>>In carbon-trading schemes it is critical to evaluate where the money is going.
>No it is not. By Coases Theorem, the long-run market equilibrium does not rely on initial allocation.
I am interested in the short-term as well, because many billions of dollars are at stake. If that money goes to the government, then perhaps that is a reasonable solution, if the government allocates these funds fairly and wisely. If the money is given to those who are currently polluting the most, I would be concerned, even if the long-term effect on CO2 is what I would want.
You may be right that in the end we will need hard limits on CO2 production and that trading would be an effective way to limit CO2 production. Certainly whatever solution is proposed, it will need strong political support. CO2 trading may have sufficient support to help this happen. I will continue to argue, however that efficiency regulation is an important part of the solution. Efficiency is often simply very cheap. How much does it cost to make an appliance that doesn't consume power when turned off? How much does a bit of extra insulation in a refrigerator cost? The problem is that the price signal doesn't effectively propagate back to the manufacturer, as it might in an economics textbook. We are busy people with complicated lives and many of us would prefer that we not be forced to be energy experts on each appliance we buy.
Market pricing schemes can ignore certain social economic realities. Here are a couple of examples. I am a landlord. I own a house with an inefficient heating system in a cold climate. What is my incentive to upgrade my system? I can assure you that my tenants don't know how much the heating bill will be. Most people neglect to ask. People rarely act in perfectly economically rational ways. (Those that do tend to be a bit obsessive and are considered weird.) Even if tenants get more interested in heating bills through increased costs, there are a few factors that tend delay a landlord's purchase of a more efficient system, such as available cash and credit. Rather than wait for a price signal to hit the tenants, and wait for tenants to start making inquiries about heating costs of a rental, so that next time the landlord replaces the boiler (perhaps in 10 to 20 years) he buys a more efficient one, a simple requirement that all boilers be at least x% efficient could be implemented. Result: everyone saves. Landlord pays say $100 - $300 more upfront (out of a $5000 - $8000 investment for a single family home). Tenants save gobs on heat and the environment is preserved. The landlord saves not on having to replace the inefficient heating system he just installed 10 years ago, when the tenants finally woke up to the soaring heating costs that the carbon trading system created.
On the social side we have to consider that not all worthwhile production CO2 is economically productive and contributing to GDP. An example would be keeping old retired people warm in the winter. The market might dictate that a salesman's international flight is more economically productive than the retired person's life, but thats not a solution anyone would seek. We end up needing to build some safeguards into the system to prevent results like this. I haven't heard much concrete talk from carbon-trading proponents about how to avoid these kinds of troubles.
If you want to have a pollution trading scheme operate along with efficiency measures, that might be a reasonable approach, but you may find that the devil is in the details.
Some of those details are political. For example, the industries that would be most affected by carbon-trading are surely spending money on lobbyists and researchers to ensure that any scheme benefits them. I can assure you that I have seen electric utility officials who are heavily invested in coal promoting schemes in the hope that we will repeat Europe's mistakes and give the right to pollute to those already doing so.
The carbon credit schemes are certainly one way to address carbon emissions, but there are multiple valid approaches to the problem, each with its own set of trade-offs. Some of these approaches are market based, such as the *various* pollution-trading schemes and others are regulatory.
Let me first raise a simple alternative to the pollution-trading schemes that are commonly proposed. The opposite solution is the outright ban of a particular pollutant. Bans have the benefit of minimal administrative overhead and rapid results. The ban of lead in gasoline and paint has been extremely effective, reducing lead levels in people, especially children dramatically since the 1970's.
Clearly this approach is not optimal for the CO2 problem, as there are not alternatives that are as readily available as there were for lead free gas and paint. The point is that sometimes a regulatory approach can be effective with minimal costs. The fuel efficiency standards are similar from the consumer point of view on costs. The consumer is never saddled with a direct or indirect tax on their CO2 production. Manufacturers are simply required to produce more efficient vehicles. The consumer does feel some impact in that manufacturers may charge more for gas guzzlers because those vehicles cut into their fleet average.
In carbon-trading schemes it is critical to evaluate where the money is going. The first thing to evaluate is who gets the credits in the first place. Are they given to the industries already producing CO2 emissions, who can then sell them off as they close plants and take in a windfall. This is what happened in Europe. Are they auctioned off by the government? Are the credits everlasting? Do they shrink every year so that CO2 targets are hit? Are a new set of credits auctioned every year? In any pollutant-trading scheme there are winners and losers. Some companies that are in favor of the CO2 trading schemes are those that burn massive amounts of coal. They could get quite rich off the fact that they invested heavily in a polluting industry.
Lets think about what would happen in a world where all CO2 production was subject to a cap and trade system. Now I have to pay extra fees for gas for my car, oil to heat my home and electricity. This money now goes, depending on the scheme adopted, to private companies or the government. I as individual I'm not too happy about this. It might get me to use less energy, but there could be much more effective ways of doing this. Clearly buying more efficient appliances, such as a fridge furnace or lights would save me energy. These appliance efficiency standards are mandated by government. Higher standards would save consumers lots of money over the long term. They would also reduce CO2 emissions. Notice, under this regulatory scheme, I have saved money, while under the market-based approach, I have lost money. Guess which one I am for?
Lets look at cars. Under CAFE standard we get a pretty definite idea how much CO2 will be produced by passenger vehicles every year. There is a definite average each manufacturer must meet. I can buy whatever car I want to. I don't have to pay extra fees to government or industry to drive my car. As an added bonus my car gets better gas mileage and save money.
The fact that 35 mpg is at all controversial seems absurd. This is about the current efficiency in Europe and my 12 year old Honda gets this much driving around town. Hitting this as an average for new cars in another 12 years should not be hard to do.
Installation cost depends on several factors. Commercial installation is substantially cheaper than residential installation. From your reference to luxury cars, I am assuming that you are thinking in terms of residential installation, which has some costs that do not scale well, such as communications between seller and buyer and guys driving out to a house, setting up ladders, drilling holes and interfacing with the electrical grid. There have been some efforts to reduce these costs by standardizing some parts, grouping installations in a neighborhood together to economize on installers time. Also, there is a move to prefabricate some parts at the factory, reducing installation labor. One kind of residential installation that may scale well is in the building of new developments, where very little additional labor would be required to install these systems. I also suspect that as the cost of solar panels drop we may see larger numbers of companies getting into the residential solar installation business.
The figures in my post, however, were concerned with commercial installations, which scale much better than residential installations. Residential installations are important, however, for a few reasons. First is available surface area. There is a lot of rooftop available and this available rooftop happens to be very close to the places where power is consumed. Second is a sense of investment and personal ownership that is important in this stage of the solar market's evolution. Many people like knowing that their power comes from the sun and get pride out of seeing their electric meter run backwards. They may not be interested in the status that a luxury car gets them, but they may be interested in telling friends and family about their green home. Not everyone with disposable income is disposed towards traditional luxury goods. As the costs of solar solar installations (panels, electronics and labor) fall and the price of electricity rises, solar rooftops will seem increasingly practical for more people, especially when the cost is spread out over the lifetime of the system. As with many technologies the early adopters are paving the way for the mass market.
Your comment reminds us that there is no magic bullet solution in energy production, just as there is no magic bullet in computer security or solving social problems. Just because a particular power source does not solve all the energy needs of a nation is not a reason to ignore it.
A converse to each of your statements would be that each of these green sources of power are available in certain areas. Combined they can have a greater impact. There are also some synergies available, such as using hydro to compensate for the variable power produced by solar or wind, since a dam's turbines can be shut down without wasting stored energy that might be used at a time of slow wind, low light or high demand.
Re:I wish that they would hit geo-thermal
on
Google Goes Green
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Good news: superconducting cables have been installed already in some cities. They are being promoted save limited space for buried cable, carry more power, reduce size of substations as well as reduce transmission losses. Check out http://www.supercables.com/ for more info. They have lots of good explanations of the benefits of superconducting cable and a video which shows parks and buildings springing up where substations and overhead transmission lines used to be. These cables look like they will become a piece of of energy future.
Clearly there are limitations and it seems like these cables are currently cost-effective only where there are benefits besides transmission efficiency, though this is certainly part of it. Likely the cost of materials and cooling makes superconducting cables too expensive for long distance transmission at current electric rates. There was a lot of hope for higher temperature superconductors in the late 1980s, perhaps the real-world use of these cables will stimulate further research and costs might drop with innovations.
Another way to reduce transmission losses is do do less transmission, by moving power generation closer to power consumers. Few people want more fossil fuel or nuclear plants located near their homes. (I remember sweeping fly ash from a large oil-fired plant across the street off the porch every spring when I was younger.) Roof-mounted solar would reduce transmission distances. It first needs to overcome some cost problems before it would be economical enough to be widespread and would always need to be part of a mix of other power sources and/or power storage systems.
