wrote up to protect ourselves from facist, oppressive governments like the one we have now
Fascism is a 20th century invention; it did not exist during the monarchy of George III. Oppression and tyranny have existed since... well, probably before there was civilization.
I don't mean for it to be transmitted across the country - it would be used locally, ideally at the point of generation. But the power used there is less total power that needs to be generated in the region by conventional means. The boundary lines - the scope of how I see things - extends at least on a national scale, if not globally. It doesn't matter to me if the electrons coming out from my solar panels trickle into my own home - an offset is an offset.
I wouldn't, of course, be giving this power away. I may be eco(logically)-conscious, but I am eco(nomically)-conscious, too. I am not a charity utility. I would be charging whoever actually does use that solar power something like a market rate, just like my utility charges me. But for the same fixed costs (i.e., the amortized capital cost of the panels and installation, plus small ongoing maintenance costs), I would get a lot more value if I had panels installed in a sunnier area than my home.
German cities only receive approx much less than the 3,000 sun-hours/year his calculations assume. 1650 sun-hours is a much more accurate estimate.
This is one reason (among several) why I haven't taken the plunge and installed solar at my home - the capacity factor. Living in the NE United States, I get a bit more sunshine than Germany. Solar at my home would certainly pay off. But that the same set of solar panels, installed in the desert southwest, would be able to generate perhaps twice as much electricity over their lifespan. I would much rather make that investment, because it has a higher energy-return-on-investment.
Unfortunately, there isn't a particularly good or widespread model for that kind of investment (fronting the capital for a residential solar installation far from your own home). Anyone know of such a method?
but you are talking about output equivalent to one large coal or nuclear power plant here. To be fair, there is only one nuke plant that big in the world, so let's say the output is equivalent to 2 standard French nuke plants
In 2011, the "average" nuclear power plant in the United States generated about 12.2 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh). There were 65 nuclear power plants with 104 operating nuclear reactors that generated a total of 790 billion kilowatt-hours."
Which works out to an average power output of 867 MW/reactor, or 1.39 GW/plant. The conventional shorthand (such as when weighing renewables against nuclear) is that one nuke = 1 GW.
And as a result, I bet you use a lot, lot less electricity than the average American. Having something be expensive makes conservation easy and simple.
If nothing else, the desert would make a good place to build a 50 km development/demonstration track. Open spaces, easy land acquisition, few neighbors to complain, relatively small environmental impact (it is built on pylons, after all), lessened earthquake risk, and abundant sunshine.
What is the obsession with flinging your sack of water down a track at 300 miles per hour. In a world of diminishing cheap energy, why travel fast
Perhaps in a generation or two (or after a few energy crises) you could convince people to sacrifice a full day traveling from LA to SanFran, but for the moment, take it as a given that people want and, to a small extent, need to travel that distance in a short period of time. Given that, consider the available alternatives to Hyperloop or the proposed High Speed Rail: 1) traveling in a vehicle at 60 mph at several times the energy/passenger/distance cost, or 2) traveling in an aircraft at 600 mph (average speed, including TSA violations, perhaps 200 mph) at many times the energy cost. A third alternative, traveling at 80-120 mph on fairly conventional high speed rail at slightly less energy cost, I presently rate as not much of an alternative at all, because it simply doesn't exist.
"Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now"
Replace "bowl of petunias" with "the sun", and you get become a PhD student.
why not just do this the old fashioned, non-expensive, non-boondogle way
The article states that the project cost is only about $850k, mostly provided by private donations. The tracking motors will be solar-powered. So, for a modest outlay of capital today, they get ample, high-quality, non-polluting light for next to nothing for the life of the system. Any idea what a stadium lighting system costs? How about the cost of electricity and replacement bulbs to keep it operating for 8-16 hours a day, five months out of the year, for decades? Mirrors on a heliostat is not a boondogle, it's proven technology. And, in this case, probably cheaper than the alternative.
I just don't get it! So in winter this town is in almost perpetual night? So what the fuck are these mirrors going to reflect moonlight???
Switch to decaf and chill out. The town is not in perpetual night. At about 60 degrees north latitude, that's impossible. However, because it is situated in a deep valley that runs east-west, it is in the shadow of the surrounding mountains for five months out of the year.
(This I was able to find out with about 30 seconds' research - about as long as it took for you to dismiss these people as idiots and write your short-sighted post.)
The only real problem with battery cars is the battery. Where do used batteries go
For the most part, they don't go anywhere - just about every battery put into a hybrid or an all electric in the last decade is still out there in service.
