solar panels cost more in materials (fabbing the silicon, energy for the aluminum, more energy to melt and shape it, etc.) than a panel ever gets back in energy coming in
Yawn. You coal shills need to come up with some new lies. Everyone in the world knows that your statement above is a lie. Solar panels return their embodied energy in 1 to 3 years. They continue to return more energy after that for at least another 50 years. At that point, everything in them is fully recyclable into new panels.
If you must lie for your feudal coal barons, please try to think of some more original and entertaining lies.
And [one in a hundred thousand, owns own house free and clear, grossing $70+k/yr] solar home owner says, but it works for me
A million homes in Australia have solar panels on their roofs as of right now. That's about one home in ten. Workers, pensioners, the unemployed, everyone - rich or poor, all benefiting from free energy. The installation pays for itself in five years, and comes with a twenty five year warranty. You Americans need to crawl out from under the dead hand of capitalism and join the free world.
"What's the point of cutting down your own use? You won't make a difference. And your actions don't influence anyone else. "
Au contraire. Since I installed my solar power system, seven other households have seen my success and followed my example. (And, in before someone gets all whiny whiny with bullshit about "robbing the poor", two of those households were pensioners on tiny social security incomes.)
Leading by example really does work. I have cut my power usage to about one third of the national average, and most of what I do use comes from solar. I'm not living in a cave. I have four air conditioners, electric oven, microwave, computers, hifi and a big plasma TV. People can see this. It readily gives the lie to loony right propaganda about freezing in the dark.
Every time I ride my bike to work I save twenty bucks on fuel and parking. It's like I'm getting paid to go for a ride in the park instead of sitting in traffic jams. I drive less than 4000 miles a year. People can see this example too. They see that an old, fat man can still get to work on a bike.
Oh, I forgot to mention, YES! I do accept the science of global warming.
Only two kinds of waste heat matter - waste heat from nuclear power and waste heat from fossil fuel burning.
Waste heat from renewable energy is part of the planets natural heat budget. The heat from wind, waves or sunlight will heat the planet no matter what. It makes no difference if we use it to run an air conditioner, a factory or a truck first. If you're not sure about this, check out the laws of thermodynamics and conservation of energy.
Nuclear power is so ridiculously expensive that we will never build enough of it for the waste heat to matter.
That just leaves - oooh look! Fossil fuels! Well how about that. Actually I suspect you will find that even that is tiny compared to the greenhouse effect.
Coward wrote "mining for all those precious minerals required by those windmills (massive rare-earth magnets)"
The device connected to the wind TURBINE (there is no mill) is called a GENERATOR. This is where the magnets are. Generators are connected to the turbines in Coal plants, gas plants and nuke plants too. They all use magnets.
We obviously have no idea about how much mercury he was exposed to. I know that eating several fish is probably equivalent to the same amount of mercury, but there is a difference between inhaled dust and food digested by your stomach.
Relax. You'd have to break about 150 bulbs to get the same mercury dose that you get from eating one fish. The numbers are not hard to find if you look.
Personally I wouldn't bother replacing the carpet.
blindseer wrote: Solar and wind are cute but if they reach a certain point of power generation, something like 20% of our power or perhaps as low as 5%, they will destabilize the grid. By "destabilize" I mean blackouts. You don't have to take my word for it, look it up.
I don't have to look it up because I already have proof that you are wrong. My state gets, on average, 27% of its power from wind turbines and 7% from solar, making a total of 34% from clean energy sources. It doesn't cause blackouts. Our grid is very reliable. It has not been destabilized.
On windy days, the state (South Australia) has drawn as much of 57% of its power load from wind turbines. The grid was not "destabilized". We did not have blackouts. We did not have to build a million zillion backup fossil plants. In fact we didn't need to build any at all.
But you don't have to take my word for it, look it up.
>>Even in solar DC to AC you have the DC load you have to do something with, though most home installations are small enough it's easy to sink.
Actually with solar panels all you need to do is open the DC switch. The panels float up to their "open circuit" voltage and the current flow stops. You don't have to "dump" the power anywhere.
This switching function is done electronically within the inverter, and happens automatically if the inverter shuts down.
