I don't think you read my post. I don't like repeating myself in the same topic but here goes.
As I said:
The average house (2000 sqft) produces ~8 times the average household consumption (24 kWh/day) using typical 17% efficient panels in an average insolation location (1800 kWh/m^2/year). Solar has phenomenal energy capacity. If you cover all the US roof space (2.43E11 sqft) the US produces 250% our national electricity needs. With 40% efficient multijunction concentrators we produce 500% our need, no extra land space required.
Where do you get 3%?. Please go to the references for these numbers I've already posted, get out your calculator and prove it to yourself. And better yet read more about renewables and get your facts straight.
Small breeder reactors allover the place? Now there's a safe, low risk idea! Just like North Korea, you too can make plutonium in your back yard with your very own breeder reactor! Trucking, shipping, securing fuel/waste to thousands of minireactors without loss/theft/accidents? MTBF multiplied by a million parts per reactor multiplied thousands of power plants? Hmm.
Cost is currently an issue, though quickly declining. Solar cells are being built for ~$1/Watt, but sold at $3-4/Watt because supply is not keeping up with demand despite 35-40% average production increase every year.
Still the costs are not prohibitive for the average homeowner, roll them into your mortgage like the rest of your house. The system is slow to change, but 35 or so states now have net metering laws.
Why will you have to make use of the warranty? We have 50 years of PV cell history with immaculate reliability. I talked to a PV company (30 years in business) about warranty claims, he said they essentially have none (they withstand 120 MPH golf ball hale stones).
Snow? Problem? Are you kidding? That's when PV systems perform the best. In winter the panels are at a fairly steep angle, snow slides off and the panels get a extra solar boost from snow reflection and the cold temperatures (which improves efficiency). In the Colorado Rocky Mountains, winter is often the best insolation season.
Backing solar and other renewables is a matter of political and institutional willpower, not techical or economic issues.
Your link also says: "French government organized a national energy policy debate, which focused on determining France's energy mix for the next 30 years, particularly the status of nuclear power and the future role of renewables...Key of the aspects of the white paper included: increasing the use of renewables..."
Smart engineers are able to solve problems....they leave that to management.
2. You read too much Dilbert. Engineering is finding the best solution to a constellation of problems. Those problems include cost, schedule, profit, economics, safety, nuclear proliferation, waste disposal, operational reliability, etc. etc. etc.
If you think you can develop a 100% perfect system (not 6 nines, or 9 nines, or whatever, but perfect) you are naive and potentially dangerous to those who use your products.
You have two technological design options, one where the stakes are VERY high no matter how unlikely, but has NO advantages over the other path, which tromps it on almost every measure. Would you pick the first one? Just cause its technologically wizbang geeky?
Nuclear proliferation...Pretty much a non-issue,
3. Don't you even read the news? How did North Korea build their nuclear weapons? With a breeder reactor built for power generation. Many other countries have followed this same formula, A nuclear power plant is the fast track to nuclear weapons. Read, learn. (Try "Nuclear Choices", MIT press for a nonbiased technical but down to earth read).
For example, solar power is definitely NOT cheaper than nuclear power on any meaningful scale.
That's a policy issue not a technical one. Let the gov't build the plants then
5. Of course its not a technical issue. Technically Nuclear power works just fine. But outside of science experiments, just because something is cool doesn't mean it should be done. It would be cool to freeze your arm in liquid nitrogen, hit it with a hammer and watch it shatter to
You don't get it. Its not about power density. Its about transmission and distribution costs. The capital cost of grid infrastructure is 10 times the cost of generation.
I parts of the world without 100 years of subsidized grid infrastructure (china, India, Africa, etc) solar is hands down the cheapest way to get electricity to end-users (unless they have good wind or hydro resources, which is cheaper still). Same with telephones. Third world countries are bypassing line-lines for cell phone towers because the grid infrastructure is too expensive! (Think string a house with Ethernet to every room outlet, or by a WiFi card)
Even once you do have a grid, distribution is 2/3's of operation costs. Power stations have been getting progressively smaller for the last 30 years for this reason, utilities can put smaller local turbines near the point of use to offset added transmission costs.
