Sandia labs says: "A well-designed and maintained PV system will operate for more than 20 years. The PV module, with no moving parts, has an expected lifetime exceeding 30 years." If I remember right, once a panel passes its expected lifetime, its power output just starts decreasing--so it remains useful for quite some time. There are definitely solar systems out there that are made from used panels.
I would expect that durability will increase as technology improves.
1) Yes, you are at the mercy of nature. Let's get some facts straight for the mis-information givers. To begin with, the two largest problems facing solar power is that for one, the farther you are away from the equator, the less solar power you can produce. Most of the US in not on the Equator. Secondly, solar power production is directly related cloud cover, among other factors. Building a solar powered facility in Wisconsin, where I live, never pays off. At night, you need energy storage, and that is a whole other issue. Some states it may work, but 90% of the rest of the US...it doesn't.
Well, these guys seem to think solar power will work pretty well in commercial/industrial applications in St. Cloud, Minnesota (more or less the same amount of sun as in Wisconsin). Cool feature of the system: the solar panels attach to a standard roof with adhesive, no metal framework needed. Elsewhere on their site they say the system has a 10-15 year payoff time, depending on electricity rates. This is of course with net metering--they sell power to the utility when they're producing more power than they need, and get power from the grid when they're not generating enough (e.g., night). This takes care of your "energy storage" objection--you're still connected to the grid, so no storage needed.
Minnesota has pretty decent incentives for renewable energy right now. In a location where the state isn't as helpful, the payback time would be longer, but the system would pay off, even in the upper midwest. You don't need to be close to the equator to produce enough solar power to make it worthwhile to put in a solar system.
Of course, it's true that wind power makes more sense up here currently. It's much cheaper than solar right now. I've read that North Dakota has enough wind potential to power all of the US. That wouldn't be feasible with the current transmission system, but there is an immense potential for wind power in the midwest as well as on the sea.
I think the biggest problem with these technologies is that they take up very large areas. This is fundamental limitation; if we want to get large amounts of energy from solar cells and wind power we have to give up large areas for these purposes.
Um, no.
There are plenty of wind power installations that are on farms. The turbines, control equipment, and access roads take up a fairly small amount of land, so farmers can get the benefit of lease payments from the utilities and still use their land.The Union of Concerned Scientists says:
In the Midwest, wind developers are paying farmers $2,000 or more per year for each wind turbine installed on their land. Large wind turbines use only about a quarter acre of land, including access roads, so farmers can continue to plant crops and graze livestock right up to the base of the turbines. In a good year, that same plot of land could yield $90 worth of corn, $40 worth of wheat, and $5 worth of beef.
Solar could take up plenty of room, I suppose. People seem to think of giant arrays of solar cells in the Arizona desert or somewhere. But if there were installations on top of industrial plants, apartment buildings, office buildings, parking garages/lots, etc., plenty of power could be generated from spaces that are already occupied.
In any case, I doubt wind/solar farms would ever get put on land that could potentially be a national park/national mounment/wilderness. There's a lot of empty land out there, even with all the suburban sprawl that's going on.
It's a nice thought but unless you live somewhere country-like, it's unfeasible to most people. Here's why, now firstly sure it is expensive to set up, but you would have to live in a geographically correct place as well. Say Florida, California, Arizona, Texas. States where it is rather sunny as opposed to say Seattle.
Also, Sustainable Minnesota has plenty of information on use of solar energy in the great white north. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any concrete estimates of the economics of these installations, but with the hefty rebates/tax breaks given by the state ($3,000 back on a $8,500 system!) and selling power to the utilities through net metering, some claim a payoff date of "a few years" for small industrial/commercial installations. A homeowner would probably have to wait awhile before the system started paying off, though.
Of course, the real way to generate renewable power in the upper midwest is wind. In fact, the utilities up here are happy to build wind farms, but that requires building new transmission lines to remote areas, which is always a problem.
The important detail in your link is that this person a) had trouble removing the coffee cup lid and b) held the fresh cup of coffeee between her legs to try to pry the lid off.
I wouldn't even try to hold a cup of room temperature liquid between my legs to try to get the lid off because obviously it will end up in my lap... a large part of the cup's rigidity comes from the lid; the amount of pressure required to "hold" a cup between your legs while you conjure with the lid will obviously collapse the cup if the lid is removed.
