Someone is going to claim that solar will never be practical, because it is 10 - 15% efficient, while internal combustion, etc. is 30%+. Please, consider that you have to *buy the energy* that goes into that 30% efficienct machine, while the 15% efficient solar panel gets it all free - then run the numbers. The only cost that matters is the dollars per Watt capital cost of the cells upfront (which is still too high, but coming down.)
Someone is going to claim that solar panels are a toxic danger to human health. Please consider that they are manufactured using identical processes to microprocessors, are easier to disassemble for recycling, and last 20 - 30 years plus, as compared to the five year or so length for most consumer electronics.
Someone is going to claim that solar only makes sense in certain parts of the United States. Keep in mind that, for instance, Albany, NY gets 80% of the solar radiation of Reno, NV. Since you pay twice as much for electricity in Albany, solar panels actually make more sense there. (Remember, most solar panels go on rooftops and spin meters backwards - you get retail price ($.08 - $.15 / kWh,) not wholesale ($.02-$.04) like a power plant.
Someone is going to claim you would have to blanket the desert with solar panels to make a workable power plant. Is this what you do with a distributed, smart, resource, that can occupy unused roof space anywhere? Did we take all of our microchips and assemble them into one giant supercomputer in the desert? Solar panels belong in a distributed network of generators - at the end of the wire, and putting them there is cheap and practical.
Someone is going to claim the solar industry can never meet real-world power demands. Check any industry publication for an interesting statistic - in 1996, 100 megawatts of solar were manufactured. Jan - Dec. 2004 saw about 1100 MW (about $ 6 billion worth) manufactured. Still pretty small, but an amazing growth rate.
What does solar cost now? About 1/20 what it did in the 1970s, but still about twice as much as grid electricity. Once you buy the panels, and finance them with, say, a home equity loan, you're looking at $.18 - $.25/kWh. Getting closer every year, but still not quite there.
Finally, a comment on the article. Yeah, Nanosolar is pretty neat, but I think that Konarka is quite a bit further along - and doesn't share nanosolar's tendency to overpromise. Here's what needs to happen. Their efficiency is fine, don't care - a 5% or 10% efficient cell, as long as it's less than $1.50 / Watt, the world will beat a path to your door. However, their longevity is not there. A normal silicon solar panel lasts at least 20 years, these things last more like 5 right now. Hence their strategy of putting them in consumer electronics that have about that lifetime anyway.
To be a real power generation source, they need to get that lifetime up by a factor of 4 - doable with the right encapsulants, some chemistry, getting rid of liquid electrolytes, etc. I bet one of these poeple will be at $.10 / kWh in five years - but the conventional silicon cells can probably get there in about 8, with manufacturing and scale improvements. So it's a real race...we'll see who pulls it out.
100 miles x 100 miles of Nevada desert would power the entire nation with photovoltaics, but the thing is...
PV goes on roofs. Oil wells do not. Look out the window next time you fly into LAX or Dallas...we do need a lot of land for solar. It's just that we've already built stuff on most of it.
Solar cells are not as toxic as people seem to offhandedly suppose...they're etched silicon for the most part, though as you microelectronics folks know, there's solvent risk that has to be managed there. See this PDF for more info.
And to head off the unresearched "solar takes more energy to make than you get from using it" canard that always shows up in these threads, I recommend the notes and bibliography at NREL,
keeping in mind that the newer systems are closer to the lower numbers from this somewhat aging report.
Now, all that said, you have a good point; no energy is completely free...what we *really* have to do is become quite a bit more efficient with how we use it...
That doesn't make as much sense as you might think, because the oil companies...well...are running out of oil.
In the US at least, we've got plenty of coal for what looks like another 100+ years (if we can deal with or mitigate the consequences,) and we're up to our necks in wind and solar (though the prices have to come down a little more on the former and by about another half on the latter,) but no matter where you look, the smart money's on the entire world having another 50 years' worth of oil - on the outside.
Not an immediate crisis, but predictable enough, and close enough to investment-scale decisions, that big oil has a fiduciary responsibility to their investors to check out this next big thing. (H2 + renewables.) They're just not that excited about it yet, because it's small potatoes, comparatively. (The world solar market in 2004 was just over $5 billion total, maybe $8 - 9 billion for wind.) And no one's making H2 fuel except as a science experiment. Solar manufacturing is doubling about every three years, and wind is "jerkier", but on a similar growth path. I'd say Give them until about 2008 - 2011, it looks like, for renewables to make better sense in countries other than Germany and Japan.
