This is the reason why we have to start now, long before the wells run dry. We are all too addicted/dependant on personal transport now to switch over to public transport totally (myself included), and its gonna take time to replace all those cars.
The point is its all feasable - Ive mentioned the wind power bit(USA) before - costs down to $0.03/kw/hr & falling - just turn it into Hydrogen, or power batteries direct if cheap/light enough. Its actually not gonna be that hard, just requires the will. Increasing taxes on petrol helps, but is not enough in itself. Actually I think costs could come right down as technologies improve (like PC's)- our kids could all be driving powerful SUVs running on cheap green electric/hydrogen, laughing at their dads who fought wars over oil..
Oh, sure, I am not defending the Soviet system - which is why, say, the X-Prize is a better model for getting C.A.T.S. than the current beurocratic NASA strategy. Let entrepreneurs do the work of making a "747" for space..
The "space pen" may not be true, but NASA has wasted money on plenty of other stuff - for instance $20+ million on a "space toilet", when cheaper designs were available..
"We spent millions of dollars developing the Space Pen program. Know what the Russians did? They used a pencil."
Its almost too neat not to be true, and in a way it is! Ok, in fact it was an independant company that spent $1 million on developing a "space" pen, and not NASA themselves, but in the end the US did spend the money, whereas the Russians were happy with the low-tech solution, although of course they took advantage of the high-tech solution once the money was spent.
The above Russian/US comparison probably holds up better today than the 60's - currently the US is spending $3 billion/year on the (white elephant) Shuttle, whereas the Russians are keeping the ISS running at under $100 million a mission.
Below is a related extract from a piece posted on www.space.com, by Robert Zubrin - an advocate of reform in the US space program - interesting reading...
In the recent Columbia hearings, numerous members of congress continually decried the fact that the US space program is "stuck in Low Earth Orbit." This is certainly a serious problem. If it is to be addressed adequately, however, America's political leadership needs to reexamine NASA's fundamental mode of operation.
Over the course of its history, NASA has employed two distinct modes of operation. The first, prevailed during the period from 1961-1973, and may therefore be called the Apollo Mode. The second, prevailing since 1974, may usefully be called the Shuttle Era Mode, or Shuttle Mode, for short.
In the Apollo Mode, business is conducted as follows. First, a destination for human spaceflight is chosen. Then a plan is developed to achieve this objective. Following this, technologies and designs are developed to implement that plan. These designs are then built, after which the mission is flown.
The Shuttle Mode operates entirely differently. In this mode, technologies and hardware elements are developed in accord with the wishes of various technical communities. These projects are then justified by arguments that they might prove useful at some time in the future when grand flight projects are initiated.
Contrasting these two approaches, we see that the Apollo Mode is destination driven, while the Shuttle Mode pretends to be technology driven, but is actually constituency driven. In the Apollo Mode, technology development is done for mission directed reasons. In the Shuttle Mode, projects are undertaken on behalf of various internal and external technical community pressure groups and then defended using rationales. In the Apollo Mode, the space agency's efforts are focused and directed. In the Shuttle Mode, NASA's efforts are random and entropic.
Imagine two couples, each planning to build their own house. The first couple decides what kind of house they want, hires an architect to design it in detail, then acquires the appropriative materials to build it. That is the Apollo Mode. The second couple polls their neighbors each month for different spare house-parts they would like to sell, and buys them all, hoping to eventually accumulate enough stuff to build a house. When their relatives inquire as to why they are accumulating so much junk, they hire an architect to compose a house design that employs all the knick-knacks they have purchased. The house is never built, but an adequate excuse is generated to justify each purchase, thereby avoiding embarrassment. That is the Shuttle Mode.
In today's dollars, NASA average budget from 1961-1973 was about $17 billion per year. This is only 10% more than NASA's current budget. To assess the comparative productivity of the Apollo Mode with the Shuttle Mode, it is therefore useful to compare NASA's accomplishments between 1961-1973 and 1990-2003, as the space agency's total expenditures over these two periods were equal.