GrpA wrote: it's only the wealthy and middle-to-upper class users who can take advantage of it.
This is a stinking lie. I will however, give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you merely haven't bothered to find out the facts.
I personally know two disability pensioners on extremely low incomes who have installed rooftop solar systems and are making substantial savings on their power bills. I know other people who received interest free finance from their panel supplier, and paid them off in two years at only $10 per week. (The power bill savings paid the rest.)
In my state, clean energy has proven so successful that we have permanently closed one of our two coal power plants, and the other is only run for 6 months of the year.
In addition, the solar panels export power to the grid during the daytime peak period. Peaking plants are allowed to charge up to $20.00 per kilowatt hour at these times, while solar panel owners are paid LESS THAN TEN CENTS by the power company for the same peak unit. This means that the solar panels are contributing to a substantial reduction in generation cost. And yet solar users still have to pay those bloated "connection fees", $20 per month or more.
If these savings are not passed on to the end user, you can blame capitalist greed, not those of us who produce clean energy.
Two more good reasons for java: Strong typing and array boundary checking.
For a scientist who spends more time doing science than being a programmer, boundary conditions and bad type casts are a permanent trap waiting to snap on you. A few years back I had a contract to convert a large mathematical application from Fortran to java. You'd be surprised how many simple errors of this nature had been lurking in the Fortran code for decades. Incorrect mathematical results are not always obvious.
Another good reason - arbitrary depth of precision. Java has built in classes for numbers with very high precision, e.g. BigDecimal.
"Every electric car adds the equivelant of a small house to the grid."
Actually it's more like the equivalent of adding a toaster. A basic home charger for an electric car draws about 2 kW, similar to a toaster or a kettle. Where I live, most houses have a grid connections with capacities in the range of 14 to 24 kW.
Just the same way you take a short position in anything else.
1. Find someone who has a lot of bitcoins, and ask him for a loan.
2. Trade your borrowed bitcoins for U.S. dollars or currency of your choice.
3. Wait for bitcoins to fall in value.
4. Buy the cheap bitcoins with the currency you obtained in step 2.
5. Repay your bitcoin loan and pocket the.....
6. PROFIT!!
Please note, I do not recommend anyone doing this due to the high risk that step 3 will not happen. If you want to bet your house on it, knock yourself out, but I certainly won't be doing so.
>>You have no free speech right on the internet. At all.
Actually, assuming you are a U.S. citizen, your constitutional free speech rights on the internet are EXACTLY the same as they are in meatspace. viz: "The federal government shall make no law that requires you to shut up".
The constitution does not force a private company to carry your data, just like it does not force a private courier to carry your mail.
Standard disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. Hot coffee is hot. etc. etc.
You can easily make a safe and dependable plane suitable for space or air travel from it.
And yes they do work in a vacuum
Don't be silly. A lifter generates thrust by using ionized air as reaction mass. When there is no air there is no more reaction mass, and thus no thrust. Dielectric would make no difference whatsoever. These toys are essentially a highly inefficient and highly polluting form of jet propulsion.
To do this in a vacuum, you must carry a tank of reaction mass with you, ionize it, and throw it overboard using an electric field. Essentially you would have an electric rocket, but this is more commonly known as an ion drive. You may be surprised to know, NASA has been flying one of these around the solar system since about 14 years ago.
$12 billion is just the tip of the iceberg, the cost of scraping up the shit on the plant site. A conservative estimate of losses in real estate values alone would add another $50 billion. Then there are the costs of making an area the size of a major city uninhabitable for a month (so far). Then there are the costs of the ruined crops and poisoned fisheries. Then there are all the bankrupted businesses to consider. Then you must consider the costs of the thousands of human deaths over the next 40 years. (The nuclear shills will never admit these of course.)
The true cost is likely to be closer to $500 billion, making nuclear the most expensive electric power ever generated.
"Base load" is largely a myth created by coal power generation utilities. It's expensive and difficult to shut down a coal plant overnight, so coal generators offered cheap "off-peak" power to claw back the costs of this inefficiency.