The reason I don't think they're actively quashing it? Because they have no reason to be frightened of it. Rest assured you'll get your fuel cell car's shot of compressed H2 from many of the same giant multinational energy companies you get your gas from now - and there's more incentive to try and get there first than to stick your head in the sand.
I am listed as the contact for about four domains, with the according 150 - 200 pieces of spam per day. Cloudmark gets me down to maybe three per day across three email accounts, and works seamlessly within Outlook. It's been around for two years, I think, and I'm a huge fan. (I should mention, also, it's never given me a false positive.
Of course, if you don't use Outlook on an MS system, I think you're pretty much SOL as far as they're concerned...
$5 - 7 / W (installed) would be pretty low for residential; figure, honestly, more like $6.50 - $8. But twisted pair is right; you can frequently get half or more off - I recommend DSIREfor a good list.
1. Every major manufacturer warrantees their panels for 20 - 25 years, with an expected life substantially longer.
2. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as well as major national banks, will include this in a mortgage or home equity loan.
3. Not so unusual. The equivalent of 1/10 of new home starts in Japan, and several thousand new homes every year in the US (mostly CA, NJ, Long Island so far, with more state markets expected to explode this year.)
EI has gone to concentrating PV - lets them leave something outside on the roof for ten years + without worrying about maintenance or moving parts, which eat up the Stirling's cost advantages very quickly. They have a great little engine, though, I think they'll finagle it into something else before too long.
Apparently, though, Italy views that population decline as a real problem - Italy and France are both examining re-upping an old WWII policy of giving medals and other recognition to new mothers. = )
Here's hopefully a clarification of all the below, from someone who works on net metering and interconnection a solid number of hours per week...
Equipment for interconnection and backfeed into the grid are governed by UL and, more relevantly, IEEE standards. (742 and 1547, respectively.)
These have fairly elaborate specifications for, as you said, not hitting the ground protection equipment, going into non-export mode (within a certain number of milliseconds) if the grid trips off, or if the current frequency or reactive power or a variety of other things vary outside certain parameters. Most utilities also require you to have an external, lockable disconnect (for instance, for if linemen are working outside your house on a segemnt of line that's still giving you good enough power that the inverter hasn't tripped you off. (they sensibly treat power lines the same way you treat working on guns - be 100% sure it's unloaded, and then be 100% sure you treat it as though it's loaded.)
These technical standards are fairly well established by the community of power engineers to be more than sufficiently safe, and we're seeing progress in their implementation: the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, for instance, has issued a model standard for their use.
However, it's far from uniform nationwide; utilities are used to implementing their own idiosyncratic rules for every part of their grid, and this (testing and retesting the same inverters in enery state, making them programmable to comply with Podunk Utility Co's individual requirements, etc.,) has become a major cost obstacle for the use of what's termed "distributed generation."
It does vary from state to state and utility to utility; while they *are* required under the Public Utility Holding Company Act or the Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act (don't remember which it is) to buy your power back from you, that's only at wholesale (ca. 2 cents per kWH,) whereas if you're truly net metering (and single-meter, spin-it-backwards net metering is something literally thousands of solar and small wind users legally do every day), you can get 7 - 14 cents. An easy way to check all of these, state by state, is the DSIRE website.
As for the solar energy payback timeand toxicity,which I'm frustratingly sure someone will bring up in this thread, those are essentially canards that "seem right" to those who haven't really looked into it but maybe heard it ten years ago, but don't hold up to empirical scrutiny.
Check the national labsfor a peer-reviewed study of the energy payback of solar panels - roughly, 500% at minimum.
As for the materials solar panels are made of, they're 95%+ n and p - doped silicon; those (thin film, mostly) that are, e.g. cadmium / tellurium, have less than 1/1000 the heavy metal concentration per kilowatt seen in, e.g. NiCad batteries, and they last for 25+ years, vs. those, which are thrown away into municipal landfills (at best) much more quickly.