Between 1961 and 1973, NASA flew the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, Ranger, Surveyor, and Mariner missions, and did all the development for the Pioneer, Viking, and Voyager missions as well. In addition, t
I would suppose it depends on the cost/efficiency of the cells. I would agree that todays cells, although improving, make it a fairly pricey proposition. Amorphous silicon cells are a promising development, much cheaper to make than traditional cells, but currently not so efficient. It strikes me that the sort of plants you propose involve a lot more structure, pressurised pipes, moving parts, etc - and how do the efficiency/cost figures work out? Wouldit be better to use 30%+ efficient solar cells rather than water pipes at the focus of the mirrors? Or is it just better to use banks of cells, with no moving parts, if they are at the right price?
Ok, but it is an important point, because if you take Nuclear out of the equation, you have a choice between the "green" alternatives, and fossil fuels. Fossil fuels also have "hidden" costs we are not really paying yet, and of course we can only go on using them for a short time, in the historic scale of things..
There is actually nothing wrong with "subsidising" an emergent energy technology, if in the end it can deliver cheap, renewable, relatively non-polluting power. Wind power is getting to the stage where it can stand alone, here in the UK the next generation of stations can generate power at $0.03/kw/hr,and that is set to come down. Solar still needs a nudge to achieve its full potential..
Would that be in the same way governments have "subsidised the heck" out of Nuclear power then? And how much is Nuclear going to cost in the future - decommission, clean-up, waste disposal? How much does it cost to look after plutonium waste for centuries to be sure terorists dont get hold of it? And what are the real costs of continued use of Fossil fuels?
I would admit that solar is still quite expensive, although I have seen better figures for Solar than that, particularly if used to heat water too. New technologies like Amorphouse Siliconc ells promise much cheaper cells, all be it less efficient. Wind power gives much better cost payback figures, and is a rapidly increasing cheap power source.
I would agree, we will probably not see "purely" solar power cars in large scale use in the forseeable future, but a hybrid solar/electric might makesense, particularly if the costs of efficient solar cells comes down..
Ok, we could use solar panels to collect sunlight and beam the energy to earth. But we already have such a device up there - its called the "sun". We could just use its energy directly.. radical though that may seem..
So the big question - are we getting close to practical electric cars? Ok the vehicles in this competition are a "tour-de-force" of solar technology, but perhaps one day we could really have cars with advanced light-weight cheap batterys (thanks to advances in laptop/mobile batteries), and solar panels to charge when you leave your car parked in daylight. Also add regenerative braking, a fairly rapid recharge cycle, and for longer journeys give the garages something to sell - they can "hot-swap" batteries for a fully charged one, for a price. Is that the future, or is it Hydrogen fuel cells? Or some combination of both?
Again, I just cannot figure why we still persist with nuclear, oil, coal, with all the attendant problems (pollution, wars over oil, etc), when we could cover a small proportiion of the deserts of the world with solar cells, and the roofs of our buildings, and the coasts with huge offsiore wind farms (British Wind Enrgy Association page) & tidal turbines, and have all the power we need?
You miss my point - sure the 1541 had its own 6502, 2k RAM, ROM - but that 2k is not enough to hold a track all at once. So in normal mode the 1541 would read a sector of a track, then have to wait while it sent the data to the host CBM 64 (about 256 bytes a second, I think!), then wait for the disk to spin around again and read another sector..
Finally some genius figured out a piece of code to sit in that 2k RAM which could send data straight from the 1541 read head to the host 64 "on the fly", track at a time at 35x speed. But this was a system hack.
So in fact, with all the "turbo" copiers/file systems that came in at the end, the 64 *did* have to control the 1541 on a track by track basis. The 6502 in the 1541 was really a "dumb" controller in this mode..
But the 1541 didnt do that by default, nor did Commodore intend anyone to use the drives that way - they only had about 2k (ish) ram onboard, and sent the data down a serial IEEE at very slow speeds. It was only much later that people hacked the on-board 6502 to send data at 35x normal speed - the controller would spew data from head->main c64 a full track at a time. With no turbo boost, it took about 20 minutes & 4 disk swaps to copy a 170K floppy on a single 1541.. When people wax nostalgic for old 64's they forget that part..
