta bench belt sander. There is a plastic belt in it that was about 1/8th of an inch wide. The plastic drive wheel had been designed to handle a belt that was about 1/4 of an inch wide.
How much do you think that company saved by putting in a plastic belt 50% of the width of that should be there? But then... what of the plastic drive wheel? I can buy metal drive wheels for a few bux. Of course they don't fit since they were not designed for the Delta.
You know... I paid for quality and I didn't get it. My response... in part warning others... and of course Delta no longer gets my business.
I have two (2) dead Black and Decker pad sanders and a dead Black and Decker belt sander and a dead Black and Decker router. Funny thing.... when I go and look at a construction site and see what the pro's are using... why don't I see much in the way of Ryobi, Black and Decker, Delta power tools?
What do I see?
Makita, Bosch, some Hitachi... there are some others of course.
So it says a lot IMHO.
BTW... you can import these other brands as well and with the net its pretty easy to find good pricing.
Hmm. I suppose for that matter I could start my import business again. But I don't think it is really worth it for $50 items. What I imported before typically retailed over $12,000. Its hard to get enough people together to organize as a $12,000 shipment of power tools. (I would expect this to be the case anyways). Note one would list $12,000 on a B3 the same as one would list $50 bux. Note that its the same number of trips to Customs and the same number of pages of paper work and the same issues with payment of GST and so forth. The only thing that changes is the size of the numbers.
Be very careful with UPS. With Air transportation they gouge but are up front but at least clear customs at an included cost. With ground transportation last I used them and I will not in the future... they try to apply a clearance tax based on the value of the item. If you were to ship say $12,000 via UPS ground your shipping costs will include a brokerage commission and hey typically don't quote this as a "shipping cost". Next, all they do is write a number on a piece of paper which is called a B3. The cost to UPS to clear an item costing $50 bux is the same as $12,000 and it takes a clerk no more than about 5-10 minutes to do it.
Think about this. The number they write on teh B3 is the cost of the item in USA currency. Then they multiply this number by the conversion rate which they have to look up for the shipment date. Then they add to this any duty and probably there is none. After that they multiply by the GST rate and add sales tax if applicable. They total these costs and you need to pay this to them if they paid the customs bill for you. The most difficult part is figuring out the classification category. This does not change regardless how much you are importing. For instance I think all power tools fall into one category.
So... I called UPS and I DO know what to ask them... What is the "Brokerage commission"?
0-20: free
20-40: $7.: $19.45
etc.
5,000: $69.03
$5,000 and up: add $5.38 per thousand.
IE. ground transportation of say $12,000 will cost $(69.03+ 7*5.38) = $106.69
Remember, the paperwork is identical in all cases. Its one (1) B3 that you need to fill in.
Well - if you add an unexpected $100 to a $12,000 shipment its maybe ok but an additional unquoted $20 bux for a $50 shipment is quite the gouge especially since you can buy i
I am not at all surprised to see parity. Canada has a strong economy and Alberta especially so.
There are many reasons for weakeness in the US currency including but not limited to a massive government debt and a glutonous appetite for foreign oil.
Yesterday T. Boone Pickens was on TV on the business channel I sometimes watch. He made a number of interesting comments:
1) World oil production is about 85 million barrels per day and T. Boone does Not think it can be increased. The best information I have comes from expertize within the Geological Survey of Canada, but this expertise is certainly not limited to the GSC, and we are now pegging the peak of work oil production at September 2006. If production increases above that level then it will not be by much. T. Boone commented that the estimated demand for 4th quarter 2007 is 88 million Barrels per day.
Hence we will see the oil price driven up in order to destroy demand. In all likelihood it will get worse.
2) T. Boone says he favours nuclear and pointed out that General Electric says they can build a reactor in 3 years plus the friction added by the regulators and dealing with opposition. Probably this is correct.
3) Canada is ramping up Tar Sands as fast as we possibly can which explains why our economy is so strong. We cannot increase production has enough to make much of a difference. Currently we are investing billions per year.
Currently the USA consumes about 23 million barrels of oil per day.
Any way you want to slice it - this is not good news. It is clear the US dollar will continue to weaken is decades of political scrapping and decades of economic mismanagement finally face their day of reconning. As has been said many times, in order to avoid the melt down of our economies due to lack of energy availablity and high cost, we have to build at break neck speed an infrastructure that can replace oil and gas. We needed to start about 15 years before the peak of world oil production. We have not done so.