Big and monolithic is not better. Assembly lines are better, faster and cheaper. Are you using the giant room sized one-off computer that took 5 years to build, or are you using a small mass-produced commodity desktop? Energy generation works the same way.
Besides if the power density of photovoltaics on the average sized roof using current technology is 8 times the average use, why are you looking for more?
Wind and solar aren't dangerous because the amount of energy generated per square foot is very small; and this is exactly what makes them (at this point in time) unworkable solutions for large scale energy production.
You've got it backwards. Power plant energy scale has been declining exponentially for three decades because bigger is not better. What brought down any recent blackout you remember? power generation? No! distribution. Smaller local decentralized power sources are far more economical, because you can discount the cost of grid augmentation which costs TWICE that of power generation. Distributions the problem not generation. Do you research, solar is sufficiently dense. Large power plants, take too long to build and make profit, Nuclear plants are the worst.
2. France and Japan's nuclear programs are heavily government subsidized, no proof of commercial viability there.
3. Chernobyl and three mile island are two of a litany of nuclear accidents. There is no such thing as a foolproof design, any engineer who thinks this isn't true is bound for disaster. With nuclear, the risks are huge, with renewables the risks are small.
Do some research. Educate yourself about the real state of renewables. You'll find there is no reason to even consider the risks of nuclear, because renewables are cheaper, more reliable, no safety risks, more decentralized, no proliferation issues, faster breakeven point, no environmental wastes, can be localized to use, etc.
Now why do we need Nuclear power, if there is no benifit?
The average house roof area (2000 sf) generates ~8 times (188 kWh/day)the average house consumption (24 kWh/day) with 17% efficient panels (sharp, BP, sunpower).
There is enough roofspace in the US (1.76E11 sqft) to provide 2.5 TIMES the electrical consumption of the country 3.4E12 kWh/year).
Photovoltaics at 17% efficiency has 4 times the energy density per square meter of strip mined coal (9666 kWh/m^2 average thickness of 1 meter) over its 30 year guaranteed life.
And thats just average photovoltaic panels. Multijunction concentrators are getting 40% efficiency at 500 suns. Several companies are starting to produce these (Entech, sharp) projecting $1 per peak watt of capacity (1.5 cent per kWh over its 30 guaranteed life).
Nuclear energy is an interesting science experiment, but a bad commercial energy source.
1. Its too expensive, the last plant to come on line in the eighties in the US, generated electricity a cost higher than solar power of the same era (the luz plant). After around $3 trillion in R&D funding, subsidies, loan guarantees, insurance no fault legislation, etc nuclear power is STILL a commercial failure only to exist out of the "goodness" of governments around the world.
2. Smart engineers know Murphy always wins. Its not IF there's going to be a serious accident (there have been many already), its WHEN. Reliability and safety only comes in nines - no such thing a 100% perfect.
3. Nuclear proliferation. The nuclear power industry is the only other major user and generator of nuclear materials other than nuclear weapons. You eliminate nuclear power and nuclear proliferation is easily controlled. Remember it only takes 5lbs of plutonium or 25lbs uranium to make a bomb. Once you've got the material, the bomb itself is literally garage science.
4. Compared to alternative energy (solar, wind, geothermal, wave, etc.), it's less commercially viable with far more risks. Nuclear power only wins on one account: energy density. And yet, outside of a nuclear submarine, this isn't an advantage! Transmitting power is twice the operation costs and ten times the capital cost compared to the generation of that power. Small decentralized power souces such a solar, photovoltaics, wind, etc is far cheaper overall.
