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Kallog

Im not sure where you got the $5700.00 per kW installation cost figures from.

the $1.37 per watt pannels in the above link would only cost $1370.00 per kW.

it only takes a few hours to install the 16.67 pannels required for 1 kW as they are 60 watt pannels.

1000 / 60 = 16.67

2 people earning $20.00 per hour for say 4 hours is
only $160.00

there is no need to buy land as they would mount on the roof of your house.

the only maintenance normaly required is to rinse them off once a year with your water hose.

so the final figure is apx $1530.00 per kW not $5700.00

5700 / 1530 = 3.73

your $0.26 kWh / 3.73 = $0.069 per kWh

To me that is a very clear difference.

Quote:
If you're generating power at twice cost of your competitors, and selling it at the same price in a competitive market, you're bound to fail.


I agree.

I didnt realize nuclear was so expensive.
but nuclear power will be necessary to use durring cloudy days and nights and we can expect that there will be many new nuclear power plants built across the U.S. to provide this much needed power when the sun does not shine.

theres no way that we can afford to store solar power using batteries on a national scale.


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i got $5700 from your $800billion / 150GW which is from your national power usage.

It should be higher than the panel price /rated wattage because this figure includes nighttime. Further on I assumed it was running 24hrs/day, so that cancels it out.

However, the proof of solar PV's impracticality is in the pudding. Where are the solar panel farms? Why doesn't some enterpeneur go and build one? It can be done on any scale from a single roof up to hundreds of megawatts, so financing is easy. In fact why don't you? Cover your entire roof. With the profits, rent the roof of another property and cover it too, as you get richer keep expanding!

It's not being done because it isn't economical. Solar thermal seems to be cheaper on a large scale, and I think there are some commercial plants in America using that. Solar thermal also has the ability to store power. I know it feels nice to have no moving parts, but at the end of the day, steam turbines are still cheaper than silicon.

Wind is also used all over the world, because that too is cheaper than solar PV when scaled up.


Last edited by kallog; 03/24/10 06:45 AM.
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Kallog

Quote:
However, the proof of solar PV's impracticality is in the pudding. Where are the solar panel farms?



heres a 6 mW farm in germany on 16.5 acres.
it uses thin film technology vs crystaline modules as do the $1.37 per watt pannels.

Quote:
The largest thin-film solar power plant in the world has opened in Germany, dubbed the “Rote Jahne”. It was built by the contractor Juwi Solar, and it will have a total output capacity of six megawatts. It uses 90,000 solar modules to capture quite a bit of sunlight. Thin-film solar modules are cheaper than crystalline modules and produce more energy per unit of installed capacity. The thin-film cells were made by First Solar. The solar plant is built on a former military airfield, and its module surface area comprises approximately 16.5 acres.


http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/04/worlds_largest_5.php

--------------------------

Portugals 45 mW solar farm which combines solar wind and wave energy.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jun/06/renewableenergy.alternativeenergy


--------------------------

and many many more

google search for "largest solar power farm"


with the emergence of new technologies such as thin film
solar the cost of production has greatly decreased and following suite there are a growing number of buisnessmen who are taking advantage of this reduction in cost.

those who remain clinging to fossil fuel as a energy source will watch their investments turn into rust as the solar industry gains more and more recognition.

they may have pudding in there fossil fuel bowl right now , but it cost a lot to make their pudding and normaly people stray away from expensive pudding.


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OK. Tho it doesn't have to cost a lot. Solar PV is extremely scalable, that's why I'm still sceptical that these projects are standing on their own two feet. Why doesn't every homeowner cover their entire roof? The German government does subsidise renewable energy, and farmers are building wind turbines with government aid. But to rely on government subsidies means it's not sustainable - yet.

I recently heard a green MP in my country stating that solar isn't economical for us. And we don't have any such solar farms.

Coal and oil plants are still going to be the mainstay for a long time, and I'm very sure their investors will be making profits. Sure not forever, but that's fine, when they finally shut down some people will have got very rich off them - and without taking tax dollars from the innocent public either!

I recently heard on TV, many old nuclear plants being described as "money printing machines". They've exceeded their planned life and paid off their huge initial investments. No doubt these early solar farms will end up that way too. Good on them, I just hope it does eventually happen.

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Kallog

Quote:
Why doesn't every homeowner cover their entire roof?


Or a portion of the roof at least.
I think the reason is that the initial cost is preventing many from doing so.

these days if you hire a contractor to paint your house a single room in your house will cost you apx $600.00 a room.
several thousand dollars depending on the number of rooms you have.

the contractor will most likely hire a sub contractor and the sub contractor will either find an additional painting sub contractor or he will actually have painters at his disposal or as employees.

then if you ask the painter how much he is getting paid he will most likely tell you just above minimum wage.

the painter might work 3-4 hours for 2 days and move between other painting jobs.

whats going to have to happen will have to be something other than the average contractor sub contractor scenario.

where most of the initial cost is actually spent on materials and labor, and not put in the prime contractors pocket.

its the same with solar power only much more has to go into the materials cost so when a new house is built you would probably have to pay a contactor at least $10,000 extra just to put in his pocket if you wanted a solar power system.

then the price of the house would go up apx $20,000 to cover the materials , labor , and the contractors pocket cash and of course the additional value to the home.

what Im trying to say is that although the materials price has greatly decreased, the installation cost is probably being increased to consume any savings.

if it could be done much like the satelight tv installers that make apx $80.00 an installation that takes an hour or so to perform.

then the installation labor cost would drop to around $200.00 for a average 2 bedroom home.

this would provide 2 installers $20.00 an hour for 5 hours.
thats what its going to take to really get it going strong.











