The existence of basic Legos is absolutely critical to the fostering of a generation capable of survival in the coming century, and I am not engaged in hyperbole here.
1. I work as a policy wonk, but have always had a technical bent; it's just enough that I will take apart the things that I own, or install my own software, or be mad when something is poorly designed. In a variety of other ways, I realize that the technologies I own did not happen to me and are not immutable. They are for me to use, they could have been made differently, and I fundamentally have control over them, to modify or reject them.
This is a worldview formed before, really, I had ever touched a piece of software; formed entirely from playing with Legos for HOURS A DAY when I was little. I would posit that the United States' technological elite, people who really look at a computer program or a bacteria or a steam engine and think "I could take that apart and do that better", played with Legos far more than the general population.
Cause and effect there are left as an exercise for the student, but the point remains that Legos are the preferred play object of the people who grow up and become our producers of technology; and if you think play is not that important to learning, attitude development, and general life outlook, you need to read some educational or vertebrate behavior research, or at least go watch some otters.
So if we grant that they're centrally important (and if you would doubt this, why are so many of you so fond of them? Why does Slashdot have a Lego icon?) then their *composition* and *direction* is centrally important. Our kids should feel that helicopters, robots, dinosaurs are made out of simple parts that can go together different ways, that to find out how those parts go together you have to *try things out* and *maybe screw up*, and that you, at six years old, can make something new and cool that no one has seen before and be proud of it.
The other option is just to have another pre-molded piece of plastic that works, for sure, first time. You're not sure why, someone else designed it, that's where technology comes from, I didn't have anything to do with putting it together because I can't do something like that, *fast forward ten years* what? Digital Rights Management? Biometric scanning in shopping malls? OK, I'm no engineer. These things happen, you can't change them. Is this a pill that I should take? If you say so, doctor, no point looking at it, machines are something other people make and understand and then I consume them as is, especially if they're trendy. *shudder.*
I've had trouble for years articulating why it bothered me so much that Lego was moving towards more specialized pieces and more licensed properties; they were teaching passivity and damaging the kind of play that gave me what intelligence I think I have today.
2. The tiny yellow Lego people of my youth existed in a shiny, functioning, Utopian republic, where there was no violence, no conflict, and the guy who drove the tow truck one day could - would - pilot the innovate Space Shuttle / submarine / dinosaur hybrid the next.
Maybe not a viable image of the world for the long term, but a good first impression, and one that fixed in your head an early impression that what you did with technology was design better police boats and monorails and ice cream shops and in general make a better place in which to live your lives, rather than, say, Spam programs or chemical weapons. These are all habits of mind that I want my kinds to get early, far earlier than they grasp that they must follow the hot toy or trend of the moment.
I had not realized that this was upsetting me until it appears to be moving towards a solution. Halleleujah.
It would seem to me that this is yet another demonstration of poor management structure on the part of the recording industry; it seems that the same individual labels are using this data to direct thier marketing efforts...
...and screwing it up by providing thousands and thousands of copies of convincing fakes to the major file-sharing networks. Do they have a means of automatically filtering these out? If so, does Big Champagne have a business arrangement with the fake-file hosts?
If this last is the case, glad to see that someone's come up with a truly devious P2P business model. If not, their data is borderline worthless, but for all their love of "empricial" data, marketeers tend to have a very vague grasp of statistical validity in any case...
Short answer is ca. 4-5 years' energy payback, out of a 20 year (warranteed) panel lifetime. Probably closer to 3 years with the newer low-energy silicon growth methods.
Think about it. Bulk retail solar module purchase - no tax credits - $275 / 100 watts. 100 watts * 20 years * 365 days * 6 hours / day = 4,380,000 Wh production. Figure $.06 / kWh sweetheart electricity rate for manufacturers, and that's $263 of electricity. You'd have to get your materials and labor essentially for free.
This statistic was actually true ca. I think 1979. Solar panels are a silicon-based semiconductor technology - would you use a 1979 measurement for MHz / dollar in microprocessors?
As for that ethanol study you also "read somewhere," it was by David Pimentel, a systematic entomologist (bug identifier) by training. I've read through it first-hand, (a practice you should try sometime,) and it plays pretty fast and loose with the numbers. As an energy economist, he's an excellent entomologist.
