EEStor has been making public claims for at least three years, possibly longer (I know I read the patent app more than two-and-a-half years ago).
If it's real, it's definitely a breakthrough -- a relatively thin insulator layer that withstands 3500 volts.
TTBOMK, they have yet to demonstrate a working device in public.
Depending on how you want to determine the year to which it should be assigned,
the breakthrough was either a few years back,
or has yet to occur.
Echoing others, but with Adblock-Plus and a reasonable blacklist, it is surprising how often I see a comment somewhere about "annoying ads" and ask myself "They have ads on this site?"
The underlying battle between the marketers' ability to push content regardless of the readers' wishes and the readers' ability to selectively filter content is probably as socially important as any of the technologies shown in the article.
Second the importance of a well-defined policy. In a prior job, one of my responsibilities was evaluation of technology, much of it revealed under non-disclosure terms. We were sued from time to time, accused of leaking proprietary information. I was never called as a witness, but was run through practice sessions by the company legal staff. The legal defense was clearly much stronger when the attorneys could show that there was a clear company policy, and I could swear that I (a) was aware of it and (b) had followed it scrupulously.
That said, the policy would have been unworkable in the case of a specification that required, say, hundreds of people to access it in order to prepare a response.
The typical suburban household consumes about 30 kWh per day, and could easily be reduced to 25 with more efficient devices. Call it two days worth. It would be interesting to price out a system that keeps your house running for two days if the commercial power goes out, or if you live in a state with time-of-day pricing, to time-shift your consumption of grid electricity into the cheap hours.
Especially in the upper grades, for good reason. A majority of the students will be going straight into the working world. Which is, in fact, heavily Microsoft. When interviewers ask about computer skills, they want to hear Windows desktop and MS Office.
Even living in a dense area doesn't matter if it's in a building where the landlord owns the wiring, and can deny access to the local network providers. This is quite common under US regulation, much less so in other countries. All the fiber in the world could terminate at the phone closet in the basement, but if the landlord won't give up space in the risers to extend it to individual apartments, tough luck.
Agree with everything you say here. Good design and conservation (in the efficiency sense) certainly buy the most bank for the buck today. And unless you're a survivalist of one flavor or another, using the grid as "storage" for small-scale local generation is also the right thing.
If you are going to do storage, electrolyzing water to get hydrogen and then oxidizing the hydrogen to recover the electricity seems like an inefficient and/or expensive way to go. I haven't run any numbers, but intuitively I would expect using the "excess" power to compress air, and a pressure drop in a turbine to drive a generator to recover the electricity would be as efficient as a hydrogen-powered ICE, and probably cheaper.
If the overall efficiency is 20% and the overall efficiency of a battery is 80% (not atypical), you need a much larger solar array in order to collect and store the same number of kWh from the same solar flux. That is, you need to generate 10 kWh in order to save eight with the battery, but must generate 40 kWh in order to save eight in the form of hydrogen. That's an enormous difference in the capital investment in PV panels.
It may also make a difference between feasible or not in terms of roof real estate. I live near Denver, with about 6.5 kWh of average daily solar insolence per square meter. If I want to store 12 kWh per day, I would need to dedicate about 11.5 square meters of PV panel for that purpose (assume 20% efficiency in the panel and 80% efficiency in the battery charge/discharge cycle). If the charge/discharge cycle for hydrogen is only 20%, that jumps to about 46.0 square meters of PV panel, and I don't have that much space available.
To get through an 8 h dark period, you need 40 kWhr...
According to the US Energy Information Agency, the typical suburban household consumes about 30 kWh per day, 900 kWh per month. The peak hour during the month (that is, the single hour during which the household consumes the most) will come in at about 12 kWh. During an eight hour dark period, consumption is more likely to be 8-12 kWh.
That said, I agree with you that cracking water for hydrogen to be stored and reformed later (in an expensive fuel cell? in a horribly inefficient internal combustion engine?) will have poor overall efficiency.
Like this, for example?
Nano structures have interesting and useful properties; some of those are likely to interact in various ways with biological "nano" structures.
I never got a good explanation of why black on white is good (think original Apple Mac), vs. white on black is bad (original IBM CGA).