5. Large monolithic power plants take years to build, the investment makes no sense without government subsidies if you have to wait 5 years just to begin to make some income, and 15 years to breakeven. Modular power technologies that are built on an assembly lines, such as photovoltaics generate returns within days.
I could go on here, but I think you get the point. Nuclear energy is a fun science experiment, but commercially we should cut our losses and run.
Solar power is after all fusion power already done for us, at a safe distance, and transmitted free nearly equally around the world with sufficient energy density to suit the worlds needs for millennia to come.
Interpretation for computer guys: Nuclear power: old complex clunky mainframe, prone to bugs. Solar power: wireless handheld with worldwide networking
On a processor basis, G5 spanks the other major processor choices. The interconnects and memory are applicable to any platform.
The final word is the Linpack tests by the supercomputer hot-rodders who optimize their systems with any tweaks, compiler, and optimizations they can. Whats the result? Linpack Rpeak per processor the G5 bests the opteron, Xeon, and Itanium. (Rpeak numbers are consistant from system to system using the same processors, calculate your favorite supercomputer and see for your self)
The Sci Am article points to human and other eukariotes having protein-coding DNA stored adjacent to intron DNA (non protein coding).
Looks like the bodies operating system is a harvard architecture where data (protein-coding DNA) and intructions (intron) are stored in a single word that is acted upon by by the spliceosome, allowing for far more complex combination than the direct coding of DNA=RNA=Protein.
Not only is PPC superior technically (meaningful to geeks though not the general public) benefiting from two decades of experience lost on the repeatability kludged X86, such a move would provide MANY benefits.
1) CHEAPER. Yes cheaper! What platform is every game system switching to (XBox, Sony, Nintendo)? Thats right PPC. Why? Because it provides more performance/$. The game market runs on free market principals unlike the desktop market held in a strangle hold by a few large companies, and the choice is clear.
2) Low power. Longer battery life. Cheaper operational costs.
3) Faster. Yes faster! The final word is the Linpack tests by the supercomputer hot-rodders who optimize their systems with any tweaks, compiler, and optimizations they can. What the result? Linpack Rpeak per processor the G5 bests the opteron, Xeon, and Itanium. VT X G5 2GHz 8/processor NCSA Xeon 3.06GHz 6.12/processor LANL Opteron 2Ghz 4/processor PNNL Itanium 1.5 GHz 6/processor
No wonder all the gaming system are choosing PPC as their platform.
"Unit volume is dominated today by the 8-bit control and instrumentation segment with over 389,000,000 units shipped this calendar year. This is followed by the 4-bit watch segment and the 8-bit PC peripherals segment." - In-Stat 2003
8 bits is all the majority of embedded applications need. Its lower power, and cheaper.
8 bits rules the world and will continue to do so for a long time.
8-12% is a little low. Current product cell efficiency are around 14-18%, and
Concentrators w/ multijunctions get 30%. But who cares? Your car gets 15% efficiency in average use, nobody complains about that even thought you pay for the gas. Sun is free. The question is does 15% efficiency do the job? Yes. Even if it gets no better, it wouldn't matter.
six hours per day in the desert without trackers...on a cloudless day... In areas with more cloud cover, shorter days in winter, etc. the numbers drop off dramatically.
Wrong. The average insolation in the US is 6 hours of peak sun per day, no desert required (ie 6000 Wh/sq. meter per day). For a flat panel, the deviation from the best southern nevada site to the worst northern washington state site is only 2-to-1! The rest of the country is suprisingly small devation within this. See rredc.nrel.gov/solar/
Solar cells degrade by 2-5% every year and have a life span of ~30 years
Wrong again. Silicon solar cells degrade less than 10% over 25 years, and are garanteed by the manufacturer to not exceed this over a 20-30 year guarantee - compare that to any other product guarantee! Though, they are guaranteed for 20-30 years, their life isn't limited by it. (see Solarbuzz.com)
Then keep in mind that you have to keep all of those cells clean
Wrong. If you clean them verses do nothing you get a whopping 4% increase. Few people clean PV panels.