Documented convnetional solar photovoltaic prices (ca. 15% efficiency, residential / commercial rooftop type cell, price per Watt capacity):
1976: $100.00
1981: $9.83
1985: $8.74
1992: $4.74
2000: $2.70
2003: $2.50 (ish. This last one approximate.)
If it gets down to about $1.10, your total system cost with racks, inverters, etc. will be ca. $3.00/Watt for a grid-tie system. Your payback (money, on a home-equity loan) would be well inside 10 years, your energy payback within 3. Most analysts and manufacturers are calling this point about 2010 - 2012 at current industry growth rates.
The cost decline there is mostly associated with major increases in manufacturing scale (25%+ annual growth rates over the last 10 years.)
At the end of the day, you don't need to do anything that exotic to make solar power economically feasible. Bring the US R&D budget up above $100M, (currently ca. $85M,) keep the market increase rate where it is, and we'll get there.
Meanwhile, the increase in panel efficiency associated with leaving the atmosphere does not make up for the enormous cost of heaving something into space. And while I'll defend the energy payback period of photovoltaics, I will no longer do so once you have either launched them atop a gigantic chemical rocket or manufactured them in a factory on the (freaking) moon.
Yes it has - that statistic dates from ca. 1974, when solar cells were essentially hand-assembled from purpose-grown silicon crystals.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory did a study on this a few years back, estimating ca. 3 years' energy payback from hugely conservative assumptions - Here, in PDF form. However, current efficiencies are slightly better than they were at the time, and silicon production has improved as well...(check shellsolar for their latest.)
Silicon being your major material and energy cost here, in most cases...the rest is just frames, glass, and wires. If, as it appears, Uni-Solar/ECD has finally got their production line unscrewed, they'll ahve even better efficiencies,a s they use a thin-film process.
At the end of the day, cars don't blow up, Starsky and Hutch notwithstanding. Think about the times you've rubbernecked or read the paper; how many times have you seen a car get really badly mastered, medevac, extraction, etc. Now compare that to how many times you've seen one of those things actually blow up, movie style. The Ford Crown Vic and some of those side-saddle-tank - pickups being the exception.
I'm pretty confident that they'll be able to generate a non-exploding hydrogen tank for motor use, especially since hydrogen dissipates so quickly.
You're doing an excellent job of profiling the political thinking of ca..01 of 1% of the green movement (and thereby missing the very salient and frankly critical points being advanced by the rest.)
Like any other political movement, there are idiots and crazies among the environmentalists. They get lots of press because they tend to generate lots of "man bites dog" type news stories. The TV cameras will definitely show up when Greenpeace rides a Zodiac in front of an exploding harpoon; probably not so much when you buy a Civic hybrid. However, treating these stories as representative of the movement as a whole is simplistic; and an uncritical way to swallow the news you recieve.
I work in Washington every day, and I talk to more than my fair share of Right and far Right politicians; I have to say that environmentalism is not a very Leftist thing any more so much as it is a realistic evaluation of what we need to do to keep ourselves alive and the world the way we enjoy it.
Good thinking, but you didn't go far enough. Yes, you lose some of the energy converting to and from hydrogen - so why bother? Because batteries suck so hard.
I'm about as lefty-Green as you can be while still maintaining some logical coherency, and I'm willing to concede that electric cars don't work...the reason being that the only cost-effective storage for vehicles are lead-acid batteries, which are very heavy and very costly. So they render the car unworkable and hugely expensive. Hydrogen fuel cells look like they'll be considerably less heavy and expensive for the same performance, which more than compensates for lower thermodynamic efficiencies.
At the end of the day, pure thermodynamic efficiency generally turns out to be a useful tool for estimating the viability of an energy system - but completely inadequate in and of itself. To be a really effective engineer, you can't delude yourself into thinking that it all comes down to one mathematical variable, and that those considering other factors are necessarily fuzzy-headed or missing the point.
Well, if we're being totally honest, by "someone", I mean me. We have a sample in the office, and it's a question I'd seen asked many times before, and I had an intramural softball game that evening...