Government subsidies have reduced the cost to consumers in certain markets such as Germany and California, but are not the primary driver of the price decreases we have seen in these two technologies over the last three decades. Currently, demand is so high for solar electric, that suppliers cannot keep up and prices are inflated and will remain so until more of the planned and in-progress photovoltaic production plants come on line. The solar industry is looking to grow beyond their current marked of subsidized installations and specialty installations (off grid, mobile power, etc). Solarbuzz.com states: "As a guide, the industry is looking to drive module prices down to $1.50 - $2.00/Watt over the next decade, if it is to make large inroads in to the grid tied electricity market, without subsidy." The price is currently $4-5/Watt range. In 1982 it was $27/Watt. The goal is aggressive, given that current price is affected by the supply constraint and the amount of investment in alternative power that is occurring, we may be pleasantly surprised.
The purpose of these subsidies to to grow the industry to the point where the economies of scale are large enough and the technologies are improved enough that the subsidies become unnecessary to the continued growth of the market. We are not at that point yet, but the cost reductions in both solar and wind have been dramatic. Currently industrial solar installation cost $0.21/KWh and produce their peak power at times of peak demand, increasing the value of their power. (Figures from solarbuzz.com . Distribution charge, typically $0.05/KWh, might not be included here). The US national average electric rate is $0.095/KWh. Tuscon Electric Charge residential customers with time of use meters $0.184/KWh in the daytime in summer and $0.126/KWh in the winter peak power times. These prices are getting pretty close to where unsubsidized solar costs currently are. Further increases in fossil fuel prices and improvements in solar will help to close this gap.
There is another justification for subsidies as well. If we were to take an economist's perspective on this issue, we might see that there are certain "externalities" in traditional energy production. An externality is a cost that is not reflected in the price of a product. For instance, the price of electricity from coal does not include the cost of treating people for asthma caused by coal plant emissions. While few would propose charging power companies a surcharge for their health effects, since this calculation would be extremely difficult to get right and politically impossible to implement, this lack of a surcharge can be seen as individuals and governments subsidizing the cost of coal power generation through their health care expenditures as well as through damage to their citizen's health. The government will actually save some money in health care costs by subsidizing alternative energy which would replace dirty coal plants and might see an interest in protecting the health of its citizens. Clearly certain subsidies would have more impact in reducing external costs than others. Some people might want to include other externalities such as
Thanks for mentioning John Reid's contribution to solving this puzzle. I was one of his students a number of years ago.
Professor John Reid was truly a great scientist. He was not the kind who worked solo in the lab late into the night coming up with the brilliant discovery. Rather, he was passionately curious about the world around him. He simply loved to solve puzzles and presented learning about geology with a sense of curiosity and wonder which drew in other curious minds.
As one of his students, I had the pleasure to watch him work on many occasions. He might have a hunch about how a system might work, or more often that just that we might learn something about it. His investigations were quite wide-ranging, though generally in the areas relating to flows of surface waters. The problems he attacked would range from details of the dynamics of river flow, stream chemistry, or mixing of waters. He would gather all kinds of data, often by turning a class of students loose with a variety of equipment for a few hours with a set of tasks. The data would then be distributed to the entire class to analyze and share. The labs had a sense of adventure and exploration. The sense I always got from him was that he always saw many discoveries just waiting to be made. All that had to be done was to think about something for a bit, collect some data and see what it might be telling us. He always seemed to get close and personal with data, to really look at what the numbers might be trying to say, and taught me to do the same. His students were involved with his research in ways that undergraduates rarely are, which was facilitated by Hampshire's system in which students complete a major research project as a condition of graduation.
One of these opportunities to watch him at work was a week long-spring break field trip to Death Valley with John, several professors and about 25 other students from Hampshire College, Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College and the University of Massachusetts in 1992 (or was it 1991?). It was an amazing time to be surrounded by a group of people, both professors and students, who loved geology in a place with such great geological features. We saw many things, one of which was the Racetrack Playa. I remember standing with him at the edge of the playa, explaining the mystery of the skating rocks to us. At that time he had already suspected an ice sheet blown by wind was involved and pointed out the parallel tracks to us. The tracks would go some distance, often in a straight line, then abruptly change direction. He was planning to return in colder weather to test the ice hypothesis, which I remember him reporting that he had verified some months later.
I learned a few years ago of his passing in 2003, but I will never forget the impact he had on the way I thought about science.
Nice point about management of power from dams. It got me thinking about power management in general. We can manage load in three ways: managing supply, storing power and managing demand.
Managing supply can be done by carefully choosing when to turn on and off various sources. As the parent mentioned, nuclear, coal and fuel oil are not well-suited for rapid adjustments to power to respond to demand variation and used for base load. I was going to tell you that gas-fired pants did not fall into this category, but Wikipedia tells me that there are two types of natural gas plants. The gas turbine facilities can be brought up to full power fairly quickly. The "combined cycle" plants are used for base load.
As other posters are mentioning, energy storage would be an ideal compliment to wind (or solar) power. Currently energy storage is in the form of "pump storage" where water up pumped up to a reservoir at higher elevation when there is excess supply. This is an especially nice way to store power from wind or solar system, since their power is quite variable and and inefficiency in the pump storage scheme would only be wasting sunlight or wind, not creating excess pollution.
Demand can also be shaped to more readily reflect supply by including a price signal. Many industrial and some residential customers pay different rates depending on time of use. For some energy-intensive industries (think aluminum smelting or hydrogen production through electrolysis) shifting their demand to off-peak times would have huge cost savings if there is a price differential. Perhaps some industrial customers would be interested in purchasing some of their power under a real-time pricing scheme, where they would decide how much power to purchase based on hourly pricing. There are also ways to manage residential demand as well. Customers with time of use pricing can save money by using a timer with their hot water heater so they are not paying to keep water hot when they are at work and the electric price is high or similarly plan their air conditioning load. There is also a scheme where the electric utility can remotely shut off hot water heaters during times of high demand via radio control, and customers are given incentives to participate. (see: http://www.eere.energy.gov/consumer/your_home/water_heating/index.cfm/mytopic=13110)
(Real-time pricing would, of course, might be impractical for many industries whose demand is inflexible (think health care) but could be useful for industries such as smelters. <rant> Hourly pricing for electrical suppliers without any price signal to consumers was part of the cause of the California energy meltdown. Ultimately the suppliers asked for a state bailout to cover the extreme prices the producers were charging because the producers had intentionally manipulated supply by manipulating supply, causing blackouts, halting subway systems and generally causing widespread disruption.</rant>)
The larger point is that we have some technologies available that will help us accommodate a greater degree of variability in our power sources, without having to toss out excess power or have shortages at times of high demand. We will always need base load power, but intelligent management of supply and demand can help smooth out the peaks and valleys of solar and wind power and customer demand.
I think he is sleeping pretty well. I just looked up raid 6, as it was unfamiliar to me.
Wikipedia says: "RAID 6
Striped set (minimum 4 disks) with dual distributed parity. Provides fault tolerance from two drive failures; array continues to operate with up to two failed drives. This makes larger RAID groups more practical, especially for high availability systems. This becomes increasingly important because large-capacity drives lengthen the time needed to recover from the failure of a single drive. Single parity RAID levels are vulnerable to data loss until the failed drive is rebuilt: the larger the drive, the longer the rebuild will take. With dual parity, it gives time to rebuild the array by recreating a failed drive with the ability to sustain failure on another drive in the same array."
I say: "Cool". I think swapping the failed drives could wait until morning. If he is worried about three drives failing in one evening he is likely truly paranoid (and thus a good adim) and could just buy an extra "hot spare" or two and allow the array to rebuild itself as necessary. Anyone care to calculate the probability of two drives failing while the array is rebuilding itself? Yeah, my thoughts went to "very low" and began wondering about other failure modes, too (RAID controller, power supply, fire,...).
He also liked the 30 second boot time over the 3 minute boot time with regular hard drives. Maybe he's impatient or perhaps this helps just a bit with hitting a five 9's uptime (~6 minutes per year downtime).
I don't know why the article said Linux support was missing. The shows appear in a Flash Player in your browser. I have Adobe Flash Player 9 installed and it works just fine for me Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon). I have the non-free codecs installed, though I haven't tested whether these are needed.
Not only did it work, but I found that it had good quality picture. The compression artifacts are only obvious on dark parts of some pictures. Stutter was rare, even on the "fullscreen" mode, which was crisp at approximately 800 pixels wide and didn't appear stretched.
Overall it was a quite enjoyable experience. I watched a few episodes of a new show and liked it. They inserted four or five promos for other shows in there, but they were brief. I assume that more ads will be forthcoming, since NBC will need to make some money off these.
Yes, your interpretation appears to be correct. The context is given by the previous sentence.
Some viruses, like HIV, have a window during which they are very difficult to detect.
"This technique will be very useful to disinfect all the viruses, known or unknown," Tsen said. "This will make blood transfusion very safe."
So, the known or unknown appears to refer specifically to the presence of HIV, not some mystery virus, which as the grandparent poster pointed out is implausible. The article could have been a bit clearer on this point.