"Someone explain to me why the green crowd considers nuclear energy to be dirty when we can just put the waste into nonexistent reactors." That's a pretty easy one, though in all honesty, I'd like to see us step up use of some pebble-bed reactors in order to really yank down our CO2 output, and find somewhere responsible to hold that waste for a couple hundred years - you don't get free energy.
Yes, actually, it probably can - get a major manufacturer's panels (Sharp, Shell, BP, Kyocera,) and that front glass will be tempered (viz. even stronger than windshield glass - it's a good chunk of the cost of modules anymore) I've seen people hit it with baseball bats, and some of the big mfgs. will even throw that into the warranty (check individual catalogs.)
I like it! = ) (though I do feel like the cells mentioned in this article would be pretty benign - even biodegradable - waste streams.) I did misunderstand your point, but in my defense, I don't think it was entirely clear.
"Most toxic devices now made" - it's my second favorite baseless canard about solar energy! The best being the one about them not making back their own manufacturing energy.
Your average silicon solar cell goes through a very similar process to that of any other silicon semiconductor, the major difference being that they are then locked into crystalline modules for 25 - 30 years, rather than put into rapidly-obsoleted electronic equipment that people ship to Southeast Asia to be landfilled or taken apart with toxic acids.
If you were talking about the heavy-metal based thin film solar cells, they use these materials in units more than one thousand times as efficient as the NiCad batteries that I'm sure you've used (and disposed of) before. NREL in Platts.
Especially since it's been locked into an ionic crystal - think about it. Sodium - explosive toxic gas. Chlorine - military nerve gas. Sodium Chloride - table salt.
"Efficiency" is a very strange comparison metric to use when one energy source has infinite, free fuel and the other does not.
What it comes down to is that solar panels are *relatively* cheap, and come in small modular bunches. Enough solar panels and batteries, charge controllers, etc. to run a 10 - computer lab 24/7 in India would be about $15,000 and take one day to set up. Then essentially anyone in the vilalge could be trained to use and maintain it, and it would sit there and work for 25 years.
A methane genset, (which they actually do a lot of, I believe, in India,) would come in cheaper per Watt, but would only be available at several multiples of that cost and capacity, and then would require much more expert maintenance, parts, shipping logistics, time, etc.
As for natural gas, the delivery infrastructure is simply not there and couldn't get there for another 5 - 10 years with a real crash, multibillion dollar infrastructure program, and then these people would be dependent on the increasingly constrained and volatile international natural gas market.
It's like using a laptop on an ambulance when an enormous Beowulf cluster is so much more cost- and power- effective per instruction.
"Probably" indicates an unresearched assumption...$8,000 - $10,000 per kilometer (EEI, EPRI, others,) just to string wires, over relatively unchallenging terrain, in the West, with skilled preexisting crews, from an existing power station, assuming there is a major power substation, then gives you the right to begin *paying* the power bill. Since few or none of these conditions exist pervasively in rural India, let's say the high end of that.
Meanwhile, an off-grid solar system (if you get it from, e.g. India's new homegrown PV industry) - panels, charge controller, racks, and batteries - will cost you about $8 / Watt. For distributed small loads (and by "small" here, I mean up to the sort of village power scale - 50,000 Watts or so - solar power is generally cheaper on an *installation* basis than conventional power sources, even before you account for O&M and fuel costs. Beyond that scale, even something like a natural gas microturbine (see Capstone et al.
In the US, these DG projects have a major financial disadvantage due to the existence of the grid - built in large part as a massive public works / employment project during the New Deal. In the developing world, with dispersed, rapidly growing populations, DG makes more sense, provided people can get past the wires and stacks mentality.
I would say "damned expensive" is no longer quite true...In 1976, 1 WWatt of solar power "retailed" for about $60 / Watt. In 1986, $10 / Watt, in 2004, bulk buy, about $3. (It's the batteries, balance-of-system stuff, and labor that more than doubles that.
And remember, solar power is "right now"/"I brought it in on the yak" power, not "wait for four years, we'll build a power plant and associated rail line and get the grid right over those Himalayas to you." power....that has real value, as well.
1. Some of it is heat, but some of it is actually reflection or transmission...the shine, you'll see across generations of PV, is decreasing as they get a hold of better glass, and do things like microtexture the front surface (see particularly BP's "Saturn" cells, which are nearly black,) or add a specific antireflective coating.