Well, there are polution issues with most manufcturing processes- the point with wind/solar is that its a "one-off", the cell will then be in use hopefully for a few decades, not making anymore pollutions. Whereas when you fill your car petrol up, a whole load of CO2, CO, NO, Hg, etc isgoing up in smoke as a result..
Wind energy looks a good bet - prices are coming down to around $0.01-0.02/kilowatt hour, the turbines keep going for decades..
As I said before, there are no zero-impact solutions, just better ones..
Oh sure, I know, but the point is that the head wore out on my original cam (just after the warranty went, sony make some cr*p these days) sony want to charge close to 200 pounds ($300) to replace the head (what a rip off), and I dont fancy shelling out for another recorder just to access some tapes. Dig-8 is rare enough that I havent seen another recorder or anything. Lesson - stick to main formats (MiniDV) and dont buy Sony again..
BWEA *has* got the backing it needs - rather the indiviual generators it represents have - for a massive off-shore scheme, that should generate 20% UK power by 2020. Its already happening. The point I made about turning Electric->H->Electric is a possible cycle for storing Wind-power in relatively rare shortage situations. It runs like this - we have enough Wind, Solar + a bit of spinning capacity from Fossil to generate, say, 200% of our needs *on average*. We dont need all that power much of the time, so we turn spare electricity into Hydrogen for cars. But there will come the odd occassion when we cannot generate enough power to meet peak demand, and we cannotimport enough form other countries, so what do we do? Burn someof the hydrogen to meet peak demand. Its not fantastically efficient, butit should only happen relatively rarely, so on average its not too expensive to do. The key is cheap power from renewables - the current generation are contracted to generate at US $0.03 per Kilowatt/hour, and it is calculated to drop to around 1-2c/kw/hour when turbines are mass-produced. Its going to be really cheap electricity, we just need to adjust the power supply system to regulate it adequately. Of course there are other ways to store electricity - hydro-electric, flywheels, etc - but since we are thinking of making making Hydrogen anyway..
In fact petrol requires a really sophisticated system to ship/handle safely - its taken decades to get the distribution system we have today.
Shipping energy big distances currently does involve problems - pollution, energy losses, and so on. But the places that *do* have large wind/solar resources should at least be exploiting those to the max.. When that happens, and the costs of PV and Turbines come down with mass production, let us then see what new storage technologies emerge. Its not going to happen all at once..
I was just quoting the
article that claimed zero-electric bills (on balance) for a
solar-powered house in Australia (minus heating), go read it and
figure..
The UK is in fact one of the countries with the biggest wealth
of *wind* resources - we could fairly readily generate 100%+ of
our needs with off-shore wind plants - ok that would require a
more advanced power regulation and control system, but the
potential is there.
The original article was about solar powered vehicles in
*australia* (remember?) so I thought it relevant to post
information about solar power technology. Even in Europe, solar
is a viable power source, and is being used in various projects.
Oh sure, Nuclear is fine. I mean, ok there are odd regions of
the world like Chernobyl and the Irish sea that are radioactive
& hazardous thanks to nuclear power, but hey, its cheap.
Well, ok it cost a lot to develop, and its gonna cost a lot to
decommission, so much that the UK government is calling a stop to
it, but yes of course if you dont include all that in your
calculations, its cheap.
All the money squandered is in fact
squandered. They decided to spend vast amounts of
money trying to make *non-military* nuclear power pay off - and
it didnt.
If its needed for space, and the risks are small, then use it
for space. Its a different issue really.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the reason why we have to start now, long before the wells run dry. We are all too addicted/dependant on personal transport now to switch over to public transport totally (myself included), and its gonna take time to replace all those cars.
The point is its all feasable - Ive mentioned the wind power bit (USA) before - costs down to $0.03/kw/hr & falling - just turn it into Hydrogen, or power batteries direct if cheap/light enough. Its actually not gonna be that hard, just requires the will. Increasing taxes on petrol helps, but is not enough in itself. Actually I think costs could come right down as technologies improve (like PC's)- our kids could all be driving powerful SUVs running on cheap green electric/hydrogen, laughing at their dads who fought wars over oil..