Idle hands are science's workshop. Not a real guitar-smasing whack, but pretty dedicated; the Styrofoam backing on the PowerGuard probably didn't hurt, either. = )
Well, that's all the truth, though there are partial counterarguments, viz:
Since 90%+ of failures originate in the grid, and a very large number of these (after weather) are grid-strain-related, putting in some distributed generation (especially solar, since it follows peak relatively well,) should let you destress your work crews overall (and reduce the number of grid failures in the first place.)
As for the idiots just backwiring themselves into the grid, well, they are in fact idiots in large part. If, however, your average utility was a little less disingenuous with their interconnection procedures (and not all are, though quite a few...) you'd see fewer of them.
I'd be interested to hear, for instance, how many of the guerilla solar crowd had tried to go the blessed route first....
Grrr...the other persistent canard. = ) As of 1999, it was down to something like 4 years, in an exceedingly conservative and comprehensive calculation:
And the panels themselves are usually output-waranteed out past 20 years (30 years being a safe bet lifetime for most.) Though I suspect that since we're seeing steadily more automation in the newer plants (and less silicon per watt, and better per-square-meter efficiencies, that this has even gotten better recently.
I'm sorry, but that's just not the way energy works in this country. We have a subsidized energy system - you don't even have to get loosey-goosey with what percentage of Navy spending goes to protect oil reserves, etc...
The nuclear power industry does not have to purchase commercial insurance, nor provide their own security at their plants - both are picked up by the American people to the tune of billions of dollars per year. Natural gas drillers enjoy tax credits that would triple or quadruple the renewable energy industry (fed in slowly enough.) Coal power plants are essentially inarguably the major force behind a large number of mercury-related birth defects and fisheries damage, as well as strongly implicated in the recent skyrocketing asthma numbers - the government picks up the tab.
remote sensing for oil and gas reserves, expedited (and deeply subsidized) access to public lands for drilling, free shipping insurance, government-subsidized health claim fund for the black-lunged coal miners,
If you are going to rear back and self-satisfiedly claim that this is the position renewable energy advocates are taking, go on over to thomas.loc.gov and grab HR6, S14, and HR6 (senate) from the 108th Congress. Then run the numbers. Until then, I'm afraid you're being patronizing from a deeply uninformed position.
Oh, and the new Prius hybrid? 0-60 in 10 seconds. Not bad for a soccermommobile.
Sorry, dropped out that "the two bad chemicals they use are etchers and cleaners for the silicon, and there's a strong economic and regulatory incentive to keep careful track of those."
Compared with the amounts of NOx and SOx your car puts out, which are measured in tons, it's trivial. I've *been* locked in a solar panel factory; I did much better than I would have locked in a garage with a running car for an equivalent length of time.
Afraid that's just not the case - in fact, it has essentially nothing to do with reality. Solar panels are etched silicon semiconductors - sound like anything you use every day? The solar panel manufacturers are far fewer and more easily tracked than microchip manufacturers - the two bad chemicals they use
Don't even bring up the "energy payback" argument, and please, at least Google before you present something as fact.
Well, again, you're not allowed to hook up willy-nilly to the grid; you have to obey the interconnection procedures and standards that require you to drop off (and either just power yourself and kill the outflow, or drop off entirely, or have a utility lockable disconnect.)
The IEEE and the UL are hardly whimsical organizations; they've provided very conservatively for lineman safety - what remains is just another bogus canard that some monopoly utilities use to keep competing generation off the grid - check out SMUD and LIPA for utilities with a different attitude, and see how much easier it is to interconnect there; it's pretty clearly more a political than technical issue.
Worse, it doesn't burn completely in the rig flares; a lot escapes through the center, and CH4 is about 16x as effective per molecule as CO2 in terms of greenhouse effects.
I should mention here just for the sake of redundancy that CH4 in a fuel cell does "burn" almost completely clean, and without NOx or SOx, because at no point in the process is anything actually being blown up or set on fire.
Approximately $2.85 / watt in bulk; $7 - $10/watt installed with power electronics, etc.
Yes, actually, they are tested with an ice launcher at NIST and other standards-testing labs; we're talking tempered architectural glass frames, generally speaking. I have seen people waste some time hitting PowerLight modules with an aluminum baseball bat to no discernible effect. The skylight-type panels mounted to the roof in a fairly nontrivial manner, using standard hardware. The shingles (From Uni-Solar) come off as often as normal shingles do;
Maintenance: wiping down the panels if they get pollen or dust covered, possibly replacing the inverter every ca. 10 years.