As for what happens at their eventual end of life... these batteries are eminently recyclable. The nickel in a Prius battery is valuable, as is the cobalt and manganese in li-ion powered cars (chemistries vary). The lithium content itself isn't terribly valuable, but can be recycled. The steel and aluminum chassis and casing is trivial and relatively profitable to reclaim. Copper bus bars are plenty valuable. The pack's control electronics may end up scrapped, or may end up in freshly produced batteries. There has been talk of using repleted packs in stationary applications like grid backup, UPSs, etc. In short, I think there will be a thriving market for these batteries. One will not simply toss them into the landfill.
The same is true for smaller packs in consumer devices today: NiMH packs from portable tools, Li-Ion packs from laptops, all can be recycled at essentially zero cost to the consumer and at some profit for the recycler. In many jurisdictions in the U.S., and pretty much everywhere else in the developed world (Japan, EU, etc.), such recycling is mandatory.
While there is probably a political angle to the decision, the reason for the delay is more prosaic:
Under the new law, companies with more than 50 employees must provide their workers with health insurance.* Those companies that do not comply are levied a per-employee tax penalty. Employees that do not receive coverage through their employer can purchase insurance on the open market, and low- and middle-income workers can avail themselves to government subsidies to purchase coverage. In other words, the government is attempting, through the tax code, to recoup the employee's health care subsidy from the employer.
In order to carry out the employer mandate, the Treasury Department needs to know which companies are opting out and also which employees are subsequently utilizing government subsidies for healthcare. This is a technical challenge that the IRS (the Tax Man) has determined they won't have ready in time for the Jan 1, 2014 deadline. Businesses, too, have complained that their duty and mechanism for reporting who they are covering with insurance is difficult and onerous. So the decision has been made to push back the deadline.
Because the whole mechanism is linked to taxes, it is difficult to push the deadline back by, say, six months, because it would be tough to figure out how to pro-rate both the subsidy and the penalty. Most health insurance contracts (employer-provided or otherwise) run from Jan 1 to Dec 31, anyway. So, they pushed the effective date back to the next tax / health insurance / calendar year.
Yes, the new deadline occurs after the 2014 elections. But considering there are national elections every two years in the United States, pushing any deadline back by one year yields a 50/50 chance of passing over an election year. Would pushing it back just six months be any better, how about two years?
* For those, both outside and inside the U.S., who are wondering why health insurance is a benefit attached to a person's job, rather than a social benefit from the government (like in most other countries) or something each person seeks on the open market (like automobile insurance), the answer is: "it's complicated." It isn't the result of any particular plan, that's for damn sure; but rather the long meandering course of history. Those who are curious should read Paul Starr's book The Social Transformation of American Medicine. The Affordable Care Act follows the path of having health insurance as a workplace benefit mostly because that is how most people in the U.S. already get it.
Oh come on, guys, again? It's not like this is rocket scie... oh, wait, yes it is.
Easy jokes aside, this is becoming a disturbing pattern. The Proton rocket has been launched how many times? 50? 100? It's supposed to be a rock-solid system at this point - the most reliable commercial launch vehicle available. How many launch failures is this in the last year? Someone down in the QA department must be sleeping on the job, or being bought off. Have they been making unwarrented component or material substitutions? Is there deliberate sabotage at work? Are they just getting lazy and cheap?
I remember first reading about this guy, his daughter, and his DIY genomics in Make and Wired magazines back in 2009. I'm glad to see that, several years on, they at least have a likely culprit identified. It's still a long ways from describing the actual mechanism, effects, and potential treatments, but you have to start somewhere. I am also pleased to see that he has been able to get collaborators in industry and academia, who can put greater resources to it than just his own.
if they're technology demonstrators, but are not meant for the application for which they're demonstrating, then what are they for
Because almost nothing new ever gets done otherwise. Maybe they aren't appropriate for the application today in a one-off fashion, but who can say about tomorrow? And even if the application isn't appropriate, but the integration of the technology is sound, who's to say that it can't be used in a different application? You can get far with thought experiments and designs on paper, but until you actually go out and build something, there's no real way of knowing where the real promise and peril lay.
Invest a trillion dollars in it over the next 10 years...
Maybe we should find something that actually makes economic sense before we add another trillion to our national debt.
The US consumes about 6.5 billion barrels of oil per year. At current market rates, that's over $500-600 billion / year, or about $10 trillion per decade. Purchasing oil accounts for about one half of the US trade deficit. It seems to me that spending $100 bil/year for a decade, even if it is borrowed money, in order to not spend 10x that amount in perpetuity, is a fine proposition.