It's actually pretty stupid to heat your water at midnight when you don't need any hot water. The real "base load" is probably less than ten percent of the value advertised by nuclear shills. Geothermal, tidal, solar thermal, wind and natural gas could easily fill the gap in the right combination.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, you are correct there. I didn't vote for them, and many people who did are regretting it now.
Here in Australia a hot summer day is more like 110 F. (About 43C) You can still walk around in it, but it's advisable to stay well hydrated.
I can hardly blame the milk manufacturers for not abandoning their equipment just to make the 1 gallon milk jug round off nicely to 3 or 4 liters.
They have probably replaced their equipment ten times since the rest of the world adopted the international system of units. It's not an issue.
Errrm... no. We didn't survive any of them. Humanity did not exist at the time.
solar panels cost more in materials (fabbing the silicon, energy for the aluminum, more energy to melt and shape it, etc.) than a panel ever gets back in energy coming in
Yawn. You coal shills need to come up with some new lies. Everyone in the world knows that your statement above is a lie. Solar panels return their embodied energy in 1 to 3 years. They continue to return more energy after that for at least another 50 years. At that point, everything in them is fully recyclable into new panels.
If you must lie for your feudal coal barons, please try to think of some more original and entertaining lies.
And [one in a hundred thousand, owns own house free and clear, grossing $70+k/yr] solar home owner says, but it works for me
A million homes in Australia have solar panels on their roofs as of right now. That's about one home in ten. Workers, pensioners, the unemployed, everyone - rich or poor, all benefiting from free energy. The installation pays for itself in five years, and comes with a twenty five year warranty. You Americans need to crawl out from under the dead hand of capitalism and join the free world.
whooooooosh!
also referred to the techies in "silicone (sic) valley".
Silicone Valley: Breast implant capital of the world. Must be all the porn studios nearby.
Congratulations. Break just 149 more and you will have equivalent mercury exposure to eating one fish fillet. Reverse placebo effect anyone?
"What's the point of cutting down your own use? You won't make a difference. And your actions don't influence anyone else. "
Au contraire. Since I installed my solar power system, seven other households have seen my success and followed my example. (And, in before someone gets all whiny whiny with bullshit about "robbing the poor", two of those households were pensioners on tiny social security incomes.)
Leading by example really does work. I have cut my power usage to about one third of the national average, and most of what I do use comes from solar. I'm not living in a cave. I have four air conditioners, electric oven, microwave, computers, hifi and a big plasma TV. People can see this. It readily gives the lie to loony right propaganda about freezing in the dark.
Every time I ride my bike to work I save twenty bucks on fuel and parking. It's like I'm getting paid to go for a ride in the park instead of sitting in traffic jams. I drive less than 4000 miles a year. People can see this example too. They see that an old, fat man can still get to work on a bike.
Oh, I forgot to mention, YES! I do accept the science of global warming.
Only two kinds of waste heat matter - waste heat from nuclear power and waste heat from fossil fuel burning.
Waste heat from renewable energy is part of the planets natural heat budget. The heat from wind, waves or sunlight will heat the planet no matter what. It makes no difference if we use it to run an air conditioner, a factory or a truck first. If you're not sure about this, check out the laws of thermodynamics and conservation of energy.
Nuclear power is so ridiculously expensive that we will never build enough of it for the waste heat to matter.
That just leaves - oooh look! Fossil fuels! Well how about that. Actually I suspect you will find that even that is tiny compared to the greenhouse effect.
The device connected to the wind TURBINE (there is no mill) is called a GENERATOR. This is where the magnets are. Generators are connected to the turbines in Coal plants, gas plants and nuke plants too. They all use magnets.
We obviously have no idea about how much mercury he was exposed to. I know that eating several fish is probably equivalent to the same amount of mercury, but there is a difference between inhaled dust and food digested by your stomach.
Relax. You'd have to break about 150 bulbs to get the same mercury dose that you get from eating one fish. The numbers are not hard to find if you look.
Personally I wouldn't bother replacing the carpet.
blindseer wrote: Solar and wind are cute but if they reach a certain point of power generation, something like 20% of our power or perhaps as low as 5%, they will destabilize the grid. By "destabilize" I mean blackouts. You don't have to take my word for it, look it up.