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So it should be easier in countries with low wages. Panels and electricity costs are probably fairly uniform around the world, but labor is a bit excessive in developed places.

But then a developing country probably doesn't have renewable energy incentives, so it's that much harder.

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Kallog

Quote:
So it should be easier in countries with low wages. Panels and electricity costs are probably fairly uniform around the world, but labor is a bit excessive in developed places.


Just imagine living in china and working in one of the many wallmart owned factories there that produce the worlds products that are sold in wallmart stores.

you want to use solar power to decrease your electric bill
however you only earn $0.13 Cents an hour.
you work 15 hours every day 7 days a week but you still only earn apx $13.65 a week.

if you saved every cent that you made for 6 months you could only afford to buy 1 $82.20 solar pannel like the ones being discussed here.

this is not just happening in china its all over the world
most of the developing nations are being used as slave labor farms by corporations.

So the developing nations people cant afford to be energy efficient even if they wanted to , and Im sure there are billions that would love to have a solar power system of their own to reduce their monthly bills.

but they have to choose to buy food and shelter and clothing first.

the price of energy isnt that great here because of our minimum wage laws but to them it is a strangle hold or death grip that gets stronger every year.

but if things dont change and the corporations dont move jobs back to the U.S. and to all the other developed countries where jobs have been removed in favor of the slave labor in china and other developing nations even our minimum wages will be lowered in order to allow more people to work in a more competitive market.

remember that the next time you buy a product made in another country.


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Chinese factory workers earn about 10 times that, and plenty of people earn much more.

I see your point that the parts costs are higher in a low-wage country. But if (a big if) you're already paying international prices for power, and using just as much, then you can automatically afford the solar panel with the same couple of years pay-back.

Actual $0.13/hour workers probably aren't paying power bills!

Your idea of taking jobs from the poorest people to make the richest even richer is pretty unethical!! Every working American should be happy to take a big pay cut if it means a whole family in India can afford enough food. Try telling your idea to a low-paid factory worker who's elderly parents will die without their work. There is very little adult slave labor these days. Typically the workers are only bound by their desire for money. Just as many workers in America are.

It's win-win really. Nobody can doubt that China is a much better place to live today than it was before it started making things for Americans. And America is better off too!

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Kallog

Quote:
A 2008 report by the National Labor Committee found that workers making holiday ornaments for Wal-Mart in Guangzhou, China were paid only 2/3 of the legal minimum wage, often worked 95 hour weeks, and were forced to work for months without a single day off. The report also found that children as young as 12 worked in the factory and that workers handled dangerous chemicals without even the most rudimentary form of protection, leading to serious skin rashes and sores. ["A Wal-Mart Christmas: Brought to You by a Sweatshop in China," The National Labor Committee, December 2007


http://wakeupwalmart.com/facts/

I believe that the 2/3 legal minimum wage mentioned above is the minimum wage in china.

Quote:
The highest is „780 per month or „4.66 (~US$0.68) an hour (in Guangzhou city). The lowest is „450 per month or „2.69 (~US$0.39) an hour.[17]


not all wallmart factories are located in Guangzhou city as it has the highest minimum wage in china.
the movie I watched titled
"wallmart the high cost of low prices"
showed a factory in china where the workers were paid $0.13 cents an hour so the wallmart factory in the film must have been located in the lowest minimum wage areas of china and it seems that they have raised the minimum wage since the film was made because $0.13 cents would only be 1/3 of $0.39 cents an hour.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_law#People.27s_Republic_of_China

The facts are that our country the U.S. cant sustain these low wages of other countries that are causing our workers to lose their jobs.

I agree that it would not be a good thing for the people in other countries if they had no source of income , however all they will ever gain with the non competitive wages is a extreme lack of internal security.

their economy is extremely dependant on almost the entire world. they need to grow their own economy and higher wages is the only way this can be accomplished.

a factory worker making $0.39 cents an hour cannot buy hardly anything therefore their economy cannot even be sustainable without the stable economies of other countries.

and if their low wages is causing instability in the countries that their economy depends on then that is not a wise venture.








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What would you prefer? That china never made cheap products for America? Where would that leave it? Subsistance farming? Brutal communism? Certainly much worse off than it is today. Now they're so wealthy the government is hoping to create a domestic consumer market comparable to America, as you suggested. That would be impossible without all those exports, and those exports would be impossible without low wages.

However they could certainly improve things for people, at the expense of economic growth by allowing their yuan to appreciate rather than keeping it locked to the USD. This would stealthily make all Chinese richer and Americans poorer without causing a riot.