And to top it all off, when you cover large tracts of land with solar cells, that land gets less sunlight.
My roof doesn't seem to mind. What land? The average roof has 4-6 times the generating capacity of the average house. 1600 sq ft house = 148 sq meters. 148 m x 150 watts x 6 hours = 133 kWh/day. Average house power consuption 24kWh/day. Beat that with some other form of energy.
after a year with more than average rainfall causes refridgerators to cease functioning and food to rot.
Wrong. When is the last time you noticed the sun failed to come up (yes you still get power in overcast conditions). Further, home PV systems are designed using statistic based on the past 30 years of weather data (see rredc.nrel.gov/solar/). Ask somebody with PV, their power is WAY more reliable than the grid. In fact, most of the comminucation repeaters throughout the western US use PV for this reason.
Now if you come up with a calculation that if you completely covered the sunny state of Arizona with solar cells, it would still not be enough to replace just coal, you're on the right track.
Wrong. Solar is a reasonably dense form of energy wirelessly transmitted through a light "grid" in a usable form almost everywhere on the earth. If you wanted to compare space needed to produce all the electricity consumed in the US it would be a small 100 mile square (see picture for scale www.energycooperation.org/solarh2.htm). In fact studies have shown coal uses as much space due to the space required for strip mining. Try strip mining on top of your roof!
Repeat after me: It doesn't matter how much you are willing to pay. Solar and wind alone cannot do the job.
Wrong. What would it cost to pay for solar electricity? Try the cost of the Irag war. Seriously, do the math (including new military spending) and that would be enough over the next 3-5 years to t
There are many ways to design a solar system, depending on application.
Yours is an ideal application: the load is directly proportional to the solar gain. So there is no need for storage because your cooling needs track the solar gain. Less sun, less cooling needed. There can be some lag time, depending insulation and thermal mass in the house but these things are best solved with insulation and thermal mass as your "storage".
For an air conditioner, use an evaporative cooler (many times more efficient than a conventional air-con, very little solar to run). If you live somewhere humid use an desiccant adsorption cycle evaporative cooler (search google -lots of work done on these for solar powered cooling).
And finally, the best "solar cooling" is no active cooling. Build or modify your house with appropriate insulation, thermal mass, shading, and architectural passive solar heating and cooling elements - and your house will stay cozy all year around with little active cooling required.
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the energy cost of the materials exceeds the expected lifetime output of the solar cells.
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I hate this quote. I hear it all of time. Unfortunatly, its WRONG. Sure it was true in 1972! But technology does have a way of marching on!
Today the energy pay-back period for solar cells is less than 6-24 months (depending of the technology). And then it keeps working for 20-30-40-50 years (20-30 guaranteed by warranty).
According to the DOE Energy Information Administration, the average household energy use per day is 20 kWh/day.
An a small generic split level house has about a 2000 sqft footprint (with garage). This is equal to 185 sq meters on a flat. The roof slope will at about 20% to this giving you 222 sq meters of roof space on the average small house.
At 15% efficiency for 6 hours per day of peak sun (the US average) the gives you 200 kWh per day OR
10 TIMES the homes required load.
PV doesn't need to be more efficient, it is not the same as the efficiency of a feul consuming device. What is the efficiency of a free resource? Extra efficiency is only important if it lowers the cost of the system. But a really cheap 10% efficient PV system would beat an expensive 30% efficient - BECAUSE SPACE IS REALLY NOT THE ISSUE (as seen above)
Slashdot Mirror
As I said: The average house (2000 sqft) produces ~8 times the average household consumption (24 kWh/day) using typical 17% efficient panels in an average insolation location (1800 kWh/m^2/year). Solar has phenomenal energy capacity. If you cover all the US roof space (2.43E11 sqft) the US produces 250% our national electricity needs. With 40% efficient multijunction concentrators we produce 500% our need, no extra land space required.