Oh, sure, I am not defending the Soviet system - which is why, say, the X-Prize is a better model for getting C.A.T.S. than the current beurocratic NASA strategy. Let entrepreneurs do the work of making a "747" for space..
The "space pen" may not be true, but NASA has wasted money on plenty of other stuff - for instance $20+ million on a "space toilet", when cheaper designs were available..
To hand over the title deeds of your house to me, and any other financial assets (shares, bank accounts, gold nuggets) or IP assets you may have..
Yeh, that should work..
"We spent millions of dollars developing the Space Pen program. Know what the Russians did? They used a pencil."
Its almost too neat not to be true, and in a way it is! Ok, in fact it was an independant company that spent $1 million on developing a "space" pen, and not NASA themselves, but in the end the US did spend the money, whereas the Russians were happy with the low-tech solution, although of course they took advantage of the high-tech solution once the money was spent.
The above Russian/US comparison probably holds up better today than the 60's - currently the US is spending $3 billion/year on the (white elephant) Shuttle, whereas the Russians are keeping the ISS running at under $100 million a mission.
Below is a related extract from a piece posted on www.space.com, by Robert Zubrin - an advocate of reform in the US space program - interesting reading...
In the recent Columbia hearings, numerous members of congress continually decried the fact that the US space program is "stuck in Low Earth Orbit." This is certainly a serious problem. If it is to be addressed adequately, however, America's political leadership needs to reexamine NASA's fundamental mode of operation.
Over the course of its history, NASA has employed two distinct modes of operation. The first, prevailed during the period from 1961-1973, and may therefore be called the Apollo Mode. The second, prevailing since 1974, may usefully be called the Shuttle Era Mode, or Shuttle Mode, for short.
In the Apollo Mode, business is conducted as follows. First, a destination for human spaceflight is chosen. Then a plan is developed to achieve this objective. Following this, technologies and designs are developed to implement that plan. These designs are then built, after which the mission is flown.
The Shuttle Mode operates entirely differently. In this mode, technologies and hardware elements are developed in accord with the wishes of various technical communities. These projects are then justified by arguments that they might prove useful at some time in the future when grand flight projects are initiated.
Contrasting these two approaches, we see that the Apollo Mode is destination driven, while the Shuttle Mode pretends to be technology driven, but is actually constituency driven. In the Apollo Mode, technology development is done for mission directed reasons. In the Shuttle Mode, projects are undertaken on behalf of various internal and external technical community pressure groups and then defended using rationales. In the Apollo Mode, the space agency's efforts are focused and directed. In the Shuttle Mode, NASA's efforts are random and entropic.
Imagine two couples, each planning to build their own house. The first couple decides what kind of house they want, hires an architect to design it in detail, then acquires the appropriative materials to build it. That is the Apollo Mode. The second couple polls their neighbors each month for different spare house-parts they would like to sell, and buys them all, hoping to eventually accumulate enough stuff to build a house. When their relatives inquire as to why they are accumulating so much junk, they hire an architect to compose a house design that employs all the knick-knacks they have purchased. The house is never built, but an adequate excuse is generated to justify each purchase, thereby avoiding embarrassment. That is the Shuttle Mode.
In today's dollars, NASA average budget from 1961-1973 was about $17 billion per year. This is only 10% more than NASA's current budget. To assess the comparative productivity of the Apollo Mode with the Shuttle Mode, it is therefore useful to compare NASA's accomplishments between 1961-1973 and 1990-2003, as the space agency's total expenditures over these two periods were equal.
Between 1961 and 1973, NASA flew the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, Ranger, Surveyor, and Mariner missions, and did all the development for the Pioneer, Viking, and Voyager missions as well. In addition, t
I would suppose it depends on the cost/efficiency of the cells. I would agree that todays cells, although improving, make it a fairly pricey proposition. Amorphous silicon cells are a promising development, much cheaper to make than traditional cells, but currently not so efficient. It strikes me that the sort of plants you propose involve a lot more structure, pressurised pipes, moving parts, etc - and how do the efficiency/cost figures work out? Wouldit be better to use 30%+ efficient solar cells rather than water pipes at the focus of the mirrors? Or is it just better to use banks of cells, with no moving parts, if they are at the right price?