According to the linked article, it was McDonald's policy at the time of this incident to keep coffee at 185 degrees F. This is clearly an insanely high temperature for a beverage--home-brewed coffee is usually at 135-140 degrees (again according to the article), and I would guess that a Starbuck's-type establishment wouldn't keep the coffee at a temperature too far above 140. The unusually high temperature of McDonald's coffee created a severe burn hazard:
Plaintiffs' expert, a scholar in thermodynamics applied to human skin
burns, testified that liquids, at 180 degrees, will cause a full
thickness burn to human skin in two to seven seconds. Other testimony
showed that as the temperature decreases toward 155 degrees, the extent
of the burn relative to that temperature decreases exponentially. Thus,
if Liebeck's spill had involved coffee at 155 degrees, the liquid would
have cooled and given her time to avoid a serious burn.
If the coffee had been at a lower temperature, the woman's burns would have been far less severe and there probably would have been no lawsuit (or at least the jury would have decided for McD's). As it was, the jury found her 20% responsible for the spill, and reduced the damages award. As you point out, it should be clear that holding a cup between your legs and taking off the lid could result in a spill. However, most people don't expect fresh coffee to cause third-degree burns. I've spilled hot coffee on my pants at home, in the car, etc., and never gotten burned. I wouldn't have expected McDonald's coffee to burn me either.
If you think that Harry Potter is "dark and spooky", don't read Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. Why the fundamentalists are missing out on this one is beyond me--the church is the main antagonistic force, one of the protagonists is assisted by rebel angels, the stated aim of one of the major characters is to kill God--all this in a series with a 12-year-old girl as the protagonist, initially marketed towards a junior high school reading audience.
People who aren't fundamentalists really ought to check the series out--the writing is consistently excellent, the worlds well-imagined, the plot compelling. One might say that as the Potter books were written for kids, but are very enjoyable for adults, Pullman's books were written with an adult reader in mind, but are still very enjoyable for younger readers. The background of the series is more richly imagined than HP, and ethical problems are far more prominent and complex than in Harry's world.
To amplify on the previous poster's comments a bit--the fires were started by humans, both to clear land for small farmers (traditional slash-and-burn agriculture) and to clear land for large-scale plantation farming (mostly for the production of palm oil). It sounds like the larger commercial operations are mostly responsible for setting the fires.
That season (1997/1998), the fires spread because the forests were unusually dry. This was partly because it was an El Niño year, which caused severe drought.
But human activity was probably a more important factor--in the mid '90s large drainage canals were cut in the peat forests (as part of the Mega Rice Project), which dried out large areas of peat; and large areas of the forest have been damaged by other activities, especially logging. So the fires spread along the banks of the drainage canals (see this article from the Guardian), along logging roads, and in general, areas where humans had damaged the forest--pristine areas were far less affected by the fire, even when they did burn. (See Satellite shows how logging makes forest more flammable, which is based on an article in the Nov 22 2001 issue of Nature.)
So, yeah, I'd blame humans for this fire--they started the fires, human use of the forest made the fires both larger and more damaging than they would have been otherwise. El Niño was a huge factor in the spread of the fires, but humans made it way worse.
While the carbon released by the fires is something to worry about, these fires also caused a big loss of biodiversity. Borneo is one of the few places where orangutans are found in the wild, along with other endangered primates. The fires are thought to have killed thousands of orangutans and destroyed much of their habitat. This wouldn't be such a huge problem--forest can grow back, after all--except that Borneo is being heavily deforested, because of (largely illegal) logging, conversion to farmland, and so on. At current rates of deforestation, some think that Borneo's forest might be essentially gone in two decades, driving orangutans, proboscis monkeys, and other species to extinction.
Incidently, since these fires were burning in peat, some of them never really stopped--the peat has just been smoldering for years. It's an El Niño year right now (much weaker than '97/98), and there are fires on Borneo again (or at least there were, as of August--it's hard to find current information, though you can look at the Global Fire Monitoring Center's webpage for southeast Asia). Another chance to take measurements of carbon emissions, I guess.
Re:[Way OT] nitpick time too far
on
Haiku vs Spam
·
· Score: 1
Wait, let me get this straight... a thread discussing the second person subjuctive case of Latin, in hiaku. Somewhere, a high school teacher is satisfied.
Only nouns have case.
The subjunctive is a mood.
Go back to school, pal.
Re:[Slightly OT] nitpick time...
on
Haiku vs Spam
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· Score: 5, Informative
Conjugate rightly.
Those endings are important.
This is what you said:
Habeas in fact
means "let us have" and no more
and not "evidence"
But that's not correct.
"Habeas" means "you should have."
It's second person,
singular, or so
I learned in Latin classes
many autumns past.
One other point regarding many patented "wheat products" - as a seed it is effectively infertile... any crop from it used as seed will never germinate, and if that cross-fertilises with an exising native strain, blammo!