Where do you get 3%?. Please go to the references for these numbers I've already posted, get out your calculator and prove it to yourself. And better yet read more about renewables and get your facts straight.
Small breeder reactors allover the place? Now there's a safe, low risk idea! Just like North Korea, you too can make plutonium in your back yard with your very own breeder reactor! Trucking, shipping, securing fuel/waste to thousands of minireactors without loss/theft/accidents? MTBF multiplied by a million parts per reactor multiplied thousands of power plants? Hmm.
Still the costs are not prohibitive for the average homeowner, roll them into your mortgage like the rest of your house. The system is slow to change, but 35 or so states now have net metering laws.
Why will you have to make use of the warranty? We have 50 years of PV cell history with immaculate reliability. I talked to a PV company (30 years in business) about warranty claims, he said they essentially have none (they withstand 120 MPH golf ball hale stones).
Snow? Problem? Are you kidding? That's when PV systems perform the best. In winter the panels are at a fairly steep angle, snow slides off and the panels get a extra solar boost from snow reflection and the cold temperatures (which improves efficiency). In the Colorado Rocky Mountains, winter is often the best insolation season.
Backing solar and other renewables is a matter of political and institutional willpower, not techical or economic issues.
1. Did you even read your own link? It says "France has been one of the slowest countries in the EU to open its electricity and natural gas sectors to competition in line with EU regulations." Why? Because they are not competitive. In fact "In France, the nation that made the biggest investment in nuclear energy, the national utility, Electricite de France, is carrying a $30 billion debt, mostly because of its nuclear investments"
"And while French nuclear advocates like to praise the nation's cheap domestic power prices, in reality, when compared to 10 other European Union nations, France ranks fifth in domestic power prices. In fact, since 1985, France's electricity prices have seen the smallest decrease in the EU. And while four new reactors are under construction there, none have been initiated since 1996."
Your link also says: "French government organized a national energy policy debate, which focused on determining France's energy mix for the next 30 years, particularly the status of nuclear power and the future role of renewables...Key of the aspects of the white paper included: increasing the use of renewables..."
2. You read too much Dilbert. Engineering is finding the best solution to a constellation of problems. Those problems include cost, schedule, profit, economics, safety, nuclear proliferation, waste disposal, operational reliability, etc. etc. etc. If you think you can develop a 100% perfect system (not 6 nines, or 9 nines, or whatever, but perfect) you are naive and potentially dangerous to those who use your products. You have two technological design options, one where the stakes are VERY high no matter how unlikely, but has NO advantages over the other path, which tromps it on almost every measure. Would you pick the first one? Just cause its technologically wizbang geeky?
3. Don't you even read the news? How did North Korea build their nuclear weapons? With a breeder reactor built for power generation. Many other countries have followed this same formula, A nuclear power plant is the fast track to nuclear weapons. Read, learn. (Try "Nuclear Choices", MIT press for a nonbiased technical but down to earth read).
4. Wrong. On capital costs alone solar is competitive with nuclear, and after you consider operational costs, security cost, waste disposal costs, decommissioning costs, and etc - solar tromps it. Nuclear cost $2/W in capital cost alone. New photovoltaic technologies are being produced for $1/W, and wind hydro and geothermal even less, never mind all the other "hidden" external costs of nuclear. In fact, nuclear After a trillion-dollar taxpayer investment, it delivers little more U.S. energy than wood. Globally, it produces less energy than renewables."
5. Of course its not a technical issue. Technically Nuclear power works just fine. But outside of science experiments, just because something is cool doesn't mean it should be done. It would be cool to freeze your arm in liquid nitrogen, hit it with a hammer and watch it shatter to
You don't get it. Its not about power density. Its about transmission and distribution costs. The capital cost of grid infrastructure is 10 times the cost of generation.
