So my thought was that some enterprising company should buy up a few acres of land (or rooftops), and let individual homeowners sponsor small batches of solar panels, like 5kw or 10kw, in exchange for some sort of credit on their electric bill. A system like this would dramatically reduce the barriers to entry for individuals who'd like to pay for solar power, as well as vastly increase the economies of scale. Does any system like this currently exist?
My electric coop is doing something along these lines. Subscribers can elect to pay about.5 cents per KWH more than standard each month (used to be 1.5 cents), up to whatever your lowest monthly KWH usage is. When enough KWH have been subscribed to absorb a wind turbines output, they put one up. It's obviously a little more planned than that, but the point is, the wind turbine generating capacity they put on line is dependent upon the number of subscribers willing to pay extra for it.
A few bucks a month is a lot simpler - and cheaper - than putting up our own turbine (we're in a lousy wind site, anyway.)
What about light leakage, will that cause an explosion? What if the fragile fiber breaks while the beam is on?
Ahh, that's it. I always wondered why the gas tank filler neck on my truck has that little flapper at the top. It's to keep the light out!
The people who made my gas cans sure screwed up, though. No light blocking flappers on them. I'm lucky I haven't been torched. From now on, I only open them at night.
I've seen these several times over the North Atlantic in the summer.
If you're not paying attention, your first impression is that they look like cirrus clouds viewed from the ground, only much more beautiful.
It's when you remember that you're already 30+ thousand feet up, and that these look like cirrus do when you're on the ground, that you realize how high they are. (That's plain English for 'mesosphere.')
Like satellites, you can see them when your sky is dark but they are catching sunlight due to their altitude.
Right up there with northern lights as a visual treat.
I'm on a Comcast business account. I recently had a problem where a working, light loaded Postfix installation suddenly had 10-20% of my outbound email traffic just hang. Verbose logging showed that the problem always occured at the DNS query stage. Mail sent through a backup server suffered the same fate.
Using tcpdump showed that all the bad dns queries stopped after 4 frames, while the successful ones went 68 or 70 frames.
Switching from Comcast's regional DNS servers to their national DNS servers fixed the problem immediately.
Makes me wonder what they're doing on the regional ones.
i only ask because i had a better-than-usual phishing attempt this morning....
It was a better than usual phish (of course, a lot a pretty bad). Netcraft Toolbar for FF caught it, though. It would be interesting to know how long it took for Netcraft to identify it as a phish.
The article doesn't mention how many watts per square meter this panel will produce.
IIRC, solar insolation runs around 1KW per square meter, or roughly 100W per sq foot. They're claiming 11 to 13% efficiency. The rest is an exercise for the reader.
I sure hope their claims are true. Every time I read about the next photovoltaic breakthrough I feel like Charlie Brown getting ready to kick off the season while Lucy tees the pigskin.
I didn't do the math, so this is more a question than a statement:
A + B = C + D
A hours good sunlight + B hours crappy sunlight < C hours good sunlight + D hours NO sunlight ?
The reason is doesn't work is that rate climb is a function of excess power. (i.e., power in excess of what's required for level flight.)
Let's say an electric aircraft (powered glider, really) requires 10 watts for level flight. If it gets 9 watts for 24 hours, it will never have enough power to sustain level flight. Launch it, it lands.
Give it 18 watts for 12 hours, and it will climb for 12 hours. (The rate of climb will depend on the weight of the aircraft - just turn 9 watt-hours into poetntial energy to get the theoretical max altitude gain.) After that, it will glide for, say, 9.6 hours.
Of course, these are contrived numbers, but they illustrate the point - you need excess power to climb. So a little high power time will beat a lot of weak power time.
Engine driven AC generators. If the pumps are unpowered, the engines will gravity feed (except #2 on a DC-10... it's uphill), though they will probably not have enough fuel flow to make rated takeoff power. Not a problem in cruise.
How the pilot is to know what RPMs of remaining engines are (kinda important if you have one or more off,)
Essential instruments (and the lights to see them) are on a separate bus powered by the back up battery via an inverter for a minimum of 30 minutes. On some aircraft, indefinitely via a RAT (ram air turbine.)
and whether an engine is already on fire or not?
Fire detection is always on a battery powered bus.
Hydraulics is powered by electric pumps, not by power of will.