Replacement: you should have a licensed installer do it, and again, replacement costs as above, though overall system costs have been declining by about 5% compounding annually for quite a while, and that may be accelerating shortly.
The larger wind farms are sort of quietly making huge strides in the market...I think the world wind turbine industry's growth rate has been over 25% for quite a few years now. - in certain places, e.g. Texas, it's cheaper than natural gas generation. And they still have strong economies of scale favoring large farms.
There are a couple of things that contribute to this perception: Darrieus (eggbeater) wind turbines never worked out like anyone hoped, and the initial incarnations of the Altamont wind farms had some cost overruns and bird-kill issues. Also, they're beginning to encounter NIMBYs for the offshore farms.
Nevertheless, the industry last year made a few billion dollars for Denmark, Germany, and GE, and seems set to rack up another decade or so of major growth..thank God.
Jamming it would be highly traceable, (and would take quite a bit of power,) and the network protection equipment would probably kick you off before you did too much damage.
Grid-connection equipment (see SMA Americas or Xantrex for some manufacturers) takes either the unsynchronized AC (as from wind turbines) or DC (fuel cells, solar panels,) reads the sine wave off the grid, and supplies it back synchronously. It's apparently not a terribly difficult piece of electrical engineering - keep in mind some of the clocks in your home probably operate by counting the cycles in your AC power.
Safety procedures dictate that power company repair personnel all operate on the "the gun is always loaded" theory and ground the grid out on either side of their work...additioanlly, IEEE (929, and 1547 soon to arrive) and UL (er...742, I believe,) standards for interconnection of small generators require that they "anti-island" themselves to prevent these effects - within several milliseconds of a dropoff (or some other anomalies.)
Prices have come down pretty substantially on the solar and small wind systems; one of the big reasons that we don't have more out there is that every single state and utility institutes their own interconnection standards and procedures - it's barbaric; like trying to run the Internet over a different networking protocol for every town. (and it drives up the cost of renewable energy power electronics by quite a bit.) Maria Cantwell (D-WA) had put up an amendment to the Energy Bill that would have cleared this up a a great deal; we'll see what happens when the Congress returns from recess and has to deal with the aftermath here.
True, no sources....this, though is different from necessarily "electrifying the ground," and is something I could see happening.
Apparently what this writer's talking about is like an EMF effect which bothers cattle and others, not so much what I'd think of as a standard like "charged ground" or shock delivery mechanism.
Sort of how they get antsy before an earthquake or big electrical storm, perhaps?
The bird thing was a strange consequence of the early Altamont Pass windfarms - they had put lattice towers under the small, fast turbines, and slapped the whole thing on a migratory raptor route. The raptors liked perching on the lattice and would drop off to hunt...smack.
Your average turbine now spins much slower (because they're much bigger) and sits on a tube tower. It seems like when the birds aren't actively perching on them, they do pretty well percieving and avoiding the blades. Though birdstrikes are down to nearly nothing (check AWEA for stats,) you still have to do a big EIS on any site to avoid migratory routes and nesting sites, etc. - to keep the strike numbers down and because they might avoid windfarms during migration, to their detriment energy-balance-wise.
Also, a megawatt turbine (ca. 3-400 homes,) doesn't really exclude a lot of land. In the US, out West, there's (anecdotally) enough otherwise unused grazing land in the Dakotas alone on high wind sites to provide our year-to-year energy growth for quite a while, once they build (and access) the transmission.)
Climatologically, 360 GW of atmospheric energy is pretty trivial, actually. (for instance, all that excess heat produced by our combustion engines is a below-roundoff-error calculation as well. But we could stand to pull some energy (aka heat) out of the atmosphere, given the rate we're increasing its retention with the CO2 blanket.
What it really comes down to, with wind and solar - how much energy can we really get out of it? More than 100 times as much as we have so far, that's for sure. So let's get on the stick about it! A good start, if you've read this far and still care, would be to go Buy some yourself!
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The existence of basic Legos is absolutely critical to the fostering of a generation capable of survival in the coming century, and I am not engaged in hyperbole here.