One of the reasons was that in many cases, people were working with paper and the computer screen simultaneously. Jumping visually back and forth from black-on-white to white-on-black is a recognized significant source of eye strain.
To me that sounds a lot like what antitrust is designed to thwart.
Sorry, antitrust is designed to thwart that kind of tying only if one has a dominant market position, and is using the tying to extend that dominance into a different market. With 5% or so market share, Apple is small enough to be free to do what they like in the way of bundling and tying.
kpppppffffffffft. Like running solar power through the electric grid into batteries isn't triply inefficient itself? Guess again.
Well-to-wheel studies conducted for various fuels all suggest that the all-electric approach has at least a 2:1 advantage. The end-to-end efficiency comparison is dominated by the 20% average thermal efficiency of deployed internal combustion engines versus the 40% average thermal efficiency for electricity generation in the US. Energy losses due to grid resistance and battery charge/discharge efficiency are, in practice, quite close to the energy losses that occur in refining and transport of petroleum products.
Back to the main topic: I'd certainly be willing to bet a beer that, in the long run, conversion of biomass to electricity (by gas pyrolysis and solid carbon fuel cells, say) for use in an electric vehicle will enjoy at least the same 2:1 advantage over conversion of the biomass to ethanol or a derivative, measured by the number of miles vehicles of similar cargo capacity can be driven per ton of biomass input.
More compelling to me is the argument that the electric vehicle can "burn" electricity from any source: PV panel, wind turbine, nuclear reactor, etc.
As someone who initially "picked up" programming, I would only comment that I also developed horrible stylistic habits that took years to break. Most of that mess would have been avoided if someone with the appropriate knowledge (eg, a prof or reasonable grad student) had been commenting on my initial efforts.
That charging cable's in the neigborhood of a foot in diameter! OR the voltage must be much, much higher.
If you look up the patent, the EEStor capacitor charges at 3500 volts.
500 kWh in 9 minutes at 3500 volts is still almost a thousand amps.
Don't know how thick the cable is, but I'm not real eager to be standing anywhere near that.
For the grandparent comment:
the figure that is usually tossed around for "mileage" for an electric car
is somewhere between 200 and 250 watt-hours per mile.
The Tesla roadster claims to be doing much better than that—
about 110 watt-hours/mile&mdash
but that's a two-seater with minimal cargo capacity.
The EEStor patent describes a device storing 52kWh;
at 110 watt-hours/mile that's good for 470 miles;
under that assumption,
you'd only need about 100 amps at 3500 volts to charge in nine minutes,
but I'm still not sure I want to be standing next to it.
Even a rudimentary digital STB needs features for which
a simple OS is probably the easiest solution.
For example,
a hardware abstraction layer, to allow a single version of the application software
to run on the dozen different hardware variants of the STB design
that the cable company will have deployed.
A multitasking executive because the box will run
multiple processes:
one for the UI,
one that monitors data downloads (eg, data for the program guide),
one that receives and stores new versions of the UI software,
etc.
A full-blown OS would be overkill, but
a simple one makes it much easier for the application developers.
MS typically gets involved when
Verizon and the other subscription TV companies
start looking for the STB to provide a much more sophisticated application platform.
The new services will require a much greater range of capabilities:
a TCP/IP stack,
a real file system,
much more sophisticated graphics capabilities,
memory protection.
The last of those is underappreciated, but
it's important that the weather application downloaded from the local TV station and
the stock ticker app downloaded from the local bank
don't mess up each other, or
overwrite the compressed database that contains the program guide information.
I personally wouldn't choose MS to provide the OS for my STB;
not least because they've been trying to do that job
for different companies for several years and
have a horrible track record.
Nor would I choose to allow 3rd-party apps written in native code into the box;
security is easier to address in interpreted languages.
When I worked in the industry,
I argued that we would be better off paying for a faster processor and more memory
so we could have a standardized Java environment
for the 3rd-party apps;
I didn't win the argument.
Yeah, but could those run other operating systems? Or run on relatively generic hardware for that matter?
Perhaps it would be better to say that the "relatively generic" hardware has caught up to the point where it allows effective virtualization?
At least in the case of IBM's mainframes, they definitely ran other operating systems.
