I think what GM meant to say that only 50 people were capable of paying what GM wanted per vehicle in order to make it worth their while to maintain the parts inventory and service sub-contracts to keep the cars running.
Then GM should have compromised: take the batteries and drivetrains out of the cars, and sell them SEPARATELY to the enthusiasts as used parts without warranty. If the enthusiasts could get the cars running again, the cars would be theirs and not GM's.
Instead, a lot of really cool-looking bodies that could have been used in any number of ways have been destroyed. It's a crying shame.
My neighbor drives a very nice Honda Insight (Hybrid). Seems like a lot less hassle than an electric-only vehicle...
Lots of people find plugging their car into the wall to be less hassle than standing around a gas station, pumping smelly liquid. If their hybrid had enough battery capacity to charge from the wall and take them 15-20 miles without having to burn fuel, they could cut their visits from a couple a month to a half-dozen a year. Imagine the reduced hassle!
You say that the corn->ethanol route gives a yield of 120% (1 BTU input gives 1.2 output)... Now, that may not seem like much, but compared with using petroleum, it still gives a net gain in a renewable manner, no?
The more recent data says 1.34:1, but the issue is that the tax subsidy (52 cents/gallon) is given to the entire production of ethanol when only about 1/4 of its net energy is biologically and renewably produced; the rest is all fossil inputs, a fair amount of it from petroleum.
This may make it worthwhile as a method of buying votes in farm states, but it does a miserable job of its putative goals:
Making the US independent of imported oil.
Reducing pollution (ethanol increases evaporative emissions in plastic fuel systems).
Accomplishing the transition to a renewable economy.
There are better ways of accomplishing those goals, and the concentration of tax subsidies on ethanol-from-corn directs effort in the wrong direction. The same is probably true of biodiesel subsidies.
You make a lot of good points about the realistic normal use of car - That one with a range of 30mi would do for most situations. But people don't only drive to and from work.
Please note that these cars are plug-in hybrids. They can only go so far on electricity alone, but they have no range limitations aside from the capacity of the fuel tank (hundreds of miles). The beauty is that a relatively small all-electric range is sufficient to eliminate a very large majority of most people's motor fuel use.
What do you think of photocatalytic hydrogen production?
It's nowhere near ready for prime time, but there ought to be a fair amount of research money devoted to it and other methods of artificial photosynthesis as well as general biology.
Why it is so important? One breakthrough in photocatalysts and another in the manufacture of products derived from extremophile microorganisms (for instance, imagine a hydrogen fuel-cell catalyst which can stand temperatures hotter than boiling water and can be made from cheap materials by bugs in big vats) could eliminate the oil-producing countries as political, military and social forces almost overnight.
All conservation does it make the energy source last longer it does not solve the under lying problem.
Conservation also reduces the amount of energy which has to be supplied by whatever source, and thus the cost of switching. Depending on the source of energy, conservation can be several times cheaper than attempting to increase supply.
The US consumes roughly 100 quads/year, or about 270 trillion BTU/day.
Unless you have looked at how it is consumed, you don't understand where the points of leverage are. I've spent some time analyzing this; click on the blog link.
The price of LD service has been falling steadily for years, but the drop to zero (and the end of the telco's cut for handling it) is going to throw a lot of revenue models in the trash. So what could happen?
Revenue falls below the price of service, companies go out of business.
Per-line fees are increased to make company profitable, more customers jump ship to cell service for voice calls, more and more landline infrastructure goes unused, fees are increased... death spiral.
Companies try to offer new services but are stuck in regulatory limbo while competitors get to market first.
Then there's the issue with overseas service. The undersea cables are supported with revenue from phone calls, and bandwidth is limited. Financing cables with the "all you can eat" Internet model is going to be interesting.
I don't see any way this can be good for local telcos, and maybe not for overseas carriers either. It may be time to sell any shares you own.
I'm skeptical about the claim of designing for one cycle (how do you withstand turbulence?) but it does explain why the team did not re-plumb the fuel lines, fill most of the tanks with a full load's weight of water (with antifreeze as required), and perform a takeoff and climb test before dumping the ballast and coming back down.
Detachable tanks would also have helped Voyager, but they aren't permitted by the rules; you have to land with all the airframe you took off with (fragments of winglets apparently excepted). If it weren't for this it would be possible to drop tanks, wings and engines like a staged rocket.
However, you aren't taking into account the difference in atomic weight
Speaking of density, there's a lot of irony in here (iron = ~7800 kg/m^3).
Saying that CFC's diffuse easily, even under the thermal activity induced by the Sun, is like saying the Mississippi River can carry a brick from St. Louis to New Orleans.