Unless your flying a 787 (no one has yet), your hydraulics on a Boeing or Airbus are powered by engine driven hydraulic pumps. There are usually some electric auxilary pumps for various events/circumstances, but not primary flight control.
Most of the battery's power will be spent on mechanically controlling the airplane.
100% wrong. Controls are hydraulic. (Electric/hydraulic on the 380, but no battery in flight could power that.)
Entertainment systems and galleys are the first things offloaded in the event of a generator failure. The biggest risk thes entertainment system pose is fire - ask SwissAir
From the article.... Another key feature is the capability to use human blood or sweat to help power the battery.
And there, in one invention, is the end of oil wars and immigration issues. Now the administration will just lure all those excess foreigners over here with our new (Soylent) Green Cards.
That all said, anybody who would consider using a Saturn 5 rocket as any sort of weapon is absolutely insane. The Saturn rockets were huge, and designed to deliver massive payloads (all of Skylab was launched via a single Saturn booster)...
Proof again that those that can't remember history are doomed to repeat it. Have you forgotten that Skylab was used to attack Austrailia?
Not on this planet. It's grown and produced using fossil fuels. In fact, the jury was out for a long time on whether or not it's even energy positive, much less carbon nuetral.
Maybe it's a little less carbon emitting than pure fossil fuel, but if you look at the whole cycle, it's nowhere near nuetral. Maybe in a future economy that's already fossil fuel free, but not now.
I hate flying on any of the new Boeings. Have you flown on a 777 in a storm? You can actually see the fuselage bend and buckle...
As far as the 'new Boeings' part, it's not really a new thing. If you sit in an aisle seat far back in a 747 and sight down the seat line, you can see the fuselage bend. As far as I know, there has never been an inflight structural breakup of a 747 that was due to turbulence. They've had passengers killed by turbulence (UA over the Pacific), engines thrown in turbulence (Anchorage), but never has one come apart due to turbulence that I'm aware of.
Still, I can see that it would make some people nervous. Fly whatever you enjoy the ride on.
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My electric coop is doing something along these lines. Subscribers can elect to pay about .5 cents per KWH more than standard each month (used to be 1.5 cents), up to whatever your lowest monthly KWH usage is. When enough KWH have been subscribed to absorb a wind turbines output, they put one up. It's obviously a little more planned than that, but the point is, the wind turbine generating capacity they put on line is dependent upon the number of subscribers willing to pay extra for it.
A few bucks a month is a lot simpler - and cheaper - than putting up our own turbine (we're in a lousy wind site, anyway.)
Actually, we try pretty hard to make sure that when it does happen, it is an accident.
What about light leakage, will that cause an explosion? What if the fragile fiber breaks while the beam is on?
Ahh, that's it. I always wondered why the gas tank filler neck on my truck has that little flapper at the top. It's to keep the light out!
The people who made my gas cans sure screwed up, though. No light blocking flappers on them. I'm lucky I haven't been torched. From now on, I only open them at night.
...for small values of 'for sure.'
Since they're using AMD, this should be an easy target to visit with your basic heat seeking missile.
Unless, of course, the signature overwhelms the sensor.
I've seen these several times over the North Atlantic in the summer.
If you're not paying attention, your first impression is that they look like cirrus clouds viewed from the ground, only much more beautiful.
It's when you remember that you're already 30+ thousand feet up, and that these look like cirrus do when you're on the ground, that you realize how high they are. (That's plain English for 'mesosphere.')
Like satellites, you can see them when your sky is dark but they are catching sunlight due to their altitude.
Right up there with northern lights as a visual treat.
Which doesn't matter one bit.
What matters is if the person(s) who's software they used cares.
They plan to fit it all in 640K.
I'm on a Comcast business account. I recently had a problem where a working, light loaded Postfix installation suddenly had 10-20% of my outbound email traffic just hang. Verbose logging showed that the problem always occured at the DNS query stage. Mail sent through a backup server suffered the same fate.
Using tcpdump showed that all the bad dns queries stopped after 4 frames, while the successful ones went 68 or 70 frames.
Switching from Comcast's regional DNS servers to their national DNS servers fixed the problem immediately.
Makes me wonder what they're doing on the regional ones.