I parts of the world without 100 years of subsidized grid infrastructure (china, India, Africa, etc) solar is hands down the cheapest way to get electricity to end-users (unless they have good wind or hydro resources, which is cheaper still). Same with telephones. Third world countries are bypassing line-lines for cell phone towers because the grid infrastructure is too expensive! (Think string a house with Ethernet to every room outlet, or by a WiFi card)
Even once you do have a grid, distribution is 2/3's of operation costs. Power stations have been getting progressively smaller for the last 30 years for this reason, utilities can put smaller local turbines near the point of use to offset added transmission costs.
Big and monolithic is not better. Assembly lines are better, faster and cheaper. Are you using the giant room sized one-off computer that took 5 years to build, or are you using a small mass-produced commodity desktop? Energy generation works the same way.
Besides if the power density of photovoltaics on the average sized roof using current technology is 8 times the average use, why are you looking for more?
I think you've missed that fact that France and Japan's nuclear industry is highly nationalized/subsidized.
Which is saying something considering how subsidized ours is.
As I said: nuclear power is STILL a commercial failure only to exist out of the "goodness" of governments around the world.
You've got it backwards. Power plant energy scale has been declining exponentially for three decades because bigger is not better. What brought down any recent blackout you remember? power generation? No! distribution. Smaller local decentralized power sources are far more economical, because you can discount the cost of grid augmentation which costs TWICE that of power generation. Distributions the problem not generation. Do you research, solar is sufficiently dense. Large power plants, take too long to build and make profit, Nuclear plants are the worst.
2. France and Japan's nuclear programs are heavily government subsidized, no proof of commercial viability there.
3. Chernobyl and three mile island are two of a litany of nuclear accidents. There is no such thing as a foolproof design, any engineer who thinks this isn't true is bound for disaster. With nuclear, the risks are huge, with renewables the risks are small.
Do some research. Educate yourself about the real state of renewables. You'll find there is no reason to even consider the risks of nuclear, because renewables are cheaper, more reliable, no safety risks, more decentralized, no proliferation issues, faster breakeven point, no environmental wastes, can be localized to use, etc.
Now why do we need Nuclear power, if there is no benifit?
What sort of efficiency do you want?
The average house roof area (2000 sf) generates ~8 times (188 kWh/day)the average house consumption (24 kWh/day) with 17% efficient panels (sharp, BP, sunpower).
There is enough roofspace in the US (1.76E11 sqft) to provide 2.5 TIMES the electrical consumption of the country 3.4E12 kWh/year).
Photovoltaics at 17% efficiency has 4 times the energy density per square meter of strip mined coal (9666 kWh/m^2 average thickness of 1 meter) over its 30 year guaranteed life.
And thats just average photovoltaic panels. Multijunction concentrators are getting 40% efficiency at 500 suns. Several companies are starting to produce these (Entech, sharp) projecting $1 per peak watt of capacity (1.5 cent per kWh over its 30 guaranteed life).
Nuclear energy is an interesting science experiment, but a bad commercial energy source.
1. Its too expensive, the last plant to come on line in the eighties in the US, generated electricity a cost higher than solar power of the same era (the luz plant). After around $3 trillion in R&D funding, subsidies, loan guarantees, insurance no fault legislation, etc nuclear power is STILL a commercial failure only to exist out of the "goodness" of governments around the world.
2. Smart engineers know Murphy always wins. Its not IF there's going to be a serious accident (there have been many already), its WHEN. Reliability and safety only comes in nines - no such thing a 100% perfect.
3. Nuclear proliferation. The nuclear power industry is the only other major user and generator of nuclear materials other than nuclear weapons. You eliminate nuclear power and nuclear proliferation is easily controlled. Remember it only takes 5lbs of plutonium or 25lbs uranium to make a bomb. Once you've got the material, the bomb itself is literally garage science.