In the early 1980s,
Bell Labs ran multiple (sometimes >20 if I remember correctly) instances of UNIX in addition to the regular OS on the big mainframes.
They were investigating more cost effective ways to run large UNIX development projects --
sometimes over 1,000 programmers.
Networks of minis had reached the point of diminishing returns --
adding another machine to the network, and making its file system available on all the other machines, actually reduced the total processing power available.
IIRC, the virtualization experiments also included running instances dedicated to
services like e-mail.
Small computers and networking software got better faster than the mainframes and eventually won out.
Nice to see this machine on the list.
I carried one around the country for about 18 months.
Wrote trip reports, meeting notes, etc.
Tracked expenses.
Had BASIC programs that downloaded error logs from a bunch of custom test equipment over the serial link.
And it did have one of the nicer keyboards I've ever used.
Did you know felons can't vote?
==========
It varies state to state; some states you can vote as soon as you are released from prison and re-register. Others, you can't vote until you are off supervised release. Others, it's a permanent lifetime ban.
I always found the differences to be amusing.
Convicted felon in state A, lifetime loss of voting.
Until you move ten miles to state B, all voting rights restored.
Only three states -- Florida, Virginia, and Kentucky -- have a lifetime ban.
In Florida, this means that just about 25% of the adult male black population is not eligible to vote.
It is pretty easy to shield using water, since that's how spent fuel is stored after discharge from commercial plants until it's cool enough to move to dry storage (temperature cool, not radiation).
A surprising amount of the shorter-lived fission products also decay during the time in the cooling pool.
Spent fuel storage should really be considered as two different problems: one of dealing with the short-lived highly radioactive elements, and another of dealing with long-lived isotopes that are much less radioactive.
Since we don't do reprocessing in the US, we have to have one solution that can cope with both.
If you were lifted out from the gravity well of our solar system, I bet you can hit the star with a rock.
Maybe.
Depends on the relative velocity with respect to our solar system,
which is typically on the order of 10 kilometers per second or so.
If that velocity is away from us,
you're going to need a heck of an arm:^)
Why does every analysis of electric vs ICE efficiency include an exhaustive analysis of the "well-to-wheel" cycle for electric, but no such analysis for gasoline?
Hey, I'm on your side.
Neither of my calculations was well-to-wheel;
the electric started at the powerplant, where whatever is burned, and the gasoline started at the pump.
This presentation from one of the national labs puts the well-to-pump efficiency for gasoline at 80%, diesel at 82%.
Similar estimates for natural gas put well-to-powerplant at about 90%
(dropping to 80% for imported LNG).
Coal also appears to come in at about 90%.
So assume 80% and 90% for getting fuel to the pump and the powerplant respectively
and get 16% and 31% for end-to-end numbers.
The dominant factors are still
the 20% efficient ICE versus
the 45% efficient powerplant.
I regard conversion of our personal transportation systems to electricity as
inevitable in the long term.
However, it's interesting to try to get a handle on the scale of electricity that
will be required.
The following assumes that we're not shifting to mass transit, which would have a large effect on the energy used for transporation.
Roughly speaking,
electricity generation in the US is 50% coal, 20% nuclear, 20% natural gas, and 10% other (mostly hydro).
Efficiencies for conversion from BTUs to kWh for those are
on the order of 33%, 30%, 60% and 100%.
We'll be generous about the hydro, since it's not consuming any fuel, and yes, nuclear is really inefficient when measured as BTUs to kWh.
All of that gives us an average generating efficiency of about 45%.
Typical transmission loss over the grid is about 7%.
Call the charging cycle 90% efficient, there's a voltage change and an AC/DC conversion involved.
Assume the electric drive train is 90% efficient.
Multiply that out and the overall efficiency from fuel to useful power delivered is just about 34%.
That's much better than the ICE used in regular cars, which are about 20% efficient in converting BTUs into power delivered to the wheels.
That advantage would be somewhat reduced if you consider that sometimes energy has to be used to provide heating and cooling of the passenger cabin, and that has less impact on the ICE-powered vehicle than it does on an electric (hey, heat's free in the ICE case).