Damn! I sold one already!
Ok, but it is an important point, because if you take Nuclear out of the equation, you have a choice between the "green" alternatives, and fossil fuels. Fossil fuels also have "hidden" costs we are not really paying yet, and of course we can only go on using them for a short time, in the historic scale of things..
There is actually nothing wrong with "subsidising" an emergent energy technology, if in the end it can deliver cheap, renewable, relatively non-polluting power. Wind power is getting to the stage where it can stand alone, here in the UK the next generation of stations can generate power at $0.03/kw/hr,and that is set to come down. Solar still needs a nudge to achieve its full potential..
Would that be in the same way governments have "subsidised the heck" out of Nuclear power then? And how much is Nuclear going to cost in the future - decommission, clean-up, waste disposal? How much does it cost to look after plutonium waste for centuries to be sure terorists dont get hold of it? And what are the real costs of continued use of Fossil fuels?
I would admit that solar is still quite expensive, although I have seen better figures for Solar than that, particularly if used to heat water too. New technologies like Amorphouse Siliconc ells promise much cheaper cells, all be it less efficient. Wind power gives much better cost payback figures, and is a rapidly increasing cheap power source.
I would agree, we will probably not see "purely" solar power cars in large scale use in the forseeable future, but a hybrid solar/electric might makesense, particularly if the costs of efficient solar cells comes down..
Ok, we could use solar panels to collect sunlight and beam the energy to earth. But we already have such a device up there - its called the "sun". We could just use its energy directly.. radical though that may seem..
Love,
Wil Wheaton
Linux weenie who doesn't even use your crappy SPYware.
But I dont understand. What is this strange emotion you humans call "Love"?
You employ a bloke with a big broom..
Or find a desert location without so much sand (fact - only a small proportion of the Sahara is sand dunes. Trust me Ive been there.)
Oil in the sahara? Maybe, but that defies the point..
So the big question - are we getting close to practical electric cars? Ok the vehicles in this competition are a "tour-de-force" of solar technology, but perhaps one day we could really have cars with advanced light-weight cheap batterys (thanks to advances in laptop/mobile batteries), and solar panels to charge when you leave your car parked in daylight. Also add regenerative braking, a fairly rapid recharge cycle, and for longer journeys give the garages something to sell - they can "hot-swap" batteries for a fully charged one, for a price. Is that the future, or is it Hydrogen fuel cells? Or some combination of both?
Again, I just cannot figure why we still persist with nuclear, oil, coal, with all the attendant problems (pollution, wars over oil, etc), when we could cover a small proportiion of the deserts of the world with solar cells, and the roofs of our buildings, and the coasts with huge offsiore wind farms (British Wind Enrgy Association page) & tidal turbines, and have all the power we need?
Damn, you ve seen the logical flaw in my otherwise impeccable joke. Foiled again..
Yes, I used to use by dictaphone - but now I use my fingers like everyone else.. :-)
You miss my point - sure the 1541 had its own 6502, 2k RAM, ROM - but that 2k is not enough to hold a track all at once. So in normal mode the 1541 would read a sector of a track, then have to wait while it sent the data to the host CBM 64 (about 256 bytes a second, I think!), then wait for the disk to spin around again and read another sector..
Finally some genius figured out a piece of code to sit in that 2k RAM which could send data straight from the 1541 read head to the host 64 "on the fly", track at a time at 35x speed. But this was a system hack.
So in fact, with all the "turbo" copiers/file systems that came in at the end, the 64 *did* have to control the 1541 on a track by track basis. The 6502 in the 1541 was really a "dumb" controller in this mode..
But the 1541 didnt do that by default, nor did Commodore intend anyone to use the drives that way - they only had about 2k (ish) ram onboard, and sent the data down a serial IEEE at very slow speeds. It was only much later that people hacked the on-board 6502 to send data at 35x normal speed - the controller would spew data from head->main c64 a full track at a time. With no turbo boost, it took about 20 minutes & 4 disk swaps to copy a 170K floppy on a single 1541.. When people wax nostalgic for old 64's they forget that part..