Of for fuck's sake: lighten up! If you had read the article or any other news related to this project, you would know that the creators of the boat aren't looking to pioneer a new mode of transportation. They all recognize that sailing is a much more effective way of having a "solar-powered" boat. The makers of the Solar Impulse airplane aren't trying to replace commercial aviation, either. These are technology demonstrators, like multi-million dollar concept cars; they don't have to be practical or ready for wide adoption.
The advantage of a water-cooled fridge wouldn't necessarily be in greater efficiency (i.e., heat flow out divided by electrical power in). There would be some of that, but the advantage that I see is to remove the requirement that the fridge have a free convection path around it. Ever taken a look at the radiator on your fridge? Of course you have, because you clean it regularly like the manufacturer recommends, right? Dusty and grimy radiators greatly reduce the efficiency of a fridge; removing it improves reliability and efficiency. Ditch the vent in the front and the radiator in the back, and use that space for added insulation. For the same volume it takes up in the kitchen, and for the same interior cooled volume, you can construct a fridge with more substantial insulation. The improved insulation, which is dirt cheap, is where the savings would come from through reduced heat influx and lowered cooling demand.
The example that comes to my mind is Tesla. The electrification of transportation is a green technology. It won't save the world, but it'll be a damn sight better than the internal combustion engine and its associated petroleum infrastructure. Tesla didn't start out trying to make a million electric vehicles per year: their tech wasn't ready for that scale, their production ability definitely wasn't ready, and the consumers weren't. So, instead, they aimed at a niche, high-margin place to develop and prove their technology: sports cars. Now that the company has some legs under them (i.e., a seasoned workforce, proven core technology, operational supply chain and production facilities, experienced workforce), they are working their way down to the consumer. I think they'll get there, which is a start contrast to the many other electric car companies that have tried to jump into the consumer market feet-first, only to end up with broken legs.
What I would be keen to see is a residential fridge that had water hookups to allow it to be plumbed into a chilled-water loop. Instead of the back of the fridge being covered with a radiator and relying on natural convection to remove the heat from the compressor, have a water-to-refrigerant heat-exchanger. The water flowing through the heat exchanger would be a separate circuit in a geothermal HVAC system.* In other words, you would always be using your geothermal "ground" loop as the heat sink for the fridge, rather than the kitchen air. The amount of heat energy we are talking about for a well-constructed fridge isn't all that much, so the heat exchanger, water flow rates, etc, could all be very modestly sized.
*Alternately, depending on the temperatures involved, it could serve as a heat input to the home's hydronic heating system, in series or parallel to the geothermal heat pump.
Slashdot Mirror
Fascism is a 20th century invention; it did not exist during the monarchy of George III. Oppression and tyranny have existed since ... well, probably before there was civilization.
Centuries to millennia. Geologists are able to measure the ongoing rebound of North America from the retreat of the glaciers from the last ice age.
I don't mean for it to be transmitted across the country - it would be used locally, ideally at the point of generation. But the power used there is less total power that needs to be generated in the region by conventional means. The boundary lines - the scope of how I see things - extends at least on a national scale, if not globally. It doesn't matter to me if the electrons coming out from my solar panels trickle into my own home - an offset is an offset.
I wouldn't, of course, be giving this power away. I may be eco(logically)-conscious, but I am eco(nomically)-conscious, too. I am not a charity utility. I would be charging whoever actually does use that solar power something like a market rate, just like my utility charges me. But for the same fixed costs (i.e., the amortized capital cost of the panels and installation, plus small ongoing maintenance costs), I would get a lot more value if I had panels installed in a sunnier area than my home.
This is one reason (among several) why I haven't taken the plunge and installed solar at my home - the capacity factor. Living in the NE United States, I get a bit more sunshine than Germany. Solar at my home would certainly pay off. But that the same set of solar panels, installed in the desert southwest, would be able to generate perhaps twice as much electricity over their lifespan. I would much rather make that investment, because it has a higher energy-return-on-investment.
Unfortunately, there isn't a particularly good or widespread model for that kind of investment (fronting the capital for a residential solar installation far from your own home). Anyone know of such a method?
To be more precise in the comparisons, here's some data from the US Energy Information Agency:
Which works out to an average power output of 867 MW/reactor, or 1.39 GW/plant. The conventional shorthand (such as when weighing renewables against nuclear) is that one nuke = 1 GW.
And as a result, I bet you use a lot, lot less electricity than the average American. Having something be expensive makes conservation easy and simple.