4. Compared to alternative energy (solar, wind, geothermal, wave, etc.), it's less commercially viable with far more risks. Nuclear power only wins on one account: energy density. And yet, outside of a nuclear submarine, this isn't an advantage! Transmitting power is twice the operation costs and ten times the capital cost compared to the generation of that power. Small decentralized power souces such a solar, photovoltaics, wind, etc is far cheaper overall.
5. Large monolithic power plants take years to build, the investment makes no sense without government subsidies if you have to wait 5 years just to begin to make some income, and 15 years to breakeven. Modular power technologies that are built on an assembly lines, such as photovoltaics generate returns within days.
I could go on here, but I think you get the point. Nuclear energy is a fun science experiment, but commercially we should cut our losses and run.
Solar power is after all fusion power already done for us, at a safe distance, and transmitted free nearly equally around the world with sufficient energy density to suit the worlds needs for millennia to come.
Interpretation for computer guys:
Nuclear power: old complex clunky mainframe, prone to bugs.
Solar power: wireless handheld with worldwide networking
Look at the TOP500. Do the calculations yourself. Opteron is NOT more powerful, just the opposite.
VT X G5 2GHz 8 Rpeak/processor
NCSA Xeon 3.06GHz 6.12 Rpeak/processor
LANL Opteron 2Ghz 4 Rpeak/processor
PNNL Itanium 1.5 GHz 6 Rpeak/processor
Its the same no matter what supercomputer cluster system. PPC970 kick some serious whoopass.
If you want to know WHY people get all excited about system X, look at performance per processor and performance per dollar.
On a processor basis, G5 spanks the other major processor choices. The interconnects and memory are applicable to any platform.
The final word is the Linpack tests by the supercomputer hot-rodders who optimize their systems with any tweaks, compiler, and optimizations they can. Whats the result? Linpack Rpeak per processor the G5 bests the opteron, Xeon, and Itanium. (Rpeak numbers are consistant from system to system using the same processors, calculate your favorite supercomputer and see for your self)
VT X G5 2GHz 8 Rpeak/processor
NCSA Xeon 3.06GHz 6.12 Rpeak/processor
LANL Opteron 2Ghz 4 Rpeak/processor
PNNL Itanium 1.5 GHz 6 Rpeak/processor
No wonder all the gaming system are choosing PPC as their platform. More FLOP/processor, more FLOP per dollar!
The Sci Am article points to human and other eukariotes having protein-coding DNA stored adjacent to intron DNA (non protein coding).
Looks like the bodies operating system is a harvard architecture where data (protein-coding DNA) and intructions (intron) are stored in a single word that is acted upon by by the spliceosome, allowing for far more complex combination than the direct coding of DNA=RNA=Protein.
Not only is PPC superior technically (meaningful to geeks though not the general public) benefiting from two decades of experience lost on the repeatability kludged X86, such a move would provide MANY benefits.
1) CHEAPER. Yes cheaper! What platform is every game system switching to (XBox, Sony, Nintendo)? Thats right PPC. Why? Because it provides more performance/$. The game market runs on free market principals unlike the desktop market held in a strangle hold by a few large companies, and the choice is clear.
2) Low power. Longer battery life. Cheaper operational costs.
3) Faster. Yes faster! The final word is the Linpack tests by the supercomputer hot-rodders who optimize their systems with any tweaks, compiler, and optimizations they can. What the result? Linpack Rpeak per processor the G5 bests the opteron, Xeon, and Itanium.
VT X G5 2GHz 8/processor
NCSA Xeon 3.06GHz 6.12/processor
LANL Opteron 2Ghz 4/processor
PNNL Itanium 1.5 GHz 6/processor
No wonder all the gaming system are choosing PPC as their platform.
8 bits is all the majority of embedded applications need. Its lower power, and cheaper.
8 bits rules the world and will continue to do so for a long time.
8-12% is a little low. Current product cell efficiency are around 14-18%, and Concentrators w/ multijunctions get 30%. But who cares? Your car gets 15% efficiency in average use, nobody complains about that even thought you pay for the gas. Sun is free. The question is does 15% efficiency do the job? Yes. Even if it gets no better, it wouldn't matter.