1. I work as a policy wonk, but have always had a technical bent; it's just enough that I will take apart the things that I own, or install my own software, or be mad when something is poorly designed. In a variety of other ways, I realize that the technologies I own did not happen to me and are not immutable. They are for me to use, they could have been made differently, and I fundamentally have control over them, to modify or reject them.
This is a worldview formed before, really, I had ever touched a piece of software; formed entirely from playing with Legos for HOURS A DAY when I was little. I would posit that the United States' technological elite, people who really look at a computer program or a bacteria or a steam engine and think "I could take that apart and do that better", played with Legos far more than the general population.
Cause and effect there are left as an exercise for the student, but the point remains that Legos are the preferred play object of the people who grow up and become our producers of technology; and if you think play is not that important to learning, attitude development, and general life outlook, you need to read some educational or vertebrate behavior research, or at least go watch some otters.
So if we grant that they're centrally important (and if you would doubt this, why are so many of you so fond of them? Why does Slashdot have a Lego icon?) then their *composition* and *direction* is centrally important. Our kids should feel that helicopters, robots, dinosaurs are made out of simple parts that can go together different ways, that to find out how those parts go together you have to *try things out* and *maybe screw up*, and that you, at six years old, can make something new and cool that no one has seen before and be proud of it.
The other option is just to have another pre-molded piece of plastic that works, for sure, first time. You're not sure why, someone else designed it, that's where technology comes from, I didn't have anything to do with putting it together because I can't do something like that, *fast forward ten years* what? Digital Rights Management? Biometric scanning in shopping malls? OK, I'm no engineer. These things happen, you can't change them. Is this a pill that I should take? If you say so, doctor, no point looking at it, machines are something other people make and understand and then I consume them as is, especially if they're trendy. *shudder.*
I've had trouble for years articulating why it bothered me so much that Lego was moving towards more specialized pieces and more licensed properties; they were teaching passivity and damaging the kind of play that gave me what intelligence I think I have today.
2. The tiny yellow Lego people of my youth existed in a shiny, functioning, Utopian republic, where there was no violence, no conflict, and the guy who drove the tow truck one day could - would - pilot the innovate Space Shuttle / submarine / dinosaur hybrid the next.
Maybe not a viable image of the world for the long term, but a good first impression, and one that fixed in your head an early impression that what you did with technology was design better police boats and monorails and ice cream shops and in general make a better place in which to live your lives, rather than, say, Spam programs or chemical weapons. These are all habits of mind that I want my kinds to get early, far earlier than they grasp that they must follow the hot toy or trend of the moment.
I had not realized that this was upsetting me until it appears to be moving towards a solution. Halleleujah.
cc: Lego North America.
It would seem to me that this is yet another demonstration of poor management structure on the part of the recording industry; it seems that the same individual labels are using this data to direct thier marketing efforts...
...and screwing it up by providing thousands and thousands of copies of convincing fakes to the major file-sharing networks. Do they have a means of automatically filtering these out? If so, does Big Champagne have a business arrangement with the fake-file hosts?
If this last is the case, glad to see that someone's come up with a truly devious P2P business model. If not, their data is borderline worthless, but for all their love of "empricial" data, marketeers tend to have a very vague grasp of statistical validity in any case...
Sorry...timed out my preview.
Actual link here (PDF.)
"I read somewhere". Great.
Short answer is ca. 4-5 years' energy payback, out of a 20 year (warranteed) panel lifetime. Probably closer to 3 years with the newer low-energy silicon growth methods.
Think about it. Bulk retail solar module purchase - no tax credits - $275 / 100 watts. 100 watts * 20 years * 365 days * 6 hours / day = 4,380,000 Wh production. Figure $.06 / kWh sweetheart electricity rate for manufacturers, and that's $263 of electricity. You'd have to get your materials and labor essentially for free.
This statistic was actually true ca. I think 1979. Solar panels are a silicon-based semiconductor technology - would you use a 1979 measurement for MHz / dollar in microprocessors?
As for that ethanol study you also "read somewhere," it was by David Pimentel, a systematic entomologist (bug identifier) by training. I've read through it first-hand, (a practice you should try sometime,) and it plays pretty fast and loose with the numbers. As an energy economist, he's an excellent entomologist.
Documented convnetional solar photovoltaic prices (ca. 15% efficiency, residential / commercial rooftop type cell, price per Watt capacity):
1976: $100.00
1981: $9.83
1985: $8.74
1992: $4.74
2000: $2.70
2003: $2.50 (ish. This last one approximate.)