Actually, the best efficiency I've seen is 37% - the way to do that is to stack PV materials which have different bandgaps, but are mutually transparent, top to bottom.
At the end of the day, though, thermodynamic efficiency is not the number 1 problem for our industry...think about it; people are used to using this efficiency in engineering contexts because they're paying for fuel...whereas PV fuel is free. The relevant metric, therefore is *not* efficiency per unit energy input, but rather efficiency per unit capital input - dollars per watt.
Build a 40% efficient solar cell that's $50 / Watt, and you could sell some to NASA and DOD. Build a 5% efficient cell that's $2 / Watt, and the world would beat a path to your door. Increased efficiencies are not so much the holy grail for PV; they're important, but things like increased manufacturing automation are what's bringing the big bang for the buck right now.
There are multi-bandgap materials, and tunable nanostructures on the horizon...look into the work of GE, Hitachi, Konarka, and Nanosolar if you're interested in these.
A little over half, for conventional crystalline silicon cells; exotic multijunction cells can do better...I'm starting to hear the alarms that mean I'm about to exceed my technical knowledge, so I'll bounce you here:
That...is not necessarily a terrible idea. As long as it was pretty cheap, and stayed out of the (relatively narrow) bandgap used by PV, that would honestly be a potentially useful application.
Unfortunately, people are already reluctant to put the comparatively inoffensive black or blue panels on their roofs...these vanadium-based ones might be worse.
It's too darn hard. I just came off of reading NREL's annual report on the research they're doing to bring down the costs on existing PV materials (silicon, CIGS, TIO2, etc.,) and it's more than enough to make me not want to "reinvent the wheel" on another niche PV compound.
Better to take existing PV and incorporate it into a window made of something else if you want to do some active cooling. In fact, I wish I could find a good link, but I know that Audi does this with the sunroof on their "warm weather package" models - thin-film PV in the glass of the roof powers fresh air fans behind the headliner when the car is parked, so that you don't have to get into such a heinously hot car when it's been outside for a while. (or burn the gas to run your AC at "Max" for 15 minutes.)
The diesel engines put out more emissions per gallon, due in part to generally not having a catalytic convertor, but also combusting at different temperatures - more soot, etc. CO2 you're ahead, but in terms of NOx, PM, and (possibly) SOx, you end up behind.
I have to say, as a (very new) rescue technician and EMT, that it's not just your decision to drive that SUV - because you're driving it in a community full of other people.
It's when you're riding 60 mph in a 25,000 lb truck, the wrong way down the Beltway, in order to shove yourself through shattered glass and twisted metal and jaws-of-life some blood-spattered libertarian out from under his dashboard (and bag up the kids in the Focus that he killed,) that you begin to wish that people had actually read the Wealth of Nations all the way through to the end, where the caveats are.
Economic decisions don't occur in a vacuum, and we don't usually have (or have the money to get) enough data to fuel the marketplace appropriately, (e.g. I am happy to wake up and go do the above, but I sure would like some extra cash into the firehouse for every Expedition in our first-due area, because man do they make a lot more work,) so we make laws. All together - ideally, a democracy lets us generally agree on the solutions to problems the marketplace can't get a handle on.
Too much of this "let every individual decide" BS is really based on faith statements...
Now, post-rant, clearly this is just a misfired law; the problem is, when you go to make truck routes so that they don't, e.g., run through elementary schools, cul-de-sacs and nursing homes, that it's hard to get a handle on what is and isn't a truck. So they went for weight - which is a pretty good proxy for danger to others, noise, and road damage, the things that we as a society were really hoping to minimize the cost of.
Less of a battery size problem and more of a starter motor size one; check out the starter / alternator in your car. Both tiny, tiny, tiny compared to the motive engine.
So once you've made the starter motor big enough, it's a major new component, you have to rearrange the engine compartment, it weighs a lot, your normal engine's low-end characteristics can be changed, etc., etc., - you've almost made a new engine.
Not to say it's not doable - this is what's frequently called a "mild hybrid", (one that can't really *drive* on its electric motor,) and I think it's what, e.g. the Dodge Ram sort-of-hybrid is.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, since this is a solar photovoltaics post:
Someone is going to claim that solar will never be practical, because it is 10 - 15% efficient, while internal combustion, etc. is 30%+. Please, consider that you have to *buy the energy* that goes into that 30% efficienct machine, while the 15% efficient solar panel gets it all free - then run the numbers. The only cost that matters is the dollars per Watt capital cost of the cells upfront (which is still too high, but coming down.)