If we assume that all of our transportation energy comes from electricity
rather than from petroleum,
use 34% and 20% as the end-to-end efficiencies of the two processes,
and use the 2004 figures of 27.7 quadrillion BTUs (quads) used for transportation and 38.8 quads for electricity, then we would need to add the equivalent of about 42% of our current generating capacity
in order to handle transportation.
That's certainly possible over time, but it is a large undertaking.
And coal-fired electricity for cars beats the hell out of coal-to-liquids for cars, where you have a process that's perhaps 75% efficient (and may be worse than that) providing fuel for a 20% efficient ICE.
When I was a lad, I lived in Iowa and was allergic to corn pollen (NOT a good combination).
During part of the year, it seemed like I lived on antihistamines.
One of the useful side effects was that when bitten by mosquitos,
I got a small bump that didn't get red and was gone in 20 minutes or less.
When not taking the antihistamines,
I got the big red welts like all the other kids.
Anecdotal and second-hand only, so who knows how close to the actual truth...
I was working at a major cable company. MS had been pressing furiously to get the company to commit to MS software for the next-generation set-top box. My boss was at a meeting where Bill showed up in person to help apply pressure. His message could be summarized as "You cable guys are stupid, shut up and trust us." When it was pointed out that none of the software deliveries to that point had included even half of the features that were supposed to be there, and that the most recent version had failed to boot in our lab, Bill's response was... "You cable guys are stupid, shut up and trust us." Doesn't make him evil, but does make him arrogant and apparently completely out of touch with what was happening to a major product initiative inside his company.
Slashdot Mirror
EEStor has been making public claims for at least three years, possibly longer (I know I read the patent app more than two-and-a-half years ago). If it's real, it's definitely a breakthrough -- a relatively thin insulator layer that withstands 3500 volts. TTBOMK, they have yet to demonstrate a working device in public. Depending on how you want to determine the year to which it should be assigned, the breakthrough was either a few years back, or has yet to occur.
Echoing others, but with Adblock-Plus and a reasonable blacklist, it is surprising how often I see a comment somewhere about "annoying ads" and ask myself "They have ads on this site?" The underlying battle between the marketers' ability to push content regardless of the readers' wishes and the readers' ability to selectively filter content is probably as socially important as any of the technologies shown in the article.
That said, the policy would have been unworkable in the case of a specification that required, say, hundreds of people to access it in order to prepare a response.
The typical suburban household consumes about 30 kWh per day, and could easily be reduced to 25 with more efficient devices. Call it two days worth. It would be interesting to price out a system that keeps your house running for two days if the commercial power goes out, or if you live in a state with time-of-day pricing, to time-shift your consumption of grid electricity into the cheap hours.
Especially in the upper grades, for good reason. A majority of the students will be going straight into the working world. Which is, in fact, heavily Microsoft. When interviewers ask about computer skills, they want to hear Windows desktop and MS Office.
Even living in a dense area doesn't matter if it's in a building where the landlord owns the wiring, and can deny access to the local network providers. This is quite common under US regulation, much less so in other countries. All the fiber in the world could terminate at the phone closet in the basement, but if the landlord won't give up space in the risers to extend it to individual apartments, tough luck.
If you are going to do storage, electrolyzing water to get hydrogen and then oxidizing the hydrogen to recover the electricity seems like an inefficient and/or expensive way to go. I haven't run any numbers, but intuitively I would expect using the "excess" power to compress air, and a pressure drop in a turbine to drive a generator to recover the electricity would be as efficient as a hydrogen-powered ICE, and probably cheaper.
If the overall efficiency is 20% and the overall efficiency of a battery is 80% (not atypical), you need a much larger solar array in order to collect and store the same number of kWh from the same solar flux. That is, you need to generate 10 kWh in order to save eight with the battery, but must generate 40 kWh in order to save eight in the form of hydrogen. That's an enormous difference in the capital investment in PV panels. It may also make a difference between feasible or not in terms of roof real estate. I live near Denver, with about 6.5 kWh of average daily solar insolence per square meter. If I want to store 12 kWh per day, I would need to dedicate about 11.5 square meters of PV panel for that purpose (assume 20% efficiency in the panel and 80% efficiency in the battery charge/discharge cycle). If the charge/discharge cycle for hydrogen is only 20%, that jumps to about 46.0 square meters of PV panel, and I don't have that much space available.