If nothing else, the desert would make a good place to build a 50 km development/demonstration track. Open spaces, easy land acquisition, few neighbors to complain, relatively small environmental impact (it is built on pylons, after all), lessened earthquake risk, and abundant sunshine.
Perhaps in a generation or two (or after a few energy crises) you could convince people to sacrifice a full day traveling from LA to SanFran, but for the moment, take it as a given that people want and, to a small extent, need to travel that distance in a short period of time. Given that, consider the available alternatives to Hyperloop or the proposed High Speed Rail: 1) traveling in a vehicle at 60 mph at several times the energy/passenger/distance cost, or 2) traveling in an aircraft at 600 mph (average speed, including TSA violations, perhaps 200 mph) at many times the energy cost. A third alternative, traveling at 80-120 mph on fairly conventional high speed rail at slightly less energy cost, I presently rate as not much of an alternative at all, because it simply doesn't exist.
"Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now"
Replace "bowl of petunias" with "the sun", and you get become a PhD student.
The article states that the project cost is only about $850k, mostly provided by private donations. The tracking motors will be solar-powered. So, for a modest outlay of capital today, they get ample, high-quality, non-polluting light for next to nothing for the life of the system. Any idea what a stadium lighting system costs? How about the cost of electricity and replacement bulbs to keep it operating for 8-16 hours a day, five months out of the year, for decades? Mirrors on a heliostat is not a boondogle, it's proven technology. And, in this case, probably cheaper than the alternative.
Switch to decaf and chill out. The town is not in perpetual night. At about 60 degrees north latitude, that's impossible. However, because it is situated in a deep valley that runs east-west, it is in the shadow of the surrounding mountains for five months out of the year.
(This I was able to find out with about 30 seconds' research - about as long as it took for you to dismiss these people as idiots and write your short-sighted post.)
Damn - where are my mod points today? Well played, sir!
For the most part, they don't go anywhere - just about every battery put into a hybrid or an all electric in the last decade is still out there in service.
As for what happens at their eventual end of life... these batteries are eminently recyclable. The nickel in a Prius battery is valuable, as is the cobalt and manganese in li-ion powered cars (chemistries vary). The lithium content itself isn't terribly valuable, but can be recycled. The steel and aluminum chassis and casing is trivial and relatively profitable to reclaim. Copper bus bars are plenty valuable. The pack's control electronics may end up scrapped, or may end up in freshly produced batteries. There has been talk of using repleted packs in stationary applications like grid backup, UPSs, etc. In short, I think there will be a thriving market for these batteries. One will not simply toss them into the landfill.
The same is true for smaller packs in consumer devices today: NiMH packs from portable tools, Li-Ion packs from laptops, all can be recycled at essentially zero cost to the consumer and at some profit for the recycler. In many jurisdictions in the U.S., and pretty much everywhere else in the developed world (Japan, EU, etc.), such recycling is mandatory.
Quite right.
People make problem. Trust me: drone better.
No furniture-making carpenter uses 2x4s. If they are starting from rough-sawn lumber, then it's 4/4, 8/4, etc.
While there is probably a political angle to the decision, the reason for the delay is more prosaic:
Under the new law, companies with more than 50 employees must provide their workers with health insurance.* Those companies that do not comply are levied a per-employee tax penalty. Employees that do not receive coverage through their employer can purchase insurance on the open market, and low- and middle-income workers can avail themselves to government subsidies to purchase coverage. In other words, the government is attempting, through the tax code, to recoup the employee's health care subsidy from the employer.
In order to carry out the employer mandate, the Treasury Department needs to know which companies are opting out and also which employees are subsequently utilizing government subsidies for healthcare. This is a technical challenge that the IRS (the Tax Man) has determined they won't have ready in time for the Jan 1, 2014 deadline. Businesses, too, have complained that their duty and mechanism for reporting who they are covering with insurance is difficult and onerous. So the decision has been made to push back the deadline.
Because the whole mechanism is linked to taxes, it is difficult to push the deadline back by, say, six months, because it would be tough to figure out how to pro-rate both the subsidy and the penalty. Most health insurance contracts (employer-provided or otherwise) run from Jan 1 to Dec 31, anyway. So, they pushed the effective date back to the next tax / health insurance / calendar year.
Yes, the new deadline occurs after the 2014 elections. But considering there are national elections every two years in the United States, pushing any deadline back by one year yields a 50/50 chance of passing over an election year. Would pushing it back just six months be any better, how about two years?