Hmm, let me test that out.
Unplug, plug, ok, no problem works fine.
Unplug, plug, ok, no problem works fine.
Unplug, plug, ok, no problem works fine.
Well my PC is still working, I cant see any pr
Well, there are polution issues with most manufcturing processes- the point with wind/solar is that its a "one-off", the cell will then be in use hopefully for a few decades, not making anymore pollutions. Whereas when you fill your car petrol up, a whole load of CO2, CO, NO, Hg, etc isgoing up in smoke as a result..
Wind energy looks a good bet - prices are coming down to around $0.01-0.02/kilowatt hour, the turbines keep going for decades..
As I said before, there are no zero-impact solutions, just better ones..
Oh sure, I know, but the point is that the head wore out on my original cam (just after the warranty went, sony make some cr*p these days) sony want to charge close to 200 pounds ($300) to replace the head (what a rip off), and I dont fancy shelling out for another recorder just to access some tapes. Dig-8 is rare enough that I havent seen another recorder or anything. Lesson - stick to main formats (MiniDV) and dont buy Sony again..
BWEA *has* got the backing it needs - rather the indiviual generators it represents have - for a massive off-shore scheme, that should generate 20% UK power by 2020. Its already happening. The point I made about turning Electric->H->Electric is a possible cycle for storing Wind-power in relatively rare shortage situations. It runs like this - we have enough Wind, Solar + a bit of spinning capacity from Fossil to generate, say, 200% of our needs *on average*. We dont need all that power much of the time, so we turn spare electricity into Hydrogen for cars. But there will come the odd occassion when we cannot generate enough power to meet peak demand, and we cannotimport enough form other countries, so what do we do? Burn someof the hydrogen to meet peak demand. Its not fantastically efficient, butit should only happen relatively rarely, so on average its not too expensive to do. The key is cheap power from renewables - the current generation are contracted to generate at US $0.03 per Kilowatt/hour, and it is calculated to drop to around 1-2c/kw/hour when turbines are mass-produced. Its going to be really cheap electricity, we just need to adjust the power supply system to regulate it adequately. Of course there are other ways to store electricity - hydro-electric, flywheels, etc - but since we are thinking of making making Hydrogen anyway..
In fact petrol requires a really sophisticated system to ship/handle safely - its taken decades to get the distribution system we have today.
Shipping energy big distances currently does involve problems - pollution, energy losses, and so on. But the places that *do* have large wind/solar resources should at least be exploiting those to the max.. When that happens, and the costs of PV and Turbines come down with mass production, let us then see what new storage technologies emerge. Its not going to happen all at once..
http://www.3nw.com/energy/resources/wind_lead_epi. htm
http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/Update24.htm
http://www.ptreyeslight.com/stories/apr20_01/energ y_plan1.html
I was just quoting the article that claimed zero-electric bills (on balance) for a solar-powered house in Australia (minus heating), go read it and figure..
The UK is in fact one of the countries with the biggest wealth of *wind* resources - we could fairly readily generate 100%+ of our needs with off-shore wind plants - ok that would require a more advanced power regulation and control system, but the potential is there.
The original article was about solar powered vehicles in *australia* (remember?) so I thought it relevant to post information about solar power technology. Even in Europe, solar is a viable power source, and is being used in various projects.
Oh sure, Nuclear is fine. I mean, ok there are odd regions of the world like Chernobyl and the Irish sea that are radioactive & hazardous thanks to nuclear power, but hey, its cheap. Well, ok it cost a lot to develop, and its gonna cost a lot to decommission, so much that the UK government is calling a stop to it, but yes of course if you dont include all that in your calculations, its cheap.
All the money squandered is in fact squandered. They decided to spend vast amounts of money trying to make *non-military* nuclear power pay off - and it didnt.
If its needed for space, and the risks are small, then use it for space. Its a different issue really.
Better to destroy the planets ecosystem through global warming then? There are no zero-impact solutions, some are just better than others..
Its ok, just be sure to make it to the top of a big hill by 5..
Or use a battery.