I don't have to look it up because I already have proof that you are wrong. My state gets, on average, 27% of its power from wind turbines and 7% from solar, making a total of 34% from clean energy sources. It doesn't cause blackouts. Our grid is very reliable. It has not been destabilized.
On windy days, the state (South Australia) has drawn as much of 57% of its power load from wind turbines. The grid was not "destabilized". We did not have blackouts. We did not have to build a million zillion backup fossil plants. In fact we didn't need to build any at all.
But you don't have to take my word for it, look it up.
Actually with solar panels all you need to do is open the DC switch. The panels float up to their "open circuit" voltage and the current flow stops. You don't have to "dump" the power anywhere.
This switching function is done electronically within the inverter, and happens automatically if the inverter shuts down.
This is a stinking lie. I will however, give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you merely haven't bothered to find out the facts.
I personally know two disability pensioners on extremely low incomes who have installed rooftop solar systems and are making substantial savings on their power bills. I know other people who received interest free finance from their panel supplier, and paid them off in two years at only $10 per week. (The power bill savings paid the rest.)
In my state, clean energy has proven so successful that we have permanently closed one of our two coal power plants, and the other is only run for 6 months of the year.
In addition, the solar panels export power to the grid during the daytime peak period. Peaking plants are allowed to charge up to $20.00 per kilowatt hour at these times, while solar panel owners are paid LESS THAN TEN CENTS by the power company for the same peak unit. This means that the solar panels are contributing to a substantial reduction in generation cost. And yet solar users still have to pay those bloated "connection fees", $20 per month or more.
If these savings are not passed on to the end user, you can blame capitalist greed, not those of us who produce clean energy.
For a scientist who spends more time doing science than being a programmer, boundary conditions and bad type casts are a permanent trap waiting to snap on you. A few years back I had a contract to convert a large mathematical application from Fortran to java. You'd be surprised how many simple errors of this nature had been lurking in the Fortran code for decades. Incorrect mathematical results are not always obvious.
Another good reason - arbitrary depth of precision. Java has built in classes for numbers with very high precision, e.g. BigDecimal.
kilo pico hours is not a unit of speed.
Actually it's more like the equivalent of adding a toaster. A basic home charger for an electric car draws about 2 kW, similar to a toaster or a kettle. Where I live, most houses have a grid connections with capacities in the range of 14 to 24 kW.
(Actually, I don't really wish you good luck. Fraud is a crime.)
1. Find someone who has a lot of bitcoins, and ask him for a loan.
2. Trade your borrowed bitcoins for U.S. dollars or currency of your choice.
3. Wait for bitcoins to fall in value.
4. Buy the cheap bitcoins with the currency you obtained in step 2.
5. Repay your bitcoin loan and pocket the .....
6. PROFIT!!
Please note, I do not recommend anyone doing this due to the high risk that step 3 will not happen. If you want to bet your house on it, knock yourself out, but I certainly won't be doing so.
Actually, assuming you are a U.S. citizen, your constitutional free speech rights on the internet are EXACTLY the same as they are in meatspace. viz: "The federal government shall make no law that requires you to shut up".
The constitution does not force a private company to carry your data, just like it does not force a private courier to carry your mail.
Standard disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. Hot coffee is hot. etc. etc.
Lifter technology scaled up is the solution.
You can easily make a safe and dependable plane suitable for space or air travel from it.
And yes they do work in a vacuum
Don't be silly. A lifter generates thrust by using ionized air as reaction mass. When there is no air there is no more reaction mass, and thus no thrust. Dielectric would make no difference whatsoever. These toys are essentially a highly inefficient and highly polluting form of jet propulsion.
To do this in a vacuum, you must carry a tank of reaction mass with you, ionize it, and throw it overboard using an electric field. Essentially you would have an electric rocket, but this is more commonly known as an ion drive. You may be surprised to know, NASA has been flying one of these around the solar system since about 14 years ago.
The true cost is likely to be closer to $500 billion, making nuclear the most expensive electric power ever generated.
It's actually pretty stupid to heat your water at midnight when you don't need any hot water. The real "base load" is probably less than ten percent of the value advertised by nuclear shills. Geothermal, tidal, solar thermal, wind and natural gas could easily fill the gap in the right combination.