If it gets down to about $1.10, your total system cost with racks, inverters, etc. will be ca. $3.00 /Watt for a grid-tie system. Your payback (money, on a home-equity loan) would be well inside 10 years, your energy payback within 3. Most analysts and manufacturers are calling this point about 2010 - 2012 at current industry growth rates.
The cost decline there is mostly associated with major increases in manufacturing scale (25%+ annual growth rates over the last 10 years.)
At the end of the day, you don't need to do anything that exotic to make solar power economically feasible. Bring the US R&D budget up above $100M, (currently ca. $85M,) keep the market increase rate where it is, and we'll get there.
Meanwhile, the increase in panel efficiency associated with leaving the atmosphere does not make up for the enormous cost of heaving something into space. And while I'll defend the energy payback period of photovoltaics, I will no longer do so once you have either launched them atop a gigantic chemical rocket or manufactured them in a factory on the (freaking) moon.
Yes it has - that statistic dates from ca. 1974, when solar cells were essentially hand-assembled from purpose-grown silicon crystals. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory did a study on this a few years back, estimating ca. 3 years' energy payback from hugely conservative assumptions - Here, in PDF form. However, current efficiencies are slightly better than they were at the time, and silicon production has improved as well...(check shellsolar for their latest.) Silicon being your major material and energy cost here, in most cases...the rest is just frames, glass, and wires. If, as it appears, Uni-Solar/ECD has finally got their production line unscrewed, they'll ahve even better efficiencies,a s they use a thin-film process.
At the end of the day, cars don't blow up, Starsky and Hutch notwithstanding. Think about the times you've rubbernecked or read the paper; how many times have you seen a car get really badly mastered, medevac, extraction, etc. Now compare that to how many times you've seen one of those things actually blow up, movie style. The Ford Crown Vic and some of those side-saddle-tank - pickups being the exception.
I'm pretty confident that they'll be able to generate a non-exploding hydrogen tank for motor use, especially since hydrogen dissipates so quickly.
You're doing an excellent job of profiling the political thinking of ca. .01 of 1% of the green movement (and thereby missing the very salient and frankly critical points being advanced by the rest.)
Like any other political movement, there are idiots and crazies among the environmentalists. They get lots of press because they tend to generate lots of "man bites dog" type news stories. The TV cameras will definitely show up when Greenpeace rides a Zodiac in front of an exploding harpoon; probably not so much when you buy a Civic hybrid. However, treating these stories as representative of the movement as a whole is simplistic; and an uncritical way to swallow the news you recieve.
I work in Washington every day, and I talk to more than my fair share of Right and far Right politicians; I have to say that environmentalism is not a very Leftist thing any more so much as it is a realistic evaluation of what we need to do to keep ourselves alive and the world the way we enjoy it.
Good thinking, but you didn't go far enough. Yes, you lose some of the energy converting to and from hydrogen - so why bother? Because batteries suck so hard.
I'm about as lefty-Green as you can be while still maintaining some logical coherency, and I'm willing to concede that electric cars don't work...the reason being that the only cost-effective storage for vehicles are lead-acid batteries, which are very heavy and very costly. So they render the car unworkable and hugely expensive. Hydrogen fuel cells look like they'll be considerably less heavy and expensive for the same performance, which more than compensates for lower thermodynamic efficiencies.At the end of the day, pure thermodynamic efficiency generally turns out to be a useful tool for estimating the viability of an energy system - but completely inadequate in and of itself. To be a really effective engineer, you can't delude yourself into thinking that it all comes down to one mathematical variable, and that those considering other factors are necessarily fuzzy-headed or missing the point.
66greenwood.com - outside of Kingman, Arizona.
I've seen it done in Japan, but never the US - great timing as far as this article goes. 487 home housing development, not connected to the grid...
Well, if we're being totally honest, by "someone", I mean me. We have a sample in the office, and it's a question I'd seen asked many times before, and I had an intramural softball game that evening...