One other point to note is that while this technique may kill HIV in blood, it might not be able to cure HIV in whole people, since the laser would have difficulty penetrating the whole body. Perhaps one day we'll have folks going in for a "blood cleaning" like dialysis as a compliment to anti-retroviral treatments.
It will run Open Office just fine. You are making an assumption here without presenting any supporting data. Here is one data point:
I just retired a 800 MHz Athlon with 512 MB RAM and Suse Linux 10.1, not because it ran anything slowly, but because I wanted a laptop and also the fan was a bit loud. Open Office ran quite nicely on it. *Launching* some applications such as Open Office and Eclipse was slow, but that was primarily a function of hard drive speed rather than processor speed, which won't be much different on this machine versus a "high end machine." *Running* these applications never felt slow. It did fine with KOffice, OpenOffice, Eclipse, Evolution a bunch of terminal, and whatever else going at the same time. I had a similarly speced XP laptop that would just choke on having a couple applications open. Seemed like XP had a poor virtual memory implementation to me.
Stone definitely has a nice record for permanence, having preserved hieroglyphics for millennia, but I quibble with your choice of granite. Living in New England and seeing many old gravestones has allowed me some observations of performance of granite. Granite is nice to carve and pretty, too, but it suffers from weathering and the details become indistinct over time, becoming difficult to read after a century or so. Slate was popular before granite came into vogue and is found in the older sections of cemeteries. The fine line carvings of willows and skulls (I seem to recall that this was some sort of Greek revival symbology) are still beautifully preserved along with the names of the deceased and often a line of verse.
So, go carve up some slate or mod an old dot matrix printer to work with discarded slate roofing tiles and archive away. Archaeologists of the future will thank you for your foresight in being the only one to permanently record the Slashdot discussion archives to a non-volatile medium so that geek wisdom could be used to rebuild a new glittering tech society following the Great Collapse of the 25th century.
That used to be true, but the situation has changed. According to ISO New England (http://www.iso-ne.com/genrtion_resrcs/snl_clmd_ca p/index.html), which manages my part of the grid, the peak demand for the past year was in July at 27,332 MW. Winter demand peaked in December at 21,733 MW. April had the lowest peak demand at around 17,000 MW. This indicates that lots of my neighbors are buying air conditioners and that not too many folks around here are heating with electric, which has about twice the cost of heating oil, the most common heating fuel in this part of the US. (Part of the increased winter demand is due to greater lighting needs in the short winter days.)
Fortunately we get a nice increase in summertime daylight, too. In fact our summer days are longer than those in the South. This may seem strange at first, but consider Alaska, the "land of the midnight sun" or anywhere above the Arctic Circle which get days (should I call them 24-hour periods?) where the sun never sets. This is offset by the fact that the sun is lower in the sky and its rays more oblique. The peak summertime insolation (cumulative sunlight energy per day) is fairly constant between 30N (Morocco and Florida) and 60N (Stockholm, Sweden and Achorage, Alaska), because of these competing effects. Its wintertime when we get seriously short on light.
I agree that the South is the best initial for PV solar systems, though mostly because of higher summertime peak demand, greater wintertime power generation and areas with few clouds and cheap land, such as Nevada and Arizona. Unfortunately, it becomes expensive to transport power too far due to resistance losses. If low-cost PV solar hits the right price point we might see these installations in the northern latitudes as well.
Yes, the solar panels produced the first year would have a maximum output of 430 MW on a sunny day, but remember that this plant is producing solar cells with a fairly long life. The combined peak power would increase by 430 MW every year. The coal plant comparison given is useful for a sense of scale. Run this solar cell factory for 20 years and you have substantially reduced need for other sources of power.
Having power available when demand is highest is very useful. Solar panels do this nicely. Peak load is on hot summer days, days when the sun is out and people are running their AC at full tilt. Although it would be nice to think that this solar would directly replace coal burned, it might tend to replace fossil fuel plants that can be "turned on" and "turned off" more quickly, such as natural gas turbines or, to a lesser extent, oil-fired plants. (Hydropower is also good for managing peak load.) Coal plants tend to be used for "base load."
Unfortunately coal is our dirtiest source of fossil fuel energy for two reasons. First, it has a lot of impurities such as sulfur and heavy metals such as mercury which are released as coal is burned. (Expensive "scrubbers" can help to mitigate these problems and are require on new coal plant. Consequently old plants are kept in service for very long periods of time.) The second problem is carbon dioxide. For a given quantity of energy produced, burning coal will release more CO2 than other fossil fuels, such as natural gas, because
CH4 + 2(O2) -> CO2 + 2(H2O)
natural gas has hydrogen-carbon bonds, and gives water as one of its by-products, compared to coal which, being almost pure carbon, mainly has CO2 as its by-product. CO2 is, of course, one of the primary greenhouse gases, so replacing coal would help reduce global warming.
Well it looks like you've only started to answer the important question: What do I have to do to vaporize the screwdriver? Here's my stab at the problem:
Boiling point of steel: 2500 C Specific heat of steel: 0.11 Kcal / Kg C Weight of metal in screwdriver: 0.1 Kg Needed change in temperature: boiling point - room temp = 2500 -25 = 2475 C
Q = c*m *( delta T)
where Q is heat added, c is specific heat and delta T is change in temperature. So, Q = 0.11Kcal/Kg/C * 0.1 Kg * 2475 C and a bit of arithmetic leads us to: Energy needed to bring to a rolling boil, Q= 27.225 Kcal
A little bird (OK an online unit converter) told me that this is about 114,000 wattseconds
Now we're getting somewhere...
Lets assume a contact time of 0.1 s. (This is clearly a maximum, since we don't want the disappointment of the screwdriver melting and losing contact) Our power is now 1140 kilowatts- or approximately 1000 toasters worth, or, perhaps 10,000 computers which convinces me that the errors that you fellow Slashdotters have found in my math above are neatly canceling out.
To conclude,
Power = V * I (where I is current) so, I = Power/V
Since we're using 5V I = Power / 5 V I = 1140 kilowatts / 5 V I = 228000 Amps
So, the proposed 300 Amp power supply is off by a factor of 750 or so. We'll all have to head to one of Google's data centers to try this one out. Anyone out there able to arrange a guest tour?
-Jon
PS I know that there is some heat of vaporization to consider, as well, but that will be left as an exercise for the Slashdotter.
An Advanced Cathode Material for Li-ion Batteries--A123 Systems, 8 Saint Mary's Street, 6th floor, Boston, MA 02215; 617-250-0566
Yet Ming Chiang, Principal Investigator, yet@a-123.com
Ric Fulop, Business Official, ric@a-123.com
DOE Grant No. DE-FG02-02ER86138
Amount: $100,000
Research Institute
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge , MA
Currently available Li-ion batteries do not meet Department of Energy targets for electric vehicle (EV) or hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) applications. The specific problem is that currently available cathode materials do not allow the specific energy and power density targets to be achieved while simultaneously being low cost, safe under abusive conditions, and environmentally benign. This project will develop electronically conductive lithium cathode materials, which have low raw materials and manufacturing costs, high energy and power density, and are environmentally benign and electrochemically stable. These materials are expected to be the first low-cost Li cathode materials to exhibit high electronic conductivity at room temperature. Phase I will synthesize and characterize the lithium materials with high electronic conductivity in the complete absence of conductive additives. Novel particle morphologies, consisting of nanoscale primary crystallites in partially-sintered aggregate particles, will be used to optimize power density.
Commercial Applications and Other Benefits as described by the awardee: In lithium ion battery cathode applications, the high electronic conductivity coupled with tailored particle design should allow near-theoretical energy densities to be achieved at high power densities and operating conditions relevant to EV and HEV technology.
The key seems to be some modified chemistry and electrodes that allow smaller lithium particles. Since the smaller particles have greater surface area per unit volume, more electro-chemistry, such as charging or discharging happens in less time. They mention that they have lowered the resistive load, as you suggested. Read the material for a more coherent explanation than I could hope to provide.
Personally, I'm very excited about this whole development. This is the kind of battery breakthrough that electric and hybrid vehicle enthusiasts have been waiting for. Not only are they claiming substantially better power densities (that means the rate at which they provide energy, 3000W/kg, not the total energy storage), energy densities (2x over conventional Li-Ion) and charge times (5 minutes), but they also claim to operate over a wider temperature range (-30 to + 60 C), have longer lifetimes and have greener (no heavy metals) and safer (less fire/explosion risk) chemistry . For hybrid cars the end result should be more energy captured by the regenerative braking systems, better cold weather performance, less battery weight, better gas mileage, no more battery swapping at 100,000 or so miles and, most important of all, better acceleration!
Time will tell if this is vapor(hard)ware, although the fact that they have products currently being manufactured for sale next year suggests otherwise.
PS Coding may result in the false belief that adding parenthesis is the perfect substitute for clear, linear writing.