Someone is going to claim that solar panels produce less energy over their lives than it takes to manufacture them. This has not been true for about 40 years.
Someone is going to claim that solar panels are a toxic danger to human health. Please consider that they are manufactured using identical processes to microprocessors, are easier to disassemble for recycling, and last 20 - 30 years plus, as compared to the five year or so length for most consumer electronics.
Someone is going to claim that solar only makes sense in certain parts of the United States. Keep in mind that, for instance, Albany, NY gets 80% of the solar radiation of Reno, NV. Since you pay twice as much for electricity in Albany, solar panels actually make more sense there. (Remember, most solar panels go on rooftops and spin meters backwards - you get retail price ($.08 - $.15 / kWh,) not wholesale ($.02-$.04) like a power plant.
Someone is going to claim you would have to blanket the desert with solar panels to make a workable power plant. Is this what you do with a distributed, smart, resource, that can occupy unused roof space anywhere? Did we take all of our microchips and assemble them into one giant supercomputer in the desert? Solar panels belong in a distributed network of generators - at the end of the wire, and putting them there is cheap and practical.
Someone is going to claim the solar industry can never meet real-world power demands. Check any industry publication for an interesting statistic - in 1996, 100 megawatts of solar were manufactured. Jan - Dec. 2004 saw about 1100 MW (about $ 6 billion worth) manufactured. Still pretty small, but an amazing growth rate.
What does solar cost now? About 1/20 what it did in the 1970s, but still about twice as much as grid electricity. Once you buy the panels, and finance them with, say, a home equity loan, you're looking at $.18 - $.25 /kWh. Getting closer every year, but still not quite there.
Finally, a comment on the article. Yeah, Nanosolar is pretty neat, but I think that Konarka is quite a bit further along - and doesn't share nanosolar's tendency to overpromise. Here's what needs to happen. Their efficiency is fine, don't care - a 5% or 10% efficient cell, as long as it's less than $1.50 / Watt, the world will beat a path to your door. However, their longevity is not there. A normal silicon solar panel lasts at least 20 years, these things last more like 5 right now. Hence their strategy of putting them in consumer electronics that have about that lifetime anyway.To be a real power generation source, they need to get that lifetime up by a factor of 4 - doable with the right encapsulants, some chemistry, getting rid of liquid electrolytes, etc. I bet one of these poeple will be at $.10 / kWh in five years - but the conventional silicon cells can probably get there in about 8, with manufacturing and scale improvements. So it's a real race...we'll see who pulls it out.
100 miles x 100 miles of Nevada desert would power the entire nation with photovoltaics, but the thing is...
PV goes on roofs. Oil wells do not. Look out the window next time you fly into LAX or Dallas...we do need a lot of land for solar. It's just that we've already built stuff on most of it.
Energy Payback.
Solar cells are not as toxic as people seem to offhandedly suppose...they're etched silicon for the most part, though as you microelectronics folks know, there's solvent risk that has to be managed there. See this PDF for more info.
And to head off the unresearched "solar takes more energy to make than you get from using it" canard that always shows up in these threads, I recommend the notes and bibliography at NREL, keeping in mind that the newer systems are closer to the lower numbers from this somewhat aging report.
Now, all that said, you have a good point; no energy is completely free...what we *really* have to do is become quite a bit more efficient with how we use it...
That doesn't make as much sense as you might think, because the oil companies...well...are running out of oil.
In the US at least, we've got plenty of coal for what looks like another 100+ years (if we can deal with or mitigate the consequences,) and we're up to our necks in wind and solar (though the prices have to come down a little more on the former and by about another half on the latter,) but no matter where you look, the smart money's on the entire world having another 50 years' worth of oil - on the outside.
Not an immediate crisis, but predictable enough, and close enough to investment-scale decisions, that big oil has a fiduciary responsibility to their investors to check out this next big thing. (H2 + renewables.) They're just not that excited about it yet, because it's small potatoes, comparatively. (The world solar market in 2004 was just over $5 billion total, maybe $8 - 9 billion for wind.) And no one's making H2 fuel except as a science experiment. Solar manufacturing is doubling about every three years, and wind is "jerkier", but on a similar growth path. I'd say Give them until about 2008 - 2011, it looks like, for renewables to make better sense in countries other than Germany and Japan.