Idle hands are science's workshop. Not a real guitar-smasing whack, but pretty dedicated; the Styrofoam backing on the PowerGuard probably didn't hurt, either. = )
Well, that's all the truth, though there are partial counterarguments, viz:
Since 90%+ of failures originate in the grid, and a very large number of these (after weather) are grid-strain-related, putting in some distributed generation (especially solar, since it follows peak relatively well,) should let you destress your work crews overall (and reduce the number of grid failures in the first place.)
As for the idiots just backwiring themselves into the grid, well, they are in fact idiots in large part. If, however, your average utility was a little less disingenuous with their interconnection procedures (and not all are, though quite a few...) you'd see fewer of them.
I'd be interested to hear, for instance, how many of the guerilla solar crowd had tried to go the blessed route first....
Grrr...the other persistent canard. = ) As of 1999, it was down to something like 4 years, in an exceedingly conservative and comprehensive calculation:
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy99osti/24619.pdf
And the panels themselves are usually output-waranteed out past 20 years (30 years being a safe bet lifetime for most.) Though I suspect that since we're seeing steadily more automation in the newer plants (and less silicon per watt, and better per-square-meter efficiencies, that this has even gotten better recently.
Photon International goes over these issues in some detail...
I'm sorry, but that's just not the way energy works in this country. We have a subsidized energy system - you don't even have to get loosey-goosey with what percentage of Navy spending goes to protect oil reserves, etc...
The nuclear power industry does not have to purchase commercial insurance, nor provide their own security at their plants - both are picked up by the American people to the tune of billions of dollars per year. Natural gas drillers enjoy tax credits that would triple or quadruple the renewable energy industry (fed in slowly enough.) Coal power plants are essentially inarguably the major force behind a large number of mercury-related birth defects and fisheries damage, as well as strongly implicated in the recent skyrocketing asthma numbers - the government picks up the tab.
remote sensing for oil and gas reserves, expedited (and deeply subsidized) access to public lands for drilling, free shipping insurance, government-subsidized health claim fund for the black-lunged coal miners,
If you are going to rear back and self-satisfiedly claim that this is the position renewable energy advocates are taking, go on over to thomas.loc.gov and grab HR6, S14, and HR6 (senate) from the 108th Congress. Then run the numbers. Until then, I'm afraid you're being patronizing from a deeply uninformed position.
Oh, and the new Prius hybrid? 0-60 in 10 seconds. Not bad for a soccermommobile.
Sorry, dropped out that "the two bad chemicals they use are etchers and cleaners for the silicon, and there's a strong economic and regulatory incentive to keep careful track of those."
Compared with the amounts of NOx and SOx your car puts out, which are measured in tons, it's trivial. I've *been* locked in a solar panel factory; I did much better than I would have locked in a garage with a running car for an equivalent length of time.
Afraid that's just not the case - in fact, it has essentially nothing to do with reality. Solar panels are etched silicon semiconductors - sound like anything you use every day? The solar panel manufacturers are far fewer and more easily tracked than microchip manufacturers - the two bad chemicals they use
Don't even bring up the "energy payback" argument, and please, at least Google before you present something as fact.
Well, again, you're not allowed to hook up willy-nilly to the grid; you have to obey the interconnection procedures and standards that require you to drop off (and either just power yourself and kill the outflow, or drop off entirely, or have a utility lockable disconnect.)
The IEEE and the UL are hardly whimsical organizations; they've provided very conservatively for lineman safety - what remains is just another bogus canard that some monopoly utilities use to keep competing generation off the grid - check out SMUD and LIPA for utilities with a different attitude, and see how much easier it is to interconnect there; it's pretty clearly more a political than technical issue.
Worse, it doesn't burn completely in the rig flares; a lot escapes through the center, and CH4 is about 16x as effective per molecule as CO2 in terms of greenhouse effects.
I should mention here just for the sake of redundancy that CH4 in a fuel cell does "burn" almost completely clean, and without NOx or SOx, because at no point in the process is anything actually being blown up or set on fire.
Right, it disperses very quickly, (near-sublimating) and tends to burn rather than exploding.
Troublesomely, it does burn invisibly if hot and pure enough, which can be a a safety hazard.
Approximately $2.85 / watt in bulk; $7 - $10 /watt installed with power electronics, etc.