Wrong. The average insolation in the US is 6 hours of peak sun per day, no desert required (ie 6000 Wh/sq. meter per day). For a flat panel, the deviation from the best southern nevada site to the worst northern washington state site is only 2-to-1! The rest of the country is suprisingly small devation within this. See rredc.nrel.gov/solar/
Wrong again. Silicon solar cells degrade less than 10% over 25 years, and are garanteed by the manufacturer to not exceed this over a 20-30 year guarantee - compare that to any other product guarantee! Though, they are guaranteed for 20-30 years, their life isn't limited by it. (see Solarbuzz.com)
Wrong. If you clean them verses do nothing you get a whopping 4% increase. Few people clean PV panels.
My roof doesn't seem to mind. What land? The average roof has 4-6 times the generating capacity of the average house. 1600 sq ft house = 148 sq meters. 148 m x 150 watts x 6 hours = 133 kWh/day. Average house power consuption 24kWh/day. Beat that with some other form of energy.
Wrong. When is the last time you noticed the sun failed to come up (yes you still get power in overcast conditions). Further, home PV systems are designed using statistic based on the past 30 years of weather data (see rredc.nrel.gov/solar/). Ask somebody with PV, their power is WAY more reliable than the grid. In fact, most of the comminucation repeaters throughout the western US use PV for this reason.
Wrong. Solar is a reasonably dense form of energy wirelessly transmitted through a light "grid" in a usable form almost everywhere on the earth. If you wanted to compare space needed to produce all the electricity consumed in the US it would be a small 100 mile square (see picture for scale www.energycooperation.org/solarh2.htm). In fact studies have shown coal uses as much space due to the space required for strip mining. Try strip mining on top of your roof!
Wrong. What would it cost to pay for solar electricity? Try the cost of the Irag war. Seriously, do the math (including new military spending) and that would be enough over the next 3-5 years to t
There are many ways to design a solar system, depending on application.
Yours is an ideal application: the load is directly proportional to the solar gain. So there is no need for storage because your cooling needs track the solar gain. Less sun, less cooling needed. There can be some lag time, depending insulation and thermal mass in the house but these things are best solved with insulation and thermal mass as your "storage".
For an air conditioner, use an evaporative cooler (many times more efficient than a conventional air-con, very little solar to run). If you live somewhere humid use an desiccant adsorption cycle evaporative cooler (search google -lots of work done on these for solar powered cooling).
And finally, the best "solar cooling" is no active cooling. Build or modify your house with appropriate insulation, thermal mass, shading, and architectural passive solar heating and cooling elements - and your house will stay cozy all year around with little active cooling required.
-TAH
-------- the energy cost of the materials exceeds the expected lifetime output of the solar cells. -------- I hate this quote. I hear it all of time. Unfortunatly, its WRONG. Sure it was true in 1972! But technology does have a way of marching on! Today the energy pay-back period for solar cells is less than 6-24 months (depending of the technology). And then it keeps working for 20-30-40-50 years (20-30 guaranteed by warranty).
According to the DOE Energy Information Administration, the average household energy use per day is 20 kWh/day. An a small generic split level house has about a 2000 sqft footprint (with garage). This is equal to 185 sq meters on a flat. The roof slope will at about 20% to this giving you 222 sq meters of roof space on the average small house. At 15% efficiency for 6 hours per day of peak sun (the US average) the gives you 200 kWh per day OR 10 TIMES the homes required load. PV doesn't need to be more efficient, it is not the same as the efficiency of a feul consuming device. What is the efficiency of a free resource? Extra efficiency is only important if it lowers the cost of the system. But a really cheap 10% efficient PV system would beat an expensive 30% efficient - BECAUSE SPACE IS REALLY NOT THE ISSUE (as seen above)