The reason I don't think they're actively quashing it? Because they have no reason to be frightened of it. Rest assured you'll get your fuel cell car's shot of compressed H2 from many of the same giant multinational energy companies you get your gas from now - and there's more incentive to try and get there first than to stick your head in the sand.
I am listed as the contact for about four domains, with the according 150 - 200 pieces of spam per day. Cloudmark gets me down to maybe three per day across three email accounts, and works seamlessly within Outlook. It's been around for two years, I think, and I'm a huge fan. (I should mention, also, it's never given me a false positive.
Of course, if you don't use Outlook on an MS system, I think you're pretty much SOL as far as they're concerned...
$5 - 7 / W (installed) would be pretty low for residential; figure, honestly, more like $6.50 - $8. But twisted pair is right; you can frequently get half or more off - I recommend DSIREfor a good list.
1. Every major manufacturer warrantees their panels for 20 - 25 years, with an expected life substantially longer.
2. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as well as major national banks, will include this in a mortgage or home equity loan.
3. Not so unusual. The equivalent of 1/10 of new home starts in Japan, and several thousand new homes every year in the US (mostly CA, NJ, Long Island so far, with more state markets expected to explode this year.)
EI has gone to concentrating PV - lets them leave something outside on the roof for ten years + without worrying about maintenance or moving parts, which eat up the Stirling's cost advantages very quickly. They have a great little engine, though, I think they'll finagle it into something else before too long.
Apparently, though, Italy views that population decline as a real problem - Italy and France are both examining re-upping an old WWII policy of giving medals and other recognition to new mothers. = )
Here's hopefully a clarification of all the below, from someone who works on net metering and interconnection a solid number of hours per week...
Equipment for interconnection and backfeed into the grid are governed by UL and, more relevantly, IEEE standards. (742 and 1547, respectively.)
These have fairly elaborate specifications for, as you said, not hitting the ground protection equipment, going into non-export mode (within a certain number of milliseconds) if the grid trips off, or if the current frequency or reactive power or a variety of other things vary outside certain parameters. Most utilities also require you to have an external, lockable disconnect (for instance, for if linemen are working outside your house on a segemnt of line that's still giving you good enough power that the inverter hasn't tripped you off. (they sensibly treat power lines the same way you treat working on guns - be 100% sure it's unloaded, and then be 100% sure you treat it as though it's loaded.)
These technical standards are fairly well established by the community of power engineers to be more than sufficiently safe, and we're seeing progress in their implementation: the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, for instance, has issued a model standard for their use.
However, it's far from uniform nationwide; utilities are used to implementing their own idiosyncratic rules for every part of their grid, and this (testing and retesting the same inverters in enery state, making them programmable to comply with Podunk Utility Co's individual requirements, etc.,) has become a major cost obstacle for the use of what's termed "distributed generation."
It does vary from state to state and utility to utility; while they *are* required under the Public Utility Holding Company Act or the Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act (don't remember which it is) to buy your power back from you, that's only at wholesale (ca. 2 cents per kWH,) whereas if you're truly net metering (and single-meter, spin-it-backwards net metering is something literally thousands of solar and small wind users legally do every day), you can get 7 - 14 cents. An easy way to check all of these, state by state, is the DSIRE website.
As for the solar energy payback timeand toxicity,which I'm frustratingly sure someone will bring up in this thread, those are essentially canards that "seem right" to those who haven't really looked into it but maybe heard it ten years ago, but don't hold up to empirical scrutiny.
Check the national labsfor a peer-reviewed study of the energy payback of solar panels - roughly, 500% at minimum.
As for the materials solar panels are made of, they're 95%+ n and p - doped silicon; those (thin film, mostly) that are, e.g. cadmium / tellurium, have less than 1/1000 the heavy metal concentration per kilowatt seen in, e.g. NiCad batteries, and they last for 25+ years, vs. those, which are thrown away into municipal landfills (at best) much more quickly.
"Someone explain to me why the green crowd considers nuclear energy to be dirty when we can just put the waste into nonexistent reactors." That's a pretty easy one, though in all honesty, I'd like to see us step up use of some pebble-bed reactors in order to really yank down our CO2 output, and find somewhere responsible to hold that waste for a couple hundred years - you don't get free energy.