According to the US Energy Information Agency, the typical suburban household consumes about 30 kWh per day, 900 kWh per month. The peak hour during the month (that is, the single hour during which the household consumes the most) will come in at about 12 kWh. During an eight hour dark period, consumption is more likely to be 8-12 kWh.
That said, I agree with you that cracking water for hydrogen to be stored and reformed later (in an expensive fuel cell? in a horribly inefficient internal combustion engine?) will have poor overall efficiency.
Like this, for example? Nano structures have interesting and useful properties; some of those are likely to interact in various ways with biological "nano" structures.
One of the reasons was that in many cases, people were working with paper and the computer screen simultaneously. Jumping visually back and forth from black-on-white to white-on-black is a recognized significant source of eye strain.
Sorry, antitrust is designed to thwart that kind of tying only if one has a dominant market position, and is using the tying to extend that dominance into a different market. With 5% or so market share, Apple is small enough to be free to do what they like in the way of bundling and tying.
As someone who initially "picked up" programming, I would only comment that I also developed horrible stylistic habits that took years to break. Most of that mess would have been avoided if someone with the appropriate knowledge (eg, a prof or reasonable grad student) had been commenting on my initial efforts.
If you look up the patent, the EEStor capacitor charges at 3500 volts. 500 kWh in 9 minutes at 3500 volts is still almost a thousand amps. Don't know how thick the cable is, but I'm not real eager to be standing anywhere near that.
For the grandparent comment: the figure that is usually tossed around for "mileage" for an electric car is somewhere between 200 and 250 watt-hours per mile. The Tesla roadster claims to be doing much better than that— about 110 watt-hours/mile&mdash but that's a two-seater with minimal cargo capacity. The EEStor patent describes a device storing 52kWh; at 110 watt-hours/mile that's good for 470 miles; under that assumption, you'd only need about 100 amps at 3500 volts to charge in nine minutes, but I'm still not sure I want to be standing next to it.
Even a rudimentary digital STB needs features for which a simple OS is probably the easiest solution. For example, a hardware abstraction layer, to allow a single version of the application software to run on the dozen different hardware variants of the STB design that the cable company will have deployed. A multitasking executive because the box will run multiple processes: one for the UI, one that monitors data downloads (eg, data for the program guide), one that receives and stores new versions of the UI software, etc. A full-blown OS would be overkill, but a simple one makes it much easier for the application developers.
MS typically gets involved when Verizon and the other subscription TV companies start looking for the STB to provide a much more sophisticated application platform. The new services will require a much greater range of capabilities: a TCP/IP stack, a real file system, much more sophisticated graphics capabilities, memory protection. The last of those is underappreciated, but it's important that the weather application downloaded from the local TV station and the stock ticker app downloaded from the local bank don't mess up each other, or overwrite the compressed database that contains the program guide information.
I personally wouldn't choose MS to provide the OS for my STB; not least because they've been trying to do that job for different companies for several years and have a horrible track record. Nor would I choose to allow 3rd-party apps written in native code into the box; security is easier to address in interpreted languages. When I worked in the industry, I argued that we would be better off paying for a faster processor and more memory so we could have a standardized Java environment for the 3rd-party apps; I didn't win the argument.
Perhaps it would be better to say that the "relatively generic" hardware has caught up to the point where it allows effective virtualization? At least in the case of IBM's mainframes, they definitely ran other operating systems. In the early 1980s, Bell Labs ran multiple (sometimes >20 if I remember correctly) instances of UNIX in addition to the regular OS on the big mainframes. They were investigating more cost effective ways to run large UNIX development projects -- sometimes over 1,000 programmers. Networks of minis had reached the point of diminishing returns -- adding another machine to the network, and making its file system available on all the other machines, actually reduced the total processing power available. IIRC, the virtualization experiments also included running instances dedicated to services like e-mail. Small computers and networking software got better faster than the mainframes and eventually won out.
Nice to see this machine on the list. I carried one around the country for about 18 months. Wrote trip reports, meeting notes, etc. Tracked expenses. Had BASIC programs that downloaded error logs from a bunch of custom test equipment over the serial link. And it did have one of the nicer keyboards I've ever used.