I doubt this is the case with most GM strains. The case of Percy Schmeiser shows that a very common variety of GM canola--Monsanto's Roundup Ready--will produce fertile seeds.
Monsanto requires farmers who plant Roundup Ready not to save seed from their crops for planting next year. That pretty much says that the seeds will be fertile--otherwise the requirement doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Schmeiser was sued for patent infringment by Monsanto--though he never used any Monsanto seed, his canola crop was cross-pollinated or otherwise contaminated by Roundup Ready. According to Monsanto, Schmeiser's 1997 crop contained Roundup Ready plants. He then saved the seed from that crop and illegally planted the seed in 1998, producing another year of GM canola plants. Monsanto's own accusation says that their GM product will produce viable seeds. Of course, if you use them, blammo! You've violated the terms of your license!
Schmeiser contends that his crop was cross-pollinated by Roundup Ready (Monsanto disputes this), which suggests that a cross-pollinated variety can produce good seed also.
In 2002, I plant natural corn, using seed kept from last year's harvest. My neighbour upwind plants GM corn bought from Monsanto. During the year, pollen from his corn blows across my field...
Note that, not including the cost of removing deformed kernels, my costs have not changed but my take is down 30%. If my margin was 20%, I just made a minus 10% profit that year. Since it's not economical to hand-pick deformed kernels, I just made considerably less.
You forgot to add in your legal costs. Remember, you're infringing Monsanto's IP by using patented genes in those deformed kernels...
It's a shame that the WWF report comes to such an absurd conclusion, because their actual concern--the loss of biological resources, i.e., wild habitat and wildlife species--is a serious problem.
As the report points out, many species have declined precipitously over the last century or so, and if this trend continues, a lot of wildlife is headed for extinction. In addition to the rhinos, elephants, birds, and fisheries mentioned in the article, the numbers of many African primates have gone down dramatically, to the extent that some have predicted populations of chimpanzees and gorillas may be at non-viable levels within 5-15 years. (Also try a google search for "bushmeat"; another good site for more general conservation issues is conservation.org.)
Does this mean that humans are going to go extinct? I doubt it. I'm pretty sure that we could wipe out most of the wildlife on the planet and still support human life. However, I doubt that many people want to live in that world. I sure don't. The WWF could get a lot of support, probably more support, by highlighting the problem of species loss without claiming that the world will end if we don't colonize Alpha Centauri. [Although that does mean we get a space race victory.]
Slashdot Mirror
I would expect that durability will increase as technology improves.
Well, these guys seem to think solar power will work pretty well in commercial/industrial applications in St. Cloud, Minnesota (more or less the same amount of sun as in Wisconsin). Cool feature of the system: the solar panels attach to a standard roof with adhesive, no metal framework needed. Elsewhere on their site they say the system has a 10-15 year payoff time, depending on electricity rates. This is of course with net metering--they sell power to the utility when they're producing more power than they need, and get power from the grid when they're not generating enough (e.g., night). This takes care of your "energy storage" objection--you're still connected to the grid, so no storage needed.
Minnesota has pretty decent incentives for renewable energy right now. In a location where the state isn't as helpful, the payback time would be longer, but the system would pay off, even in the upper midwest. You don't need to be close to the equator to produce enough solar power to make it worthwhile to put in a solar system.
Of course, it's true that wind power makes more sense up here currently. It's much cheaper than solar right now. I've read that North Dakota has enough wind potential to power all of the US. That wouldn't be feasible with the current transmission system, but there is an immense potential for wind power in the midwest as well as on the sea.
There are plenty of wind power installations that are on farms. The turbines, control equipment, and access roads take up a fairly small amount of land, so farmers can get the benefit of lease payments from the utilities and still use their land.The Union of Concerned Scientists says:
Solar could take up plenty of room, I suppose. People seem to think of giant arrays of solar cells in the Arizona desert or somewhere. But if there were installations on top of industrial plants, apartment buildings, office buildings, parking garages/lots, etc., plenty of power could be generated from spaces that are already occupied.
In any case, I doubt wind/solar farms would ever get put on land that could potentially be a national park/national mounment/wilderness. There's a lot of empty land out there, even with all the suburban sprawl that's going on.
Well, you might want to look at this article, which includes a description of a solar installation in Woodbury, Minnesota. This suburban community is neither country-like nor particularly sunny, but the guy put solar panels on his roof anyway.
Also, Sustainable Minnesota has plenty of information on use of solar energy in the great white north. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any concrete estimates of the economics of these installations, but with the hefty rebates/tax breaks given by the state ($3,000 back on a $8,500 system!) and selling power to the utilities through net metering, some claim a payoff date of "a few years" for small industrial/commercial installations. A homeowner would probably have to wait awhile before the system started paying off, though.