Yes, actually, it probably can - get a major manufacturer's panels (Sharp, Shell, BP, Kyocera,) and that front glass will be tempered (viz. even stronger than windshield glass - it's a good chunk of the cost of modules anymore) I've seen people hit it with baseball bats, and some of the big mfgs. will even throw that into the warranty (check individual catalogs.)
You should also check the flexible shingles at Uni-Solar; they're nonbrittle and would probably take a hit even better.
I like it! = ) (though I do feel like the cells mentioned in this article would be pretty benign - even biodegradable - waste streams.) I did misunderstand your point, but in my defense, I don't think it was entirely clear.
"Most toxic devices now made" - it's my second favorite baseless canard about solar energy! The best being the one about them not making back their own manufacturing energy.
Your average silicon solar cell goes through a very similar process to that of any other silicon semiconductor, the major difference being that they are then locked into crystalline modules for 25 - 30 years, rather than put into rapidly-obsoleted electronic equipment that people ship to Southeast Asia to be landfilled or taken apart with toxic acids.
University of Utrecht study;
If you were talking about the heavy-metal based thin film solar cells, they use these materials in units more than one thousand times as efficient as the NiCad batteries that I'm sure you've used (and disposed of) before. NREL in Platts.
Especially since it's been locked into an ionic crystal - think about it. Sodium - explosive toxic gas. Chlorine - military nerve gas. Sodium Chloride - table salt.
"Efficiency" is a very strange comparison metric to use when one energy source has infinite, free fuel and the other does not.
What it comes down to is that solar panels are *relatively* cheap, and come in small modular bunches. Enough solar panels and batteries, charge controllers, etc. to run a 10 - computer lab 24/7 in India would be about $15,000 and take one day to set up. Then essentially anyone in the vilalge could be trained to use and maintain it, and it would sit there and work for 25 years.
A methane genset, (which they actually do a lot of, I believe, in India,) would come in cheaper per Watt, but would only be available at several multiples of that cost and capacity, and then would require much more expert maintenance, parts, shipping logistics, time, etc.
As for natural gas, the delivery infrastructure is simply not there and couldn't get there for another 5 - 10 years with a real crash, multibillion dollar infrastructure program, and then these people would be dependent on the increasingly constrained and volatile international natural gas market.
It's like using a laptop on an ambulance when an enormous Beowulf cluster is so much more cost- and power- effective per instruction.
"Probably" indicates an unresearched assumption...$8,000 - $10,000 per kilometer (EEI, EPRI, others,) just to string wires, over relatively unchallenging terrain, in the West, with skilled preexisting crews, from an existing power station, assuming there is a major power substation, then gives you the right to begin *paying* the power bill. Since few or none of these conditions exist pervasively in rural India, let's say the high end of that.
Meanwhile, an off-grid solar system (if you get it from, e.g. India's new homegrown PV industry) - panels, charge controller, racks, and batteries - will cost you about $8 / Watt. For distributed small loads (and by "small" here, I mean up to the sort of village power scale - 50,000 Watts or so - solar power is generally cheaper on an *installation* basis than conventional power sources, even before you account for O&M and fuel costs. Beyond that scale, even something like a natural gas microturbine (see Capstone et al.
In the US, these DG projects have a major financial disadvantage due to the existence of the grid - built in large part as a massive public works / employment project during the New Deal. In the developing world, with dispersed, rapidly growing populations, DG makes more sense, provided people can get past the wires and stacks mentality.
I would say "damned expensive" is no longer quite true...In 1976, 1 WWatt of solar power "retailed" for about $60 / Watt. In 1986, $10 / Watt, in 2004, bulk buy, about $3. (It's the batteries, balance-of-system stuff, and labor that more than doubles that.
And remember, solar power is "right now"/"I brought it in on the yak" power, not "wait for four years, we'll build a power plant and associated rail line and get the grid right over those Himalayas to you." power....that has real value, as well.
1. Some of it is heat, but some of it is actually reflection or transmission...the shine, you'll see across generations of PV, is decreasing as they get a hold of better glass, and do things like microtexture the front surface (see particularly BP's "Saturn" cells, which are nearly black,) or add a specific antireflective coating.