I always found the differences to be amusing. Convicted felon in state A, lifetime loss of voting. Until you move ten miles to state B, all voting rights restored. Only three states -- Florida, Virginia, and Kentucky -- have a lifetime ban. In Florida, this means that just about 25% of the adult male black population is not eligible to vote.
A surprising amount of the shorter-lived fission products also decay during the time in the cooling pool. Spent fuel storage should really be considered as two different problems: one of dealing with the short-lived highly radioactive elements, and another of dealing with long-lived isotopes that are much less radioactive. Since we don't do reprocessing in the US, we have to have one solution that can cope with both.
Maybe. Depends on the relative velocity with respect to our solar system, which is typically on the order of 10 kilometers per second or so. If that velocity is away from us, you're going to need a heck of an arm :^)
Hey, I'm on your side. Neither of my calculations was well-to-wheel; the electric started at the powerplant, where whatever is burned, and the gasoline started at the pump. This presentation from one of the national labs puts the well-to-pump efficiency for gasoline at 80%, diesel at 82%. Similar estimates for natural gas put well-to-powerplant at about 90% (dropping to 80% for imported LNG). Coal also appears to come in at about 90%. So assume 80% and 90% for getting fuel to the pump and the powerplant respectively and get 16% and 31% for end-to-end numbers. The dominant factors are still the 20% efficient ICE versus the 45% efficient powerplant.
I regard conversion of our personal transportation systems to electricity as inevitable in the long term. However, it's interesting to try to get a handle on the scale of electricity that will be required. The following assumes that we're not shifting to mass transit, which would have a large effect on the energy used for transporation.
Roughly speaking, electricity generation in the US is 50% coal, 20% nuclear, 20% natural gas, and 10% other (mostly hydro). Efficiencies for conversion from BTUs to kWh for those are on the order of 33%, 30%, 60% and 100%. We'll be generous about the hydro, since it's not consuming any fuel, and yes, nuclear is really inefficient when measured as BTUs to kWh. All of that gives us an average generating efficiency of about 45%. Typical transmission loss over the grid is about 7%. Call the charging cycle 90% efficient, there's a voltage change and an AC/DC conversion involved. Assume the electric drive train is 90% efficient. Multiply that out and the overall efficiency from fuel to useful power delivered is just about 34%. That's much better than the ICE used in regular cars, which are about 20% efficient in converting BTUs into power delivered to the wheels. That advantage would be somewhat reduced if you consider that sometimes energy has to be used to provide heating and cooling of the passenger cabin, and that has less impact on the ICE-powered vehicle than it does on an electric (hey, heat's free in the ICE case).
If we assume that all of our transportation energy comes from electricity rather than from petroleum, use 34% and 20% as the end-to-end efficiencies of the two processes, and use the 2004 figures of 27.7 quadrillion BTUs (quads) used for transportation and 38.8 quads for electricity, then we would need to add the equivalent of about 42% of our current generating capacity in order to handle transportation. That's certainly possible over time, but it is a large undertaking.
And coal-fired electricity for cars beats the hell out of coal-to-liquids for cars, where you have a process that's perhaps 75% efficient (and may be worse than that) providing fuel for a 20% efficient ICE.
When I was a lad, I lived in Iowa and was allergic to corn pollen (NOT a good combination). During part of the year, it seemed like I lived on antihistamines. One of the useful side effects was that when bitten by mosquitos, I got a small bump that didn't get red and was gone in 20 minutes or less. When not taking the antihistamines, I got the big red welts like all the other kids.
Anecdotal and second-hand only, so who knows how close to the actual truth...
I was working at a major cable company. MS had been pressing furiously to get the company to commit to MS software for the next-generation set-top box. My boss was at a meeting where Bill showed up in person to help apply pressure. His message could be summarized as "You cable guys are stupid, shut up and trust us." When it was pointed out that none of the software deliveries to that point had included even half of the features that were supposed to be there, and that the most recent version had failed to boot in our lab, Bill's response was... "You cable guys are stupid, shut up and trust us." Doesn't make him evil, but does make him arrogant and apparently completely out of touch with what was happening to a major product initiative inside his company.