Of course, the real way to generate renewable power in the upper midwest is wind. In fact, the utilities up here are happy to build wind farms, but that requires building new transmission lines to remote areas, which is always a problem.
People who aren't fundamentalists really ought to check the series out--the writing is consistently excellent, the worlds well-imagined, the plot compelling. One might say that as the Potter books were written for kids, but are very enjoyable for adults, Pullman's books were written with an adult reader in mind, but are still very enjoyable for younger readers. The background of the series is more richly imagined than HP, and ethical problems are far more prominent and complex than in Harry's world.
And I haven't even mentioned the armored bears...
That season (1997/1998), the fires spread because the forests were unusually dry. This was partly because it was an El Niño year, which caused severe drought.
But human activity was probably a more important factor--in the mid '90s large drainage canals were cut in the peat forests (as part of the Mega Rice Project), which dried out large areas of peat; and large areas of the forest have been damaged by other activities, especially logging. So the fires spread along the banks of the drainage canals (see this article from the Guardian), along logging roads, and in general, areas where humans had damaged the forest--pristine areas were far less affected by the fire, even when they did burn. (See Satellite shows how logging makes forest more flammable, which is based on an article in the Nov 22 2001 issue of Nature.)
So, yeah, I'd blame humans for this fire--they started the fires, human use of the forest made the fires both larger and more damaging than they would have been otherwise. El Niño was a huge factor in the spread of the fires, but humans made it way worse.
While the carbon released by the fires is something to worry about, these fires also caused a big loss of biodiversity. Borneo is one of the few places where orangutans are found in the wild, along with other endangered primates. The fires are thought to have killed thousands of orangutans and destroyed much of their habitat. This wouldn't be such a huge problem--forest can grow back, after all--except that Borneo is being heavily deforested, because of (largely illegal) logging, conversion to farmland, and so on. At current rates of deforestation, some think that Borneo's forest might be essentially gone in two decades, driving orangutans, proboscis monkeys, and other species to extinction.
Incidently, since these fires were burning in peat, some of them never really stopped--the peat has just been smoldering for years. It's an El Niño year right now (much weaker than '97/98), and there are fires on Borneo again (or at least there were, as of August--it's hard to find current information, though you can look at the Global Fire Monitoring Center's webpage for southeast Asia). Another chance to take measurements of carbon emissions, I guess.
The subjunctive is a mood.
Go back to school, pal.
Those endings are important.
This is what you said:
But that's not correct.
"Habeas" means "you should have."
It's second person,
singular, or so
I learned in Latin classes
many autumns past.
I doubt this is the case with most GM strains. The case of Percy Schmeiser shows that a very common variety of GM canola--Monsanto's Roundup Ready--will produce fertile seeds.
Monsanto requires farmers who plant Roundup Ready not to save seed from their crops for planting next year. That pretty much says that the seeds will be fertile--otherwise the requirement doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Schmeiser was sued for patent infringment by Monsanto--though he never used any Monsanto seed, his canola crop was cross-pollinated or otherwise contaminated by Roundup Ready. According to Monsanto, Schmeiser's 1997 crop contained Roundup Ready plants. He then saved the seed from that crop and illegally planted the seed in 1998, producing another year of GM canola plants. Monsanto's own accusation says that their GM product will produce viable seeds. Of course, if you use them, blammo! You've violated the terms of your license!
Schmeiser contends that his crop was cross-pollinated by Roundup Ready (Monsanto disputes this), which suggests that a cross-pollinated variety can produce good seed also.
You forgot to add in your legal costs. Remember, you're infringing Monsanto's IP by using patented genes in those deformed kernels...
As the report points out, many species have declined precipitously over the last century or so, and if this trend continues, a lot of wildlife is headed for extinction. In addition to the rhinos, elephants, birds, and fisheries mentioned in the article, the numbers of many African primates have gone down dramatically, to the extent that some have predicted populations of chimpanzees and gorillas may be at non-viable levels within 5-15 years. (Also try a google search for "bushmeat"; another good site for more general conservation issues is conservation.org.)
Does this mean that humans are going to go extinct? I doubt it. I'm pretty sure that we could wipe out most of the wildlife on the planet and still support human life. However, I doubt that many people want to live in that world. I sure don't. The WWF could get a lot of support, probably more support, by highlighting the problem of species loss without claiming that the world will end if we don't colonize Alpha Centauri. [Although that does mean we get a space race victory.]