I work at a school as a computer teacher and tech support person. I have essentially no budget and I scrounge what I can. A bunch of 32MB PC100 or larger DIMMS (or SIMMS for that matter) would be put to great use. Remember corportate users upgrade much more frequently than schools do. I have a long list of machines that need more RAM. If you don't want to send them to me, check with local schools - they might be delighted for some extra RAM. Just make sure you talk to the right folks.
The lack of budget isn't all bad. It allows be to have a persuasive arguments for setting up a SAMBA file server (headless 200MHz Pentium, 96 MB RAM, 4GB storage and heavily used) as well as Open Office, the GIMP, Blender, Audacity, etc!
(Those interested in sending old RAM my way may contact me at: kittyspam a t comcast d o t net. Don't drop the word spam from the address.)
I believe the LWV is well-intentioned, but a bit misguided in this matter. A few thousand folks pointing this out may help considerably. They may be contacted at:
1730 M Street NW, Suite 1000,
Washington, DC 20036-4508
Phone: 202-429-1965
Fax: 202-429-0854
They also have a feedback form at:
http://www.lwv.org/forms/contactus.cfm
Here is a copy of the note I sent them.
I recently learned of LWV's opposition to use paper audit trails in electronic voting. As a computer professional I can assure you that this is a grave mistake, which will result in elections where the true winner may never be known. The prolems are myriad, from buggy software to willful, and untraceable, manipulation of the results from people within the company running the election, local officials or skilled hackers from the outside. My specialty is "software quality assurance", which means I am a specialist in finding "bugs" in software. The very first axiom of software quality assurance is that all software containing over a few dozen lines of code contains bugs. Some are never encountered, others cause your computer to crash or corrupt its data. The most serious are those which leave computers wide open to intruders. Even the best software, written by highly skilled professionals contains serious bugs which may not be discovered for years, sometimes because it is discovered that someone is taking advantage of the problems for their own gain.
The most serious problem, I believe, is the possibility of an insider manipulating the results. If an election is entirely electronic insiders can and will make changes, despite any attempts to secure the systems through encryption, digital signatures and other technologies. Let me give you a quick example. A couple of years ago I worked at a company where people could purchase web services online. Customers were told that their transactions were secure because their connections were encrypted. Anyone in our company who had access to our main database had access to the full details of all of our customers credit cards, address, name, expiration date, phone number, etc. Definitely enough information to commit substantial fraud, if done carefully. The only barriers to this fraud were the honestly of my company's employees and the credit card companies fraud-detection systems.
Your concern for the rights of disabled citizens to vote in laudable. All I would ask is that each voting machine have a printer attached to it which would provide a backup copy of the votes for a recount. This could be easily done in time for the fall elections.
For the long term, we should look at standards for electronic voting machines, developed with input from the public and computer professionals. Such standards should include public review of the computer programs running within election machines, to ensure accuracy and security, as well as digital signatures at every stage of the vote-counting process, paper and electronic. This more extensive process could be completed in time for the 2008 elections, but the key is to have a paper audit trail for this fall, which will be counted along side the electronic results to produce a results the will can be counted on to be tallied correctly by the American public.
I love computers, but I do not believe that they are a panacea for the problems which we encountered in the 2000 elections. Please reconsider your position. There is no real conflict between having truly auditable elections and protecting the rights of the disabled.
If this claim to be behaving ethically is read carefully a couple of things stand out:
1. employers must comply with all
applicable wage and hour laws or, if prevailing industry wage standards are
higher, then employers must comply with or exceed these standards
This means they will happily pay the same crap wages as the next guy and comply with local wage laws. Hmmm.... I thought it was these very low wages that were the basis of complaints. They make no mention of any kind of "living wage" where their employees could actually make a living on their earnings.
2. Employees have the right to choose (or not)
to affiliate with legally sanctioned organizations without unlawful interference
Unions (in the sense that we are used to in the West with the rights to organize and strike) are not legal in the People's Republic of China. So Employees of this company, under its stated policy, could be fired or jailed for attempting to organize.
Other provisions like health and safety, child labor, and monitoring look somewhat better.
All the recent trade agreements have put lots of focus of eliminating tarriffs and other obstacles to trade, which ends up requiring the race to the bottom for companies who want to stay in business. The only counters to this race to the bottom are required consumer labelling, global labor standards, or labor standards for products to be imported into a particular country. Its impossible to keep with who is good and bad with respect to labor for every product we buy. We have the right to know the nutrition content of products we buy - what about wages & working conditions. The labeling would, of course, be moot if governments stepped up to ensure the basic rights of people - a much more effective solution.
The changes will need to be dupicated from one series to the other.
A change to the 2.4 series may be submitted to Linus for inclusion in 2.6, and added if he deems it worthy. The process also works the same way in the other direction. For instance, if Linus accepts a patch to the 2.6 series, then the 2.4 maintainer may choose to include a "backported" patch for the 2.4 series. Alan Cox (I believe) has been the 2.2 maintainer for a while now. (Remember the beloved stable 2.2 series?) If he feels a 2.4 series patch is essential he may backport it to 2.2.
The decision to backport is not automatic, since applying all the patches from 2.6 back to 2.4 would yield... 2.6. The general idea is to backport security, stability and driver patches and leave the architectural changes alone.
First the number of nuclear plants in the United States is somewhat over one hundered not one thousand.
The nuclear industry in this country is in terrible financial shape, because even with generous government subsidies it is hugely uneconomical. Nuclear power happens to be a very expensive way to boil water. You may be aware that nuclear power creates something called "nuclear waste". The government has provided the largest subsidy to the nuclear industry by promising to dispose of this waste at government (read taxpayer) expense. Fifty years into the history we still do not have a open repository for high - level civilian nuclear waste. (I believe that a military repository in Carlsbad, New Mexico is open or will open soon.) This nuclear waste has some unfortunate properties, such as extreme toxicity and long-term persistance (thousands of years). Releases radiation (the kind from breaches of reactor containment and waste storage systems, not the venting of mildly radioactive gas that are a part of normal plant operation) can cause widespread health effects. The problem here is that continued use of nuclear power creates additional waste, piling up for thousands of years - all to boil some water. (Another subsidy is the services that the government provides to the nuclear industry in the forms of security and regulation.) Nuclear power currently provides 14% of the electric power in the United States.
As far as your comments about wind, solar and water go, I'll address them one at a time. * Water - Hydroelectric power is currently providing about 12% of the electric power in the US, though there is little room for growth, due to opposition to new dams. * Wind - Did you read the article? There are hopes that wind will provide up to 20% of US power. This may be a bit optimistic, but the interesting part is that wind power went from being from an eco-hippie dream in the 1970's to a serious business in the present - without government subsidy. (Note to bird-lovers the newest wind turbines are large enough that the blades spin slowly and harm very few birds.) * Solar - Applications of solar power are booming as cost and efficiency of photovoltaic cells improve. In many cases it is cheaper to use solar than to connect to the grid, such as temporary highway signs and homes more than 0.25 mile (0.4 km) from the electric grid. It is, however unlikely to ever be a significant percentage of electric power in the US.
The gigantic oil reserves that the poster refers to may the the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, which has enough capacity to supply the US for 180 days. The percentage of domestically produced oil here is around 50% and has been falling for years and is porjected to continue to do so regardless of what the government chooses to do.
There was one source that is important that was not mentioned in the article or your post - conservation. This does not mean self-deprivation. It does mean higher standards in efficiency for all sorts of devives like the computer monitor you are currently staring at. It turns out that there's lots of savings to be had here and the additional cost to the consumer are greatly exceeded by the savings over the appliance life. The important point here is that we may not need to increase the amount of power generated to imporve standard of living (in the developed nations - developing world is a differnt case) even with moderate population growth.
Coal's technology has improved 300% from the 1970's with great advances in efficiency and emmission controls (scrubbers). Coal's tragic flaw it its C02 emissions. Unless someone figures how to capture and store the CO2(sequestration) then it will continue to be a problem if you are concerned about the greenhouse effect.
I have to agree with the poster's comments on the hydrogen economy. I just don't understand where the power is supposed to come from.
Remember support. Oracle is not just a development house. They have the kind of support people you want when you have problems. They are knowlegeable and expensive. Even if PostgreSQL someday acquires all the features, reliability and reputation of Oracle databases, Oracle will have plenty of business with their fine team of DBAs..Nar barnen lagt.sig
Ignore. This post is to erase an incorrect mod point.
(I had selected "+1 FUNNY" but an inadvertant keystroke on the down arrow changed this to "-1 OVERRATED", before I changed focus away from the moderate category dropdown box. Suggestion: Confirm moderations before the are committed.)
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Thanks for your thoughtful reply.
>>In carbon-trading schemes it is critical to evaluate where the money is going.
>No it is not. By Coases Theorem, the long-run market equilibrium does not rely on initial allocation.