* For those, both outside and inside the U.S., who are wondering why health insurance is a benefit attached to a person's job, rather than a social benefit from the government (like in most other countries) or something each person seeks on the open market (like automobile insurance), the answer is: "it's complicated." It isn't the result of any particular plan, that's for damn sure; but rather the long meandering course of history. Those who are curious should read Paul Starr's book The Social Transformation of American Medicine . The Affordable Care Act follows the path of having health insurance as a workplace benefit mostly because that is how most people in the U.S. already get it.
Oh come on, guys, again? It's not like this is rocket scie... oh, wait, yes it is.
Easy jokes aside, this is becoming a disturbing pattern. The Proton rocket has been launched how many times? 50? 100? It's supposed to be a rock-solid system at this point - the most reliable commercial launch vehicle available. How many launch failures is this in the last year? Someone down in the QA department must be sleeping on the job, or being bought off. Have they been making unwarrented component or material substitutions? Is there deliberate sabotage at work? Are they just getting lazy and cheap?
I remember first reading about this guy, his daughter, and his DIY genomics in Make and Wired magazines back in 2009. I'm glad to see that, several years on, they at least have a likely culprit identified. It's still a long ways from describing the actual mechanism, effects, and potential treatments, but you have to start somewhere. I am also pleased to see that he has been able to get collaborators in industry and academia, who can put greater resources to it than just his own.
What, "because it's cool" isn't a good enough reason?
Because almost nothing new ever gets done otherwise. Maybe they aren't appropriate for the application today in a one-off fashion, but who can say about tomorrow? And even if the application isn't appropriate, but the integration of the technology is sound, who's to say that it can't be used in a different application? You can get far with thought experiments and designs on paper, but until you actually go out and build something, there's no real way of knowing where the real promise and peril lay.
The US consumes about 6.5 billion barrels of oil per year. At current market rates, that's over $500-600 billion / year, or about $10 trillion per decade. Purchasing oil accounts for about one half of the US trade deficit. It seems to me that spending $100 bil/year for a decade, even if it is borrowed money, in order to not spend 10x that amount in perpetuity, is a fine proposition.
Of for fuck's sake: lighten up! If you had read the article or any other news related to this project, you would know that the creators of the boat aren't looking to pioneer a new mode of transportation. They all recognize that sailing is a much more effective way of having a "solar-powered" boat. The makers of the Solar Impulse airplane aren't trying to replace commercial aviation, either. These are technology demonstrators, like multi-million dollar concept cars; they don't have to be practical or ready for wide adoption.
The advantage of a water-cooled fridge wouldn't necessarily be in greater efficiency (i.e., heat flow out divided by electrical power in). There would be some of that, but the advantage that I see is to remove the requirement that the fridge have a free convection path around it. Ever taken a look at the radiator on your fridge? Of course you have, because you clean it regularly like the manufacturer recommends, right? Dusty and grimy radiators greatly reduce the efficiency of a fridge; removing it improves reliability and efficiency. Ditch the vent in the front and the radiator in the back, and use that space for added insulation. For the same volume it takes up in the kitchen, and for the same interior cooled volume, you can construct a fridge with more substantial insulation. The improved insulation, which is dirt cheap, is where the savings would come from through reduced heat influx and lowered cooling demand.
The example that comes to my mind is Tesla. The electrification of transportation is a green technology. It won't save the world, but it'll be a damn sight better than the internal combustion engine and its associated petroleum infrastructure. Tesla didn't start out trying to make a million electric vehicles per year: their tech wasn't ready for that scale, their production ability definitely wasn't ready, and the consumers weren't. So, instead, they aimed at a niche, high-margin place to develop and prove their technology: sports cars. Now that the company has some legs under them (i.e., a seasoned workforce, proven core technology, operational supply chain and production facilities, experienced workforce), they are working their way down to the consumer. I think they'll get there, which is a start contrast to the many other electric car companies that have tried to jump into the consumer market feet-first, only to end up with broken legs.
What I would be keen to see is a residential fridge that had water hookups to allow it to be plumbed into a chilled-water loop. Instead of the back of the fridge being covered with a radiator and relying on natural convection to remove the heat from the compressor, have a water-to-refrigerant heat-exchanger. The water flowing through the heat exchanger would be a separate circuit in a geothermal HVAC system.* In other words, you would always be using your geothermal "ground" loop as the heat sink for the fridge, rather than the kitchen air. The amount of heat energy we are talking about for a well-constructed fridge isn't all that much, so the heat exchanger, water flow rates, etc, could all be very modestly sized.
*Alternately, depending on the temperatures involved, it could serve as a heat input to the home's hydronic heating system, in series or parallel to the geothermal heat pump.