If the peak really was last year, then all hell is about to unfold and it will not surpise me to see gas rationing in the not too distant future.
Some things to remember.
Ethanol will not solve the problem. 100% of the US corn production will provide less than 2 weeks of liquid fuel. Next, ethanol from any source lives by the equation that 1 tonne of dry plant mass yields the equivalent of about 2 barrels of oil and this if we can do the conversion for free. This includes cellulostic ethanol.
We don't have the plants build anyways.
Industry runs under much tighter constraints than consumers. A consumer will simply give up a dinner at a restaurant in order to save the money to pay for his next tank of gas. Industry shuts down the plant and lays everyone off. We have already lost most of the North American fertilizer industry and plastic feedstock production (IE the pellets that go into injection moulding machines) is also going to die. Electricity production from Natural Gas is not threatened yet but expect power costs to continue to climb as this sector pushes out weaker sectors. In all cases jobs are lost and expensive infrastructure goes idle.
If one looks at the mortgage crisis and factors in the job loses precipitated by energy issues, then it becomes clear that this picture is not yet well understood.
Next consider how a government deals with recession? They print currency. Faced with the choice of inflation or recession, which do you choose? People on fixed incomes will lose their retirement.
Of course - one way to look at this is that its the retiring generation that lived beyond their means and created the mess. Their children certainly didn't. So maybe its poetic justice. However I do not think that people realize how bad its going to be. I watched my father-in-law lose his retirement because of the inflation Pierre Elliot (Idjot) Trudeau and his henchman Jean (Cretin) Chretien during the 1970's.
In part this
So - what do these findings have to do with Global Warming? Especially GW pushed by CO2?
If we do have GW its probably pushed by changes in Water Vapour - but of course we can't measure that.
You make a good post and get intelligent responses. Yet some moderator thinks it is not politically correct and mods you a troll.
I get moderator points quite frequently and recently there are few occasions where I am not using some of them to reverse stupid moderation! Gawd moderators, Get real? Why do you want to suppress the contrarian point of view? Is it against your religeon or something?
The truth with regard to global warming is that planetary climate change is due to a number of factors and these include the distribution of the continents, the amount of land at high elevation (Ie mountains and plateaus like the Colorado and Tibetian), ocean currents an connections between oceans like for instance the Isthmus of Panama.
CO2 levels are not linked to climate change in the geological record. One would think they would be if CO2 is a significant factor.
Yet of those who wish for a change in the way we live and use the non-renewable resources of Mother earth... and recognize that burning fossil fuels is both unsustainable and does add CO2 to the atmosphere... well - for these people yes, it would be correct to recognize that if we adopt a sustainable life style then at the same time we might reduce CO2 emissions.
Yet - this observation does not mean that climate change if it exists is necessarily linked to Co2 emissions.
I will say this. I think those who feel this way are going to get their wish.
The best information I have is that the world's oil production peaked in September of last year. Is this information published? Well - not really. The media has not picked up on it. Why? Because you don't get good information from the media.
My sources are very reliable. But I will caution that we need to go 5 more years past peak before we can confidently look in the mirror and say we are past peak. Even then, something unexpected could happen like finding that oil is abiogenic and there is an ocean of it sitting under say the Alberta Tar sands.
If the preliminary data is correct and we are past peak then those who want us to drive less and emit less CO2 will get their wish. This still doesn't mean that CO2 driven climate change exists.
I will point out that anyone who is really concerned about CO2 emissions should open the walls of their house and increase the insulation to about R50 in the walls and R70 in the ceiling and that they can do this during construction for about $1 buk per square foot of building envelop.
Until I see people do this I will not listen to their concerns... why? Because unless someone is concerned enough to actually do what is in their power to do - then I do not think they are much more than a hypocrite. Sorry - but that is just the way it is.
End of rant.
Now if we could get rid of this bad moderation.
What is really too bad here is that IBM and Novel will not be compensated for what this frivolous law suit has cost them. It is really too bad that the personal assets of the management of SCOX cannot be taken.
Then, it is really too bad they can't be tossed in jail as well.