I am interested in the short-term as well, because many billions of dollars are at stake. If that money goes to the government, then perhaps that is a reasonable solution, if the government allocates these funds fairly and wisely. If the money is given to those who are currently polluting the most, I would be concerned, even if the long-term effect on CO2 is what I would want.
You may be right that in the end we will need hard limits on CO2 production and that trading would be an effective way to limit CO2 production. Certainly whatever solution is proposed, it will need strong political support. CO2 trading may have sufficient support to help this happen. I will continue to argue, however that efficiency regulation is an important part of the solution. Efficiency is often simply very cheap. How much does it cost to make an appliance that doesn't consume power when turned off? How much does a bit of extra insulation in a refrigerator cost? The problem is that the price signal doesn't effectively propagate back to the manufacturer, as it might in an economics textbook. We are busy people with complicated lives and many of us would prefer that we not be forced to be energy experts on each appliance we buy.
Market pricing schemes can ignore certain social economic realities. Here are a couple of examples. I am a landlord. I own a house with an inefficient heating system in a cold climate. What is my incentive to upgrade my system? I can assure you that my tenants don't know how much the heating bill will be. Most people neglect to ask. People rarely act in perfectly economically rational ways. (Those that do tend to be a bit obsessive and are considered weird.) Even if tenants get more interested in heating bills through increased costs, there are a few factors that tend delay a landlord's purchase of a more efficient system, such as available cash and credit. Rather than wait for a price signal to hit the tenants, and wait for tenants to start making inquiries about heating costs of a rental, so that next time the landlord replaces the boiler (perhaps in 10 to 20 years) he buys a more efficient one, a simple requirement that all boilers be at least x% efficient could be implemented. Result: everyone saves. Landlord pays say $100 - $300 more upfront (out of a $5000 - $8000 investment for a single family home). Tenants save gobs on heat and the environment is preserved. The landlord saves not on having to replace the inefficient heating system he just installed 10 years ago, when the tenants finally woke up to the soaring heating costs that the carbon trading system created.
On the social side we have to consider that not all worthwhile production CO2 is economically productive and contributing to GDP. An example would be keeping old retired people warm in the winter. The market might dictate that a salesman's international flight is more economically productive than the retired person's life, but thats not a solution anyone would seek. We end up needing to build some safeguards into the system to prevent results like this. I haven't heard much concrete talk from carbon-trading proponents about how to avoid these kinds of troubles.
If you want to have a pollution trading scheme operate along with efficiency measures, that might be a reasonable approach, but you may find that the devil is in the details.
Some of those details are political. For example, the industries that would be most affected by carbon-trading are surely spending money on lobbyists and researchers to ensure that any scheme benefits them. I can assure you that I have seen electric utility officials who are heavily invested in coal promoting schemes in the hope that we will repeat Europe's mistakes and give the right to pollute to those already doing so.
If the trading syst
The carbon credit schemes are certainly one way to address carbon emissions, but there are multiple valid approaches to the problem, each with its own set of trade-offs. Some of these approaches are market based, such as the *various* pollution-trading schemes and others are regulatory.
Let me first raise a simple alternative to the pollution-trading schemes that are commonly proposed. The opposite solution is the outright ban of a particular pollutant. Bans have the benefit of minimal administrative overhead and rapid results. The ban of lead in gasoline and paint has been extremely effective, reducing lead levels in people, especially children dramatically since the 1970's.
Clearly this approach is not optimal for the CO2 problem, as there are not alternatives that are as readily available as there were for lead free gas and paint. The point is that sometimes a regulatory approach can be effective with minimal costs. The fuel efficiency standards are similar from the consumer point of view on costs. The consumer is never saddled with a direct or indirect tax on their CO2 production. Manufacturers are simply required to produce more efficient vehicles. The consumer does feel some impact in that manufacturers may charge more for gas guzzlers because those vehicles cut into their fleet average.
In carbon-trading schemes it is critical to evaluate where the money is going. The first thing to evaluate is who gets the credits in the first place. Are they given to the industries already producing CO2 emissions, who can then sell them off as they close plants and take in a windfall. This is what happened in Europe. Are they auctioned off by the government? Are the credits everlasting? Do they shrink every year so that CO2 targets are hit? Are a new set of credits auctioned every year? In any pollutant-trading scheme there are winners and losers. Some companies that are in favor of the CO2 trading schemes are those that burn massive amounts of coal. They could get quite rich off the fact that they invested heavily in a polluting industry.
Lets think about what would happen in a world where all CO2 production was subject to a cap and trade system. Now I have to pay extra fees for gas for my car, oil to heat my home and electricity. This money now goes, depending on the scheme adopted, to private companies or the government. I as individual I'm not too happy about this. It might get me to use less energy, but there could be much more effective ways of doing this. Clearly buying more efficient appliances, such as a fridge furnace or lights would save me energy. These appliance efficiency standards are mandated by government. Higher standards would save consumers lots of money over the long term. They would also reduce CO2 emissions. Notice, under this regulatory scheme, I have saved money, while under the market-based approach, I have lost money. Guess which one I am for?
Lets look at cars. Under CAFE standard we get a pretty definite idea how much CO2 will be produced by passenger vehicles every year. There is a definite average each manufacturer must meet. I can buy whatever car I want to. I don't have to pay extra fees to government or industry to drive my car. As an added bonus my car gets better gas mileage and save money.
The fact that 35 mpg is at all controversial seems absurd. This is about the current efficiency in Europe and my 12 year old Honda gets this much driving around town. Hitting this as an average for new cars in another 12 years should not be hard to do.
-Jon
Installation cost depends on several factors. Commercial installation is substantially cheaper than residential installation. From your reference to luxury cars, I am assuming that you are thinking in terms of residential installation, which has some costs that do not scale well, such as communications between seller and buyer and guys driving out to a house, setting up ladders, drilling holes and interfacing with the electrical grid. There have been some efforts to reduce these costs by standardizing some parts, grouping installations in a neighborhood together to economize on installers time. Also, there is a move to prefabricate some parts at the factory, reducing installation labor. One kind of residential installation that may scale well is in the building of new developments, where very little additional labor would be required to install these systems. I also suspect that as the cost of solar panels drop we may see larger numbers of companies getting into the residential solar installation business.
The figures in my post, however, were concerned with commercial installations, which scale much better than residential installations. Residential installations are important, however, for a few reasons. First is available surface area. There is a lot of rooftop available and this available rooftop happens to be very close to the places where power is consumed. Second is a sense of investment and personal ownership that is important in this stage of the solar market's evolution. Many people like knowing that their power comes from the sun and get pride out of seeing their electric meter run backwards. They may not be interested in the status that a luxury car gets them, but they may be interested in telling friends and family about their green home. Not everyone with disposable income is disposed towards traditional luxury goods. As the costs of solar solar installations (panels, electronics and labor) fall and the price of electricity rises, solar rooftops will seem increasingly practical for more people, especially when the cost is spread out over the lifetime of the system. As with many technologies the early adopters are paving the way for the mass market.
Your comment reminds us that there is no magic bullet solution in energy production, just as there is no magic bullet in computer security or solving social problems. Just because a particular power source does not solve all the energy needs of a nation is not a reason to ignore it.
A converse to each of your statements would be that each of these green sources of power are available in certain areas. Combined they can have a greater impact. There are also some synergies available, such as using hydro to compensate for the variable power produced by solar or wind, since a dam's turbines can be shut down without wasting stored energy that might be used at a time of slow wind, low light or high demand.
Good news: superconducting cables have been installed already in some cities. They are being promoted save limited space for buried cable, carry more power, reduce size of substations as well as reduce transmission losses. Check out http://www.supercables.com/ for more info. They have lots of good explanations of the benefits of superconducting cable and a video which shows parks and buildings springing up where substations and overhead transmission lines used to be. These cables look like they will become a piece of of energy future.
Clearly there are limitations and it seems like these cables are currently cost-effective only where there are benefits besides transmission efficiency, though this is certainly part of it. Likely the cost of materials and cooling makes superconducting cables too expensive for long distance transmission at current electric rates. There was a lot of hope for higher temperature superconductors in the late 1980s, perhaps the real-world use of these cables will stimulate further research and costs might drop with innovations.
Another way to reduce transmission losses is do do less transmission, by moving power generation closer to power consumers. Few people want more fossil fuel or nuclear plants located near their homes. (I remember sweeping fly ash from a large oil-fired plant across the street off the porch every spring when I was younger.) Roof-mounted solar would reduce transmission distances. It first needs to overcome some cost problems before it would be economical enough to be widespread and would always need to be part of a mix of other power sources and/or power storage systems.