Yes, actually, they are tested with an ice launcher at NIST and other standards-testing labs; we're talking tempered architectural glass frames, generally speaking. I have seen people waste some time hitting PowerLight modules with an aluminum baseball bat to no discernible effect. The skylight-type panels mounted to the roof in a fairly nontrivial manner, using standard hardware. The shingles (From Uni-Solar) come off as often as normal shingles do;
Maintenance: wiping down the panels if they get pollen or dust covered, possibly replacing the inverter every ca. 10 years.
Replacement: you should have a licensed installer do it, and again, replacement costs as above, though overall system costs have been declining by about 5% compounding annually for quite a while, and that may be accelerating shortly.
The larger wind farms are sort of quietly making huge strides in the market...I think the world wind turbine industry's growth rate has been over 25% for quite a few years now. - in certain places, e.g. Texas, it's cheaper than natural gas generation. And they still have strong economies of scale favoring large farms.
There are a couple of things that contribute to this perception: Darrieus (eggbeater) wind turbines never worked out like anyone hoped, and the initial incarnations of the Altamont wind farms had some cost overruns and bird-kill issues. Also, they're beginning to encounter NIMBYs for the offshore farms.
Nevertheless, the industry last year made a few billion dollars for Denmark, Germany, and GE, and seems set to rack up another decade or so of major growth..thank God.
Jamming it would be highly traceable, (and would take quite a bit of power,) and the network protection equipment would probably kick you off before you did too much damage.
Grid-connection equipment (see SMA Americas or Xantrex for some manufacturers) takes either the unsynchronized AC (as from wind turbines) or DC (fuel cells, solar panels,) reads the sine wave off the grid, and supplies it back synchronously. It's apparently not a terribly difficult piece of electrical engineering - keep in mind some of the clocks in your home probably operate by counting the cycles in your AC power.
Safety procedures dictate that power company repair personnel all operate on the "the gun is always loaded" theory and ground the grid out on either side of their work...additioanlly, IEEE (929, and 1547 soon to arrive) and UL (er...742, I believe,) standards for interconnection of small generators require that they "anti-island" themselves to prevent these effects - within several milliseconds of a dropoff (or some other anomalies.) Prices have come down pretty substantially on the solar and small wind systems; one of the big reasons that we don't have more out there is that every single state and utility institutes their own interconnection standards and procedures - it's barbaric; like trying to run the Internet over a different networking protocol for every town. (and it drives up the cost of renewable energy power electronics by quite a bit.) Maria Cantwell (D-WA) had put up an amendment to the Energy Bill that would have cleared this up a a great deal; we'll see what happens when the Congress returns from recess and has to deal with the aftermath here.
True, no sources....this, though is different from necessarily "electrifying the ground," and is something I could see happening. Apparently what this writer's talking about is like an EMF effect which bothers cattle and others, not so much what I'd think of as a standard like "charged ground" or shock delivery mechanism. Sort of how they get antsy before an earthquake or big electrical storm, perhaps?
The bird thing was a strange consequence of the early Altamont Pass windfarms - they had put lattice towers under the small, fast turbines, and slapped the whole thing on a migratory raptor route. The raptors liked perching on the lattice and would drop off to hunt...smack.
Your average turbine now spins much slower (because they're much bigger) and sits on a tube tower. It seems like when the birds aren't actively perching on them, they do pretty well percieving and avoiding the blades. Though birdstrikes are down to nearly nothing (check AWEA for stats,) you still have to do a big EIS on any site to avoid migratory routes and nesting sites, etc. - to keep the strike numbers down and because they might avoid windfarms during migration, to their detriment energy-balance-wise.
Also, a megawatt turbine (ca. 3-400 homes,) doesn't really exclude a lot of land. In the US, out West, there's (anecdotally) enough otherwise unused grazing land in the Dakotas alone on high wind sites to provide our year-to-year energy growth for quite a while, once they build (and access) the transmission.)
Climatologically, 360 GW of atmospheric energy is pretty trivial, actually. (for instance, all that excess heat produced by our combustion engines is a below-roundoff-error calculation as well. But we could stand to pull some energy (aka heat) out of the atmosphere, given the rate we're increasing its retention with the CO2 blanket.
What it really comes down to, with wind and solar - how much energy can we really get out of it? More than 100 times as much as we have so far, that's for sure. So let's get on the stick about it! A good start, if you've read this far and still care, would be to go Buy some yourself!