It was a better than usual phish (of course, a lot a pretty bad). Netcraft Toolbar for FF caught it, though. It would be interesting to know how long it took for Netcraft to identify it as a phish.
IIRC, solar insolation runs around 1KW per square meter, or roughly 100W per sq foot. They're claiming 11 to 13% efficiency. The rest is an exercise for the reader.
I sure hope their claims are true. Every time I read about the next photovoltaic breakthrough I feel like Charlie Brown getting ready to kick off the season while Lucy tees the pigskin.
If they get Bill Dube to do a static test burn, don't get in front of him!
...just turn 9 watt-hours..D'oh! 18 - 10 = 8 in most places. Make that 8 watt-hours.
I didn't do the math, so this is more a question than a statement:
A + B = C + D
A hours good sunlight + B hours crappy sunlight < C hours good sunlight + D hours NO sunlight ?
The reason is doesn't work is that rate climb is a function of excess power. (i.e., power in excess of what's required for level flight.)
Let's say an electric aircraft (powered glider, really) requires 10 watts for level flight. If it gets 9 watts for 24 hours, it will never have enough power to sustain level flight. Launch it, it lands.
Give it 18 watts for 12 hours, and it will climb for 12 hours. (The rate of climb will depend on the weight of the aircraft - just turn 9 watt-hours into poetntial energy to get the theoretical max altitude gain .) After that, it will glide for, say, 9.6 hours.
Of course, these are contrived numbers, but they illustrate the point - you need excess power to climb. So a little high power time will beat a lot of weak power time.
It was supposed to say, 'Ten half-lives after coming into contact with the mineral, radioactive water becomes completely safe.'
You made a spelling (or grammar) error today.
You're welcome.
Engine driven AC generators. If the pumps are unpowered, the engines will gravity feed (except #2 on a DC-10... it's uphill), though they will probably not have enough fuel flow to make rated takeoff power. Not a problem in cruise.
How the pilot is to know what RPMs of remaining engines are (kinda important if you have one or more off,)Essential instruments (and the lights to see them) are on a separate bus powered by the back up battery via an inverter for a minimum of 30 minutes. On some aircraft, indefinitely via a RAT (ram air turbine.)
and whether an engine is already on fire or not?Fire detection is always on a battery powered bus.
Hydraulics is powered by electric pumps, not by power of will.Unless your flying a 787 (no one has yet), your hydraulics on a Boeing or Airbus are powered by engine driven hydraulic pumps. There are usually some electric auxilary pumps for various events/circumstances, but not primary flight control.
Most of the battery's power will be spent on mechanically controlling the airplane.100% wrong. Controls are hydraulic. (Electric/hydraulic on the 380, but no battery in flight could power that.)
Entertainment systems and galleys are the first things offloaded in the event of a generator failure. The biggest risk thes entertainment system pose is fire - ask SwissAir
From the article.... Another key feature is the capability to use human blood or sweat to help power the battery.
And there, in one invention, is the end of oil wars and immigration issues. Now the administration will just lure all those excess foreigners over here with our new (Soylent) Green Cards.
Didn't google discover that heat isn't a big factor in hard drive reliability? This is more about moving waste heat around versus generating less of it.
I'm all for quiet, though.
Proof again that those that can't remember history are doomed to repeat it. Have you forgotten that Skylab was used to attack Austrailia?
Um, actually, you just started the next one. Sorry to have to break the bad news to you.
...and yeah, yeah, I buggered 'neutral.' Twice.
Should've used Firefox.
Not on this planet. It's grown and produced using fossil fuels. In fact, the jury was out for a long time on whether or not it's even energy positive, much less carbon nuetral.
Maybe it's a little less carbon emitting than pure fossil fuel, but if you look at the whole cycle, it's nowhere near nuetral. Maybe in a future economy that's already fossil fuel free, but not now.
As far as the 'new Boeings' part, it's not really a new thing. If you sit in an aisle seat far back in a 747 and sight down the seat line, you can see the fuselage bend. As far as I know, there has never been an inflight structural breakup of a 747 that was due to turbulence. They've had passengers killed by turbulence (UA over the Pacific), engines thrown in turbulence (Anchorage), but never has one come apart due to turbulence that I'm aware of.
Still, I can see that it would make some people nervous. Fly whatever you enjoy the ride on.