The cost of solar and wind have been going down fast for three reasons:
- improved technology (larger wind turbines, better generators, new solar cell types)
- more efficient production techniques (production of larger solar panels see: http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/appliedmaterials/index.jsp?epi-content=GENERIC&newsId=20060905005378&ndmHsc=v2*A1167656400000*B1178676791000*C4102491599000*DgroupByDate*J2*N1002992&newsLang=en&beanID=547561197&viewID=news_view) or check out eSolar's modular approach to thermal solar
- economies of scale as production volumes increase
Government subsidies have reduced the cost to consumers in certain markets such as Germany and California, but are not the primary driver of the price decreases we have seen in these two technologies over the last three decades. Currently, demand is so high for solar electric, that suppliers cannot keep up and prices are inflated and will remain so until more of the planned and in-progress photovoltaic production plants come on line. The solar industry is looking to grow beyond their current marked of subsidized installations and specialty installations (off grid, mobile power, etc). Solarbuzz.com states: "As a guide, the industry is looking to drive module prices down to $1.50 - $2.00/Watt over the next decade, if it is to make large inroads in to the grid tied electricity market, without subsidy." The price is currently $4-5/Watt range. In 1982 it was $27/Watt. The goal is aggressive, given that current price is affected by the supply constraint and the amount of investment in alternative power that is occurring, we may be pleasantly surprised.
The purpose of these subsidies to to grow the industry to the point where the economies of scale are large enough and the technologies are improved enough that the subsidies become unnecessary to the continued growth of the market. We are not at that point yet, but the cost reductions in both solar and wind have been dramatic. Currently industrial solar installation cost $0.21/KWh and produce their peak power at times of peak demand, increasing the value of their power. (Figures from solarbuzz.com . Distribution charge, typically $0.05/KWh, might not be included here). The US national average electric rate is $0.095/KWh. Tuscon Electric Charge residential customers with time of use meters $0.184/KWh in the daytime in summer and $0.126/KWh in the winter peak power times. These prices are getting pretty close to where unsubsidized solar costs currently are. Further increases in fossil fuel prices and improvements in solar will help to close this gap.
There is another justification for subsidies as well. If we were to take an economist's perspective on this issue, we might see that there are certain "externalities" in traditional energy production. An externality is a cost that is not reflected in the price of a product. For instance, the price of electricity from coal does not include the cost of treating people for asthma caused by coal plant emissions. While few would propose charging power companies a surcharge for their health effects, since this calculation would be extremely difficult to get right and politically impossible to implement, this lack of a surcharge can be seen as individuals and governments subsidizing the cost of coal power generation through their health care expenditures as well as through damage to their citizen's health. The government will actually save some money in health care costs by subsidizing alternative energy which would replace dirty coal plants and might see an interest in protecting the health of its citizens. Clearly certain subsidies would have more impact in reducing external costs than others. Some people might want to include other externalities such as
Thanks for mentioning John Reid's contribution to solving this puzzle. I was one of his students a number of years ago.
Professor John Reid was truly a great scientist. He was not the kind who worked solo in the lab late into the night coming up with the brilliant discovery. Rather, he was passionately curious about the world around him. He simply loved to solve puzzles and presented learning about geology with a sense of curiosity and wonder which drew in other curious minds.
As one of his students, I had the pleasure to watch him work on many occasions. He might have a hunch about how a system might work, or more often that just that we might learn something about it. His investigations were quite wide-ranging, though generally in the areas relating to flows of surface waters. The problems he attacked would range from details of the dynamics of river flow, stream chemistry, or mixing of waters. He would gather all kinds of data, often by turning a class of students loose with a variety of equipment for a few hours with a set of tasks. The data would then be distributed to the entire class to analyze and share. The labs had a sense of adventure and exploration. The sense I always got from him was that he always saw many discoveries just waiting to be made. All that had to be done was to think about something for a bit, collect some data and see what it might be telling us. He always seemed to get close and personal with data, to really look at what the numbers might be trying to say, and taught me to do the same. His students were involved with his research in ways that undergraduates rarely are, which was facilitated by Hampshire's system in which students complete a major research project as a condition of graduation.
One of these opportunities to watch him at work was a week long-spring break field trip to Death Valley with John, several professors and about 25 other students from Hampshire College, Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College and the University of Massachusetts in 1992 (or was it 1991?). It was an amazing time to be surrounded by a group of people, both professors and students, who loved geology in a place with such great geological features. We saw many things, one of which was the Racetrack Playa. I remember standing with him at the edge of the playa, explaining the mystery of the skating rocks to us. At that time he had already suspected an ice sheet blown by wind was involved and pointed out the parallel tracks to us. The tracks would go some distance, often in a straight line, then abruptly change direction. He was planning to return in colder weather to test the ice hypothesis, which I remember him reporting that he had verified some months later.
I learned a few years ago of his passing in 2003, but I will never forget the impact he had on the way I thought about science.
Thank you very much John.
- Jon Caplan
Nice point about management of power from dams. It got me thinking about power management in general. We can manage load in three ways: managing supply, storing power and managing demand.
Managing supply can be done by carefully choosing when to turn on and off various sources. As the parent mentioned, nuclear, coal and fuel oil are not well-suited for rapid adjustments to power to respond to demand variation and used for base load. I was going to tell you that gas-fired pants did not fall into this category, but Wikipedia tells me that there are two types of natural gas plants. The gas turbine facilities can be brought up to full power fairly quickly. The "combined cycle" plants are used for base load.
As other posters are mentioning, energy storage would be an ideal compliment to wind (or solar) power. Currently energy storage is in the form of "pump storage" where water up pumped up to a reservoir at higher elevation when there is excess supply. This is an especially nice way to store power from wind or solar system, since their power is quite variable and and inefficiency in the pump storage scheme would only be wasting sunlight or wind, not creating excess pollution.
Demand can also be shaped to more readily reflect supply by including a price signal. Many industrial and some residential customers pay different rates depending on time of use. For some energy-intensive industries (think aluminum smelting or hydrogen production through electrolysis) shifting their demand to off-peak times would have huge cost savings if there is a price differential. Perhaps some industrial customers would be interested in purchasing some of their power under a real-time pricing scheme, where they would decide how much power to purchase based on hourly pricing. There are also ways to manage residential demand as well. Customers with time of use pricing can save money by using a timer with their hot water heater so they are not paying to keep water hot when they are at work and the electric price is high or similarly plan their air conditioning load. There is also a scheme where the electric utility can remotely shut off hot water heaters during times of high demand via radio control, and customers are given incentives to participate. (see: http://www.eere.energy.gov/consumer/your_home/water_heating/index.cfm/mytopic=13110)
(Real-time pricing would, of course, might be impractical for many industries whose demand is inflexible (think health care) but could be useful for industries such as smelters. <rant> Hourly pricing for electrical suppliers without any price signal to consumers was part of the cause of the California energy meltdown. Ultimately the suppliers asked for a state bailout to cover the extreme prices the producers were charging because the producers had intentionally manipulated supply by manipulating supply, causing blackouts, halting subway systems and generally causing widespread disruption.</rant>)
The larger point is that we have some technologies available that will help us accommodate a greater degree of variability in our power sources, without having to toss out excess power or have shortages at times of high demand. We will always need base load power, but intelligent management of supply and demand can help smooth out the peaks and valleys of solar and wind power and customer demand.
-Jon
I think he is sleeping pretty well. I just looked up raid 6, as it was unfamiliar to me.
...).
Wikipedia says:
"RAID 6
Striped set (minimum 4 disks) with dual distributed parity. Provides fault tolerance from two drive failures; array continues to operate with up to two failed drives. This makes larger RAID groups more practical, especially for high availability systems. This becomes increasingly important because large-capacity drives lengthen the time needed to recover from the failure of a single drive. Single parity RAID levels are vulnerable to data loss until the failed drive is rebuilt: the larger the drive, the longer the rebuild will take. With dual parity, it gives time to rebuild the array by recreating a failed drive with the ability to sustain failure on another drive in the same array."
I say: "Cool". I think swapping the failed drives could wait until morning. If he is worried about three drives failing in one evening he is likely truly paranoid (and thus a good adim) and could just buy an extra "hot spare" or two and allow the array to rebuild itself as necessary. Anyone care to calculate the probability of two drives failing while the array is rebuilding itself? Yeah, my thoughts went to "very low" and began wondering about other failure modes, too (RAID controller, power supply, fire,
He also liked the 30 second boot time over the 3 minute boot time with regular hard drives. Maybe he's impatient or perhaps this helps just a bit with hitting a five 9's uptime (~6 minutes per year downtime).
I don't know why the article said Linux support was missing. The shows appear in a Flash Player in your browser. I have Adobe Flash Player 9 installed and it works just fine for me Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon). I have the non-free codecs installed, though I haven't tested whether these are needed.
Not only did it work, but I found that it had good quality picture. The compression artifacts are only obvious on dark parts of some pictures. Stutter was rare, even on the "fullscreen" mode, which was crisp at approximately 800 pixels wide and didn't appear stretched.
Overall it was a quite enjoyable experience. I watched a few episodes of a new show and liked it. They inserted four or five promos for other shows in there, but they were brief. I assume that more ads will be forthcoming, since NBC will need to make some money off these.