Sediment particles are a lot heavier than water molecules, but that doesn't stop the Mississippi from carrying as much as six hundred million tons of them to the sea in one year. I think you'll be forced to agree that that's equivalent to one heaping shitload of bricks. And let's not mention the fact that cloud droplets and dust particles, which are many millions of times bigger and heavier than CFC molecules, remain in the air for extended periods.
Nope, you've got to be a troll. Nobody could be that ignorant/stupid and still be able to use a computer.
down her in NOLA, I turn on the A/C about early April, and don't turn it off again till end of November.
But your compressor isn't working full-tilt at night and in the morning; its duty cycle peaks in afternoon and early evening, no?
If you size your array to meet most or all of your demand during the summer peak hours, you're going to have a surplus in the morning. That surplus is going to go cheap enough to attract uses: ice storage (run the A/C to make ice for the afternoon), vehicle power, and the like.
If NanoSolar can use the ETFE film that is being used by The Eden Project, they can expect a 25-year lifespan of the encapsulation. I have no idea how long the dyes in the cells will last.
If the stuff is manufactured as a sticky-backed sheet, you might well be able to just clean an old, tired set and stick down new ones on top just like you'd nail new shingles over old.
It doesn't matter if the power company can generate for 3.5 cents. If they're selling to you for 8 cents, and you can generate your own for 5, you're ahead.
Consider electric vehicles while you're at it. If you're feeding 5 cent/KWH juice to a car (electric or plug-in hybrid) which uses 350 WH/mile, your "fuel" cost is 1.75 cents/mile. To equal that with a gas car, you'd have to be getting 100+ mpg at current prices!
If you want the utility to supply you only when the sun isn't shining, expect to pay a lot of money for them to keep the lines, generators etc. working just for those times you need them.
Notice that it's from Hindu.com, and they're all metric over there... I'll bet that nobody in the editorial chain has a good enough grasp of English units to have caught the error.
The University of Toronto claimed nanoparticle-enhanced plastic PV cell almost two months ago, with a potential of 30% efficiency. There was also a discovery of useful electronic properties of lead-selenide nanocrystals to push potential efficiency over 60%.
Even at 30% a lot of applecarts are going to be overturned. Hang on, it's going to be interesting.
You're probably mistaken about generator companies. There probably won't be all that many, unless they are maintaining the panels on the roofs of buildings and carports. If you put the generation right next to the points of use, you don't need any more transmission and distribution equipment and your capital costs go way, way down; the companies which sell power along with a contract to maintain a roof are going to beat the other guys, because they'll get their real-estate for free.
Note also that if the cost target can be hit (note that Nanosolar doesn't have any recent press releases, so take carefully) the cost minimum for electricity will not be late at night, but in the mid-morning when the panels hit their full output but demand for e.g. A/C hasn't come up yet. Expect new markets to come out of the opportunities for arbitrage.
And as long as morning juice is cheap, why not charge your car and replace some motor fuel?
A galaxy full of Dyson spheres would be radiating the same amount of energy, but in the IR. If that was the case, Keck would see it glowing merrily away.
What I find most interesting about the "dark galaxy" is that it's got plenty of hydrogen but it somehow has not managed to form stars.
fertilizers are certainly NOT derived from petroleum
No, they're typically derived from natural gas (steam-reform to hydrogen, Haber process combines H2 and N2 to make ammonia, ammonia is either used as-is or oxidyzed to HNO3. HNO3 is chemically combined with ammonia to make ammonium nitrate or urea to make urea nitrate).
High natural gas prices have driven some users to petroleum fuels, so the demand for fertilizer is increasing petroleum demand even if it isn't a direct petroleum product.
pesticides are sometimes synthesized using petroleum products (i.e., organic solvents), but I don't think that makes them petroleum-derived
If their manufacture involves petrochemicals and their use increases the demand for oil, you might as well call them petroleum-derived.
If I understand the law correctly, the biodiesel initiative allows $.50/gallon for biodiesel made from waste oil. If biofuel made from any waste matter qualified, CWT's plants could collect $22/barrel.
I'm not sure if this is a good thing. Subsidies usually result in overproduction and overconsumption, financed by the taxpayer. If we want to "fix" the problem, let's tax petroleum to pay for all the defense costs of the oil shipping routes instead of the taxpayer paying more for other things.
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75%? WRONG. Try 55% tops for gas-fired combined-cycle, 40% for coal-fired IGCC, 33% for powdered coal steam cycle.
Instead, a lot of really cool-looking bodies that could have been used in any number of ways have been destroyed. It's a crying shame.
- Multicrystalline: 3.7 years
- Thin film: 3.0 years
- Multicrystalline, anticipated: 2.1 years
- Thin film, anticipated: 1.1 years
Warranty on today's PV panels is typically 25 years, and panels can be expected to go on producing well beyond the warranty period.This may make it worthwhile as a method of buying votes in farm states, but it does a miserable job of its putative goals:
- Making the US independent of imported oil.