Actually, the best efficiency I've seen is 37% - the way to do that is to stack PV materials which have different bandgaps, but are mutually transparent, top to bottom.
At the end of the day, though, thermodynamic efficiency is not the number 1 problem for our industry...think about it; people are used to using this efficiency in engineering contexts because they're paying for fuel...whereas PV fuel is free. The relevant metric, therefore is *not* efficiency per unit energy input, but rather efficiency per unit capital input - dollars per watt.
Build a 40% efficient solar cell that's $50 / Watt, and you could sell some to NASA and DOD. Build a 5% efficient cell that's $2 / Watt, and the world would beat a path to your door. Increased efficiencies are not so much the holy grail for PV; they're important, but things like increased manufacturing automation are what's bringing the big bang for the buck right now.
There are multi-bandgap materials, and tunable nanostructures on the horizon...look into the work of GE, Hitachi, Konarka, and Nanosolar if you're interested in these.
A little over half, for conventional crystalline silicon cells; exotic multijunction cells can do better...I'm starting to hear the alarms that mean I'm about to exceed my technical knowledge, so I'll bounce you here:
http://www.eere.energy.gov/solar/bandgap_energiesThat...is not necessarily a terrible idea. As long as it was pretty cheap, and stayed out of the (relatively narrow) bandgap used by PV, that would honestly be a potentially useful application.
Unfortunately, people are already reluctant to put the comparatively inoffensive black or blue panels on their roofs...these vanadium-based ones might be worse.
It's too darn hard. I just came off of reading NREL's annual report on the research they're doing to bring down the costs on existing PV materials (silicon, CIGS, TIO2, etc.,) and it's more than enough to make me not want to "reinvent the wheel" on another niche PV compound.
Better to take existing PV and incorporate it into a window made of something else if you want to do some active cooling. In fact, I wish I could find a good link, but I know that Audi does this with the sunroof on their "warm weather package" models - thin-film PV in the glass of the roof powers fresh air fans behind the headliner when the car is parked, so that you don't have to get into such a heinously hot car when it's been outside for a while. (or burn the gas to run your AC at "Max" for 15 minutes.)
What's their deal with SOx? Same? Better? Worse?
The diesel engines put out more emissions per gallon, due in part to generally not having a catalytic convertor, but also combusting at different temperatures - more soot, etc. CO2 you're ahead, but in terms of NOx, PM, and (possibly) SOx, you end up behind.
I have to say, as a (very new) rescue technician and EMT, that it's not just your decision to drive that SUV - because you're driving it in a community full of other people.
It's when you're riding 60 mph in a 25,000 lb truck, the wrong way down the Beltway, in order to shove yourself through shattered glass and twisted metal and jaws-of-life some blood-spattered libertarian out from under his dashboard (and bag up the kids in the Focus that he killed,) that you begin to wish that people had actually read the Wealth of Nations all the way through to the end, where the caveats are.
Economic decisions don't occur in a vacuum, and we don't usually have (or have the money to get) enough data to fuel the marketplace appropriately, (e.g. I am happy to wake up and go do the above, but I sure would like some extra cash into the firehouse for every Expedition in our first-due area, because man do they make a lot more work,) so we make laws. All together - ideally, a democracy lets us generally agree on the solutions to problems the marketplace can't get a handle on.
Too much of this "let every individual decide" BS is really based on faith statements...
Now, post-rant, clearly this is just a misfired law; the problem is, when you go to make truck routes so that they don't, e.g., run through elementary schools, cul-de-sacs and nursing homes, that it's hard to get a handle on what is and isn't a truck. So they went for weight - which is a pretty good proxy for danger to others, noise, and road damage, the things that we as a society were really hoping to minimize the cost of.
Less of a battery size problem and more of a starter motor size one; check out the starter / alternator in your car. Both tiny, tiny, tiny compared to the motive engine.
So once you've made the starter motor big enough, it's a major new component, you have to rearrange the engine compartment, it weighs a lot, your normal engine's low-end characteristics can be changed, etc., etc., - you've almost made a new engine.
Not to say it's not doable - this is what's frequently called a "mild hybrid", (one that can't really *drive* on its electric motor,) and I think it's what, e.g. the Dodge Ram sort-of-hybrid is.