-Jon
One other point to note is that while this technique may kill HIV in blood, it might not be able to cure HIV in whole people, since the laser would have difficulty penetrating the whole body. Perhaps one day we'll have folks going in for a "blood cleaning" like dialysis as a compliment to anti-retroviral treatments.
It will run Open Office just fine. You are making an assumption here without presenting any supporting data. Here is one data point:
I just retired a 800 MHz Athlon with 512 MB RAM and Suse Linux 10.1, not because it ran anything slowly, but because I wanted a laptop and also the fan was a bit loud. Open Office ran quite nicely on it. *Launching* some applications such as Open Office and Eclipse was slow, but that was primarily a function of hard drive speed rather than processor speed, which won't be much different on this machine versus a "high end machine." *Running* these applications never felt slow. It did fine with KOffice, OpenOffice, Eclipse, Evolution a bunch of terminal, and whatever else going at the same time. I had a similarly speced XP laptop that would just choke on having a couple applications open. Seemed like XP had a poor virtual memory implementation to me.
Stone definitely has a nice record for permanence, having preserved hieroglyphics for millennia, but I quibble with your choice of granite. Living in New England and seeing many old gravestones has allowed me some observations of performance of granite. Granite is nice to carve and pretty, too, but it suffers from weathering and the details become indistinct over time, becoming difficult to read after a century or so. Slate was popular before granite came into vogue and is found in the older sections of cemeteries. The fine line carvings of willows and skulls (I seem to recall that this was some sort of Greek revival symbology) are still beautifully preserved along with the names of the deceased and often a line of verse.
So, go carve up some slate or mod an old dot matrix printer to work with discarded slate roofing tiles and archive away. Archaeologists of the future will thank you for your foresight in being the only one to permanently record the Slashdot discussion archives to a non-volatile medium so that geek wisdom could be used to rebuild a new glittering tech society following the Great Collapse of the 25th century.
That used to be true, but the situation has changed. According to ISO New England (http://www.iso-ne.com/genrtion_resrcs/snl_clmd_ca p/index.html), which manages my part of the grid, the peak demand for the past year was in July at 27,332 MW. Winter demand peaked in December at 21,733 MW. April had the lowest peak demand at around 17,000 MW. This indicates that lots of my neighbors are buying air conditioners and that not too many folks around here are heating with electric, which has about twice the cost of heating oil, the most common heating fuel in this part of the US. (Part of the increased winter demand is due to greater lighting needs in the short winter days.)
Fortunately we get a nice increase in summertime daylight, too. In fact our summer days are longer than those in the South. This may seem strange at first, but consider Alaska, the "land of the midnight sun" or anywhere above the Arctic Circle which get days (should I call them 24-hour periods?) where the sun never sets. This is offset by the fact that the sun is lower in the sky and its rays more oblique. The peak summertime insolation (cumulative sunlight energy per day) is fairly constant between 30N (Morocco and Florida) and 60N (Stockholm, Sweden and Achorage, Alaska), because of these competing effects. Its wintertime when we get seriously short on light.
I agree that the South is the best initial for PV solar systems, though mostly because of higher summertime peak demand, greater wintertime power generation and areas with few clouds and cheap land, such as Nevada and Arizona. Unfortunately, it becomes expensive to transport power too far due to resistance losses. If low-cost PV solar hits the right price point we might see these installations in the northern latitudes as well.
Yes, the solar panels produced the first year would have a maximum output of 430 MW on a sunny day, but remember that this plant is producing solar cells with a fairly long life. The combined peak power would increase by 430 MW every year. The coal plant comparison given is useful for a sense of scale. Run this solar cell factory for 20 years and you have substantially reduced need for other sources of power.
Having power available when demand is highest is very useful. Solar panels do this nicely. Peak load is on hot summer days, days when the sun is out and people are running their AC at full tilt. Although it would be nice to think that this solar would directly replace coal burned, it might tend to replace fossil fuel plants that can be "turned on" and "turned off" more quickly, such as natural gas turbines or, to a lesser extent, oil-fired plants. (Hydropower is also good for managing peak load.) Coal plants tend to be used for "base load."
Unfortunately coal is our dirtiest source of fossil fuel energy for two reasons. First, it has a lot of impurities such as sulfur and heavy metals such as mercury which are released as coal is burned. (Expensive "scrubbers" can help to mitigate these problems and are require on new coal plant. Consequently old plants are kept in service for very long periods of time.) The second problem is carbon dioxide. For a given quantity of energy produced, burning coal will release more CO2 than other fossil fuels, such as natural gas, because
CH4 + 2(O2) -> CO2 + 2(H2O)
natural gas has hydrogen-carbon bonds, and gives water as one of its by-products, compared to coal which, being almost pure carbon, mainly has CO2 as its by-product. CO2 is, of course, one of the primary greenhouse gases, so replacing coal would help reduce global warming.
Well it looks like you've only started to answer the important question: What do I have to do to vaporize the screwdriver? Here's my stab at the problem:
/V
Boiling point of steel: 2500 C
Specific heat of steel: 0.11 Kcal / Kg C
Weight of metal in screwdriver: 0.1 Kg
Needed change in temperature: boiling point - room temp = 2500 -25 = 2475 C
Q = c*m *( delta T)
where Q is heat added, c is specific heat and delta T is change in temperature.
So, Q = 0.11Kcal/Kg/C * 0.1 Kg * 2475 C
and a bit of arithmetic leads us to:
Energy needed to bring to a rolling boil, Q= 27.225 Kcal
A little bird (OK an online unit converter) told me that this is about 114,000 wattseconds
Now we're getting somewhere...
Lets assume a contact time of 0.1 s. (This is clearly a maximum, since we don't want the disappointment of the screwdriver melting and losing contact) Our power is now 1140 kilowatts- or approximately 1000 toasters worth, or, perhaps 10,000 computers which convinces me that the errors that you fellow Slashdotters have found in my math above are neatly canceling out.
To conclude,
Power = V * I (where I is current)
so,
I = Power
Since we're using 5V
I = Power / 5 V
I = 1140 kilowatts / 5 V
I = 228000 Amps
So, the proposed 300 Amp power supply is off by a factor of 750 or so. We'll all have to head to one of Google's data centers to try this one out. Anyone out there able to arrange a guest tour?
-Jon
PS I know that there is some heat of vaporization to consider, as well, but that will be left as an exercise for the Slashdotter.
Here is an abstract of doe grant taken from:
s birsttr/cycle20/phase1/071.htm
_ ________________
http://www.science.doe.gov/sbir/awards_abstracts/
_________________________________________________
An Advanced Cathode Material for Li-ion Batteries--A123 Systems, 8 Saint Mary's Street, 6th floor, Boston, MA 02215; 617-250-0566
Yet Ming Chiang, Principal Investigator, yet@a-123.com
Ric Fulop, Business Official, ric@a-123.com
DOE Grant No. DE-FG02-02ER86138
Amount: $100,000
Research Institute
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge , MA
Currently available Li-ion batteries do not meet Department of Energy targets for electric vehicle (EV) or hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) applications. The specific problem is that currently available cathode materials do not allow the specific energy and power density targets to be achieved while simultaneously being low cost, safe under abusive conditions, and environmentally benign. This project will develop electronically conductive lithium cathode materials, which have low raw materials and manufacturing costs, high energy and power density, and are environmentally benign and electrochemically stable. These materials are expected to be the first low-cost Li cathode materials to exhibit high electronic conductivity at room temperature. Phase I will synthesize and characterize the lithium materials with high electronic conductivity in the complete absence of conductive additives. Novel particle morphologies, consisting of nanoscale primary crystallites in partially-sintered aggregate particles, will be used to optimize power density.
Commercial Applications and Other Benefits as described by the awardee: In lithium ion battery cathode applications, the high electronic conductivity coupled with tailored particle design should allow near-theoretical energy densities to be achieved at high power densities and operating conditions relevant to EV and HEV technology.
Your comment got me digging deeper. They have some good information here: http://www.a123systems.com/html/tech/overview.html .
The key seems to be some modified chemistry and electrodes that allow smaller lithium particles. Since the smaller particles have greater surface area per unit volume, more electro-chemistry, such as charging or discharging happens in less time. They mention that they have lowered the resistive load, as you suggested. Read the material for a more coherent explanation than I could hope to provide.
Personally, I'm very excited about this whole development. This is the kind of battery breakthrough that electric and hybrid vehicle enthusiasts have been waiting for. Not only are they claiming substantially better power densities (that means the rate at which they provide energy, 3000W/kg, not the total energy storage), energy densities (2x over conventional Li-Ion) and charge times (5 minutes), but they also claim to operate over a wider temperature range (-30 to + 60 C), have longer lifetimes and have greener (no heavy metals) and safer (less fire/explosion risk) chemistry . For hybrid cars the end result should be more energy captured by the regenerative braking systems, better cold weather performance, less battery weight, better gas mileage, no more battery swapping at 100,000 or so miles and, most important of all, better acceleration!