- Reducing pollution (ethanol increases evaporative emissions in plastic fuel systems).
- Accomplishing the transition to a renewable economy.
There are better ways of accomplishing those goals, and the concentration of tax subsidies on ethanol-from-corn directs effort in the wrong direction. The same is probably true of biodiesel subsidies. Please note that these cars are plug-in hybrids . They can only go so far on electricity alone, but they have no range limitations aside from the capacity of the fuel tank (hundreds of miles). The beauty is that a relatively small all-electric range is sufficient to eliminate a very large majority of most people's motor fuel use. It's nowhere near ready for prime time, but there ought to be a fair amount of research money devoted to it and other methods of artificial photosynthesis as well as general biology.Why it is so important? One breakthrough in photocatalysts and another in the manufacture of products derived from extremophile microorganisms (for instance, imagine a hydrogen fuel-cell catalyst which can stand temperatures hotter than boiling water and can be made from cheap materials by bugs in big vats) could eliminate the oil-producing countries as political, military and social forces almost overnight.
Unless you have looked at how it is consumed, you don't understand where the points of leverage are. I've spent some time analyzing this; click on the blog link.
Germany enforces its speech prohibitions even against residents of North America. (Against Holocaust denialists, but think of the precedent.)
Then there's the issue with overseas service. The undersea cables are supported with revenue from phone calls, and bandwidth is limited. Financing cables with the "all you can eat" Internet model is going to be interesting.
I don't see any way this can be good for local telcos, and maybe not for overseas carriers either. It may be time to sell any shares you own.
More like a Caproni A21J than a C-150, I'd think.
I'm skeptical about the claim of designing for one cycle (how do you withstand turbulence?) but it does explain why the team did not re-plumb the fuel lines, fill most of the tanks with a full load's weight of water (with antifreeze as required), and perform a takeoff and climb test before dumping the ballast and coming back down.
Detachable tanks would also have helped Voyager, but they aren't permitted by the rules; you have to land with all the airframe you took off with (fragments of winglets apparently excepted). If it weren't for this it would be possible to drop tanks, wings and engines like a staged rocket.
Nope, you've got to be a troll. Nobody could be that ignorant/stupid and still be able to use a computer.
If you size your array to meet most or all of your demand during the summer peak hours, you're going to have a surplus in the morning. That surplus is going to go cheap enough to attract uses: ice storage (run the A/C to make ice for the afternoon), vehicle power, and the like.
If the stuff is manufactured as a sticky-backed sheet, you might well be able to just clean an old, tired set and stick down new ones on top just like you'd nail new shingles over old.
Voila, you've burned coal with no carbon emissions.
Consider electric vehicles while you're at it. If you're feeding 5 cent/KWH juice to a car (electric or plug-in hybrid) which uses 350 WH/mile, your "fuel" cost is 1.75 cents/mile. To equal that with a gas car, you'd have to be getting 100+ mpg at current prices!
If you want the utility to supply you only when the sun isn't shining, expect to pay a lot of money for them to keep the lines, generators etc. working just for those times you need them.
Notice that it's from Hindu.com, and they're all metric over there... I'll bet that nobody in the editorial chain has a good enough grasp of English units to have caught the error.
Even at 30% a lot of applecarts are going to be overturned. Hang on, it's going to be interesting.
You're probably mistaken about generator companies. There probably won't be all that many, unless they are maintaining the panels on the roofs of buildings and carports. If you put the generation right next to the points of use, you don't need any more transmission and distribution equipment and your capital costs go way, way down; the companies which sell power along with a contract to maintain a roof are going to beat the other guys, because they'll get their real-estate for free.
Note also that if the cost target can be hit (note that Nanosolar doesn't have any recent press releases, so take carefully) the cost minimum for electricity will not be late at night, but in the mid-morning when the panels hit their full output but demand for e.g. A/C hasn't come up yet. Expect new markets to come out of the opportunities for arbitrage.
And as long as morning juice is cheap, why not charge your car and replace some motor fuel?
What I find most interesting about the "dark galaxy" is that it's got plenty of hydrogen but it somehow has not managed to form stars.
Check the links in this post and this story (referenced here).
High natural gas prices have driven some users to petroleum fuels, so the demand for fertilizer is increasing petroleum demand even if it isn't a direct petroleum product.
If their manufacture involves petrochemicals and their use increases the demand for oil, you might as well call them petroleum-derived.I'm not sure if this is a good thing. Subsidies usually result in overproduction and overconsumption, financed by the taxpayer. If we want to "fix" the problem, let's tax petroleum to pay for all the defense costs of the oil shipping routes instead of the taxpayer paying more for other things.