Time will tell if this is vapor(hard)ware, although the fact that they have products currently being manufactured for sale next year suggests otherwise.
PS Coding may result in the false belief that adding parenthesis is the perfect substitute for clear, linear writing.
I work at a school as a computer teacher and tech support person. I have essentially no budget and I scrounge what I can. A bunch of 32MB PC100 or larger DIMMS (or SIMMS for that matter) would be put to great use. Remember corportate users upgrade much more frequently than schools do. I have a long list of machines that need more RAM. If you don't want to send them to me, check with local schools - they might be delighted for some extra RAM. Just make sure you talk to the right folks.
The lack of budget isn't all bad. It allows be to have a persuasive arguments for setting up a SAMBA file server (headless 200MHz Pentium, 96 MB RAM, 4GB storage and heavily used) as well as Open Office, the GIMP, Blender, Audacity, etc!
(Those interested in sending old RAM my way may contact me at: kittyspam a t comcast d o t net. Don't drop the word spam from the address.)
Thanks very much,
Jon
PS I also can make use of 20GB+ hard drives!
I believe the LWV is well-intentioned, but a bit misguided in this matter. A few thousand folks pointing this out may help considerably. They may be contacted at:
1730 M Street NW, Suite 1000,
Washington, DC 20036-4508
Phone: 202-429-1965
Fax: 202-429-0854
They also have a feedback form at:
http://www.lwv.org/forms/contactus.cfm
Here is a copy of the note I sent them.
I recently learned of LWV's opposition to use paper audit trails in electronic voting. As a computer professional I can assure you that this is a grave mistake, which will result in elections where the true winner may never be known. The prolems are myriad, from buggy software to willful, and untraceable, manipulation of the results from people within the company running the election, local officials or skilled hackers from the outside. My specialty is "software quality assurance", which means I am a specialist in finding "bugs" in software. The very first axiom of software quality assurance is that all software containing over a few dozen lines of code contains bugs. Some are never encountered, others cause your computer to crash or corrupt its data. The most serious are those which leave computers wide open to intruders. Even the best software, written by highly skilled professionals contains serious bugs which may not be discovered for years, sometimes because it is discovered that someone is taking advantage of the problems for their own gain.
The most serious problem, I believe, is the possibility of an insider manipulating the results. If an election is entirely electronic insiders can and will make changes, despite any attempts to secure the systems through encryption, digital signatures and other technologies. Let me give you a quick example. A couple of years ago I worked at a company where people could purchase web services online. Customers were told that their transactions were secure because their connections were encrypted. Anyone in our company who had access to our main database had access to the full details of all of our customers credit cards, address, name, expiration date, phone number, etc. Definitely enough information to commit substantial fraud, if done carefully. The only barriers to this fraud were the honestly of my company's employees and the credit card companies fraud-detection systems.
Your concern for the rights of disabled citizens to vote in laudable. All I would ask is that each voting machine have a printer attached to it which would provide a backup copy of the votes for a recount. This could be easily done in time for the fall elections.
For the long term, we should look at standards for electronic voting machines, developed with input from the public and computer professionals. Such standards should include public review of the computer programs running within election machines, to ensure accuracy and security, as well as digital signatures at every stage of the vote-counting process, paper and electronic. This more extensive process could be completed in time for the 2008 elections, but the key is to have a paper audit trail for this fall, which will be counted along side the electronic results to produce a results the will can be counted on to be tallied correctly by the American public.
I love computers, but I do not believe that they are a panacea for the problems which we encountered in the 2000 elections. Please reconsider your position. There is no real conflict between having truly auditable elections and protecting the rights of the disabled.
Thank you very much.
1. employers must comply with all applicable wage and hour laws or, if prevailing industry wage standards are higher, then employers must comply with or exceed these standards
This means they will happily pay the same crap wages as the next guy and comply with local wage laws. Hmmm.... I thought it was these very low wages that were the basis of complaints. They make no mention of any kind of "living wage" where their employees could actually make a living on their earnings.
2. Employees have the right to choose (or not) to affiliate with legally sanctioned organizations without unlawful interference
Unions (in the sense that we are used to in the West with the rights to organize and strike) are not legal in the People's Republic of China. So Employees of this company, under its stated policy, could be fired or jailed for attempting to organize.
Other provisions like health and safety, child labor, and monitoring look somewhat better.
All the recent trade agreements have put lots of focus of eliminating tarriffs and other obstacles to trade, which ends up requiring the race to the bottom for companies who want to stay in business. The only counters to this race to the bottom are required consumer labelling, global labor standards, or labor standards for products to be imported into a particular country. Its impossible to keep with who is good and bad with respect to labor for every product we buy. We have the right to know the nutrition content of products we buy - what about wages & working conditions. The labeling would, of course, be moot if governments stepped up to ensure the basic rights of people - a much more effective solution.
Forgiven.
... 2.6. The general idea is to backport security, stability and driver patches and leave the architectural changes alone.
The changes will need to be dupicated from one series to the other.
A change to the 2.4 series may be submitted to Linus for inclusion in 2.6, and added if he deems it worthy. The process also works the same way in the other direction. For instance, if Linus accepts a patch to the 2.6 series, then the 2.4 maintainer may choose to include a "backported" patch for the 2.4 series. Alan Cox (I believe) has been the 2.2 maintainer for a while now. (Remember the beloved stable 2.2 series?) If he feels a 2.4 series patch is essential he may backport it to 2.2.
The decision to backport is not automatic, since applying all the patches from 2.6 back to 2.4 would yield
-Jon
First the number of nuclear plants in the United States is somewhat over one hundered not one thousand.
The nuclear industry in this country is in terrible financial shape, because even with generous government subsidies it is hugely uneconomical. Nuclear power happens to be a very expensive way to boil water. You may be aware that nuclear power creates something called "nuclear waste". The government has provided the largest subsidy to the nuclear industry by promising to dispose of this waste at government (read taxpayer) expense. Fifty years into the history we still do not have a open repository for high - level civilian nuclear waste. (I believe that a military repository in Carlsbad, New Mexico is open or will open soon.) This nuclear waste has some unfortunate properties, such as extreme toxicity and long-term persistance (thousands of years). Releases radiation (the kind from breaches of reactor containment and waste storage systems, not the venting of mildly radioactive gas that are a part of normal plant operation) can cause widespread health effects. The problem here is that continued use of nuclear power creates additional waste, piling up for thousands of years - all to boil some water. (Another subsidy is the services that the government provides to the nuclear industry in the forms of security and regulation.) Nuclear power currently provides 14% of the electric power in the United States.
As far as your comments about wind, solar and water go, I'll address them one at a time.
* Water - Hydroelectric power is currently providing about 12% of the electric power in the US, though there is little room for growth, due to opposition to new dams.
* Wind - Did you read the article? There are hopes that wind will provide up to 20% of US power. This may be a bit optimistic, but the interesting part is that wind power went from being from an eco-hippie dream in the 1970's to a serious business in the present - without government subsidy. (Note to bird-lovers the newest wind turbines are large enough that the blades spin slowly and harm very few birds.)
* Solar - Applications of solar power are booming as cost and efficiency of photovoltaic cells improve. In many cases it is cheaper to use solar than to connect to the grid, such as temporary highway signs and homes more than 0.25 mile (0.4 km) from the electric grid. It is, however unlikely to ever be a significant percentage of electric power in the US.
The gigantic oil reserves that the poster refers to may the the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, which has enough capacity to supply the US for 180 days. The percentage of domestically produced oil here is around 50% and has been falling for years and is porjected to continue to do so regardless of what the government chooses to do.
There was one source that is important that was not mentioned in the article or your post - conservation. This does not mean self-deprivation. It does mean higher standards in efficiency for all sorts of devives like the computer monitor you are currently staring at. It turns out that there's lots of savings to be had here and the additional cost to the consumer are greatly exceeded by the savings over the appliance life. The important point here is that we may not need to increase the amount of power generated to imporve standard of living (in the developed nations - developing world is a differnt case) even with moderate population growth.
Coal's technology has improved 300% from the 1970's with great advances in efficiency and emmission controls (scrubbers). Coal's tragic flaw it its C02 emissions. Unless someone figures how to capture and store the CO2(sequestration) then it will continue to be a problem if you are concerned about the greenhouse effect.
I have to agree with the poster's comments on the hydrogen economy. I just don't understand where the power is supposed to come from.
-Jon
Remember support. Oracle is not just a development house. They have the kind of support people you want when you have problems. They are knowlegeable and expensive. Even if PostgreSQL someday acquires all the features, reliability and reputation of Oracle databases, Oracle will have plenty of business with their fine team of DBAs. .Nar barnen lagt .sig
Ignore. This post is to erase an incorrect mod point.
(I had selected "+1 FUNNY" but an inadvertant keystroke on the down arrow changed this to "-1 OVERRATED", before I changed focus away from the moderate category dropdown box. Suggestion: Confirm moderations before the are committed.)