It's very misleading to measure wages in USD when they're not being spent in America. When I lived in eastern Europe my rent was $30US/week in the most expensive district of the capital city, 10min walk from parliament. The metro train cost about 10c to travel anywhere in the city. If somebody earned $0.60/hour and lived with their extended family (very common), they'd be OK.

Well my main point is that it's really wrong to take a job from a poor person and give it to a rich person, simply because you imagine the poor person doesn't want their job. Americans lost their own jobs by demanding too much pay! That's why so much IT is done in India - the Indians are lower bidders in a free market, it's totally fair. They can afford to demand low wages because they don't waste their money on McDonalds, petrol and big TVs, the way Americans do.

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Quote:
What would you prefer? That china never made cheap products for America? Where would that leave it? Subsistance farming? Brutal communism? Certainly much worse off than it is today. Now they're so wealthy the government is hoping to create a domestic consumer market comparable to America, as you suggested. That would be impossible without all those exports, and those exports would be impossible without low wages.


in the movie "wallmart the high cost of low prices" a product made in china that sells in a U.S. wallmart for $19.00 only had a combined materials , production , and shipping cost of $0.38 cents by the time it was put on the shelves in a wallmart in the U.S.

what I get out of that is that the chinese people could buy these products , if they were allowed to because they make enought and the price is within their wage range , even with a 100% mark up of the materials , production ,
and including the shipping cost that woud not be necessary
they could sell the product for $0.76 cents U.S.

but they couldnt afford to buy the product for the $19.00
that it sells for in the U.S.

heres the real dangerous part.
there is no way that a factory in the U.S. can build that product for $0.38 cents.

if a factory did try to start up to build that product and compete with wallmart then given that wallmart has a 5000% markup on that particular product all they would need to do is keep dropping their prices until the new company folded up its sidewalks and closed the doors.

which is what they do.

Quote:
those exports would be impossible without low wages


I can see $18.62 cents per each product produced including its shipping that would allow for higher wages in china that would also allow for new buisnesses to start up in other countries to produce this particular product.

so Im not falling for that one.

Quote:
However they could certainly improve things for people, at the expense of economic growth by allowing their yuan to appreciate rather than keeping it locked to the USD. This would stealthily make all Chinese richer and Americans poorer without causing a riot.


its all connected if the chinese leverage their monetary system then there will be less products purchased from china so both would suffer.

but the U.S. wouldnt suffer long , if the sun comes up the next day the buisnessmen will find ways to make more money.
thats what they do.

Quote:
Well my main point is that it's really wrong to take a job from a poor person and give it to a rich person, simply because you imagine the poor person doesn't want their job. Americans lost their own jobs by demanding too much pay!


Americans lost their jobs because the buisnessmen decided they could make loads more money if they deserted the American people by producing the products they sell to the American people in other countries.



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I sense you have a prejudice towards Americans. I don't want to put money in the pocket of a greedy overpaid American worker when somebody who needs the money more will do the same job for less. It's called the free market.




Of course some countries won't be able to compete in some markets. But it's a self correcting problem. Back in the day Japan was making the cheap products that nobody could undercut, Then it was Hong Kong and Korea, then it was China, now China's getting too wealthy so Vietnam and other places are taking over. Oh and it gets worse:

"Trade between China and Africa soared 40% to a record $55.5 billion last year. Direct investment has reached a cumulative $6.5 billion. A whopping third of Chinese oil now comes from Africa."

Now those poor Africans are being abused by the rich Chinese businessmen selling things to rich Chinese consumers! Where will Africa turn when it finally needs cheap labor? American perhaps wink

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Kallog

and then after the americans become rich again after performing the cheap labor for the africans they will need the cheap labor that could be found in the japanese people again , etc , etc , etc , over and over again and again.

but if countries build there own economies that can support there own people then that would not happen.

Im not saying that all trade should be done away with
but that more responcibility should be taken to ensure that
each country can sustain itself without a large dependance on other countries.

this way the rich couldnt take advantage of the poor the
way they do.

Quote:
I sense you have a prejudice towards Americans.


No Im not prejudice towards any countries people.




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Tell me what China should do if it always paid its workers the same as American workers? It wouldn't have any industry, for a start. What then? Peasant farmers? Is poverty OK as long as nobody benefits from it?

Maybe poverty in Africa is OK because nobody is taking advantage of those people. They brought it on themselves and should just become self-sufficient?

Free international trade is a way of transferring money from rich countries to poor countries, evening out the differences. And everybody wins! Well there is one loser - national pride.

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Quote:
Free international trade is a way of transferring money from rich countries to poor countries, evening out the differences. And everybody wins! Well there is one loser - national pride.


if it worked that way , but it doesnt.

look at the $19.00 product sold in wallmart that is produced in china.

from what I see , china gets a extremely small portion of the $19.00 and the american wallmart workers get just above minimum wage and wallmart tells its employees to apply for government assistance.

the only transfer of wealth is from the people in america who purchase the wallmart product to the owners of wallmart.

those who own wallmart take that $18.62 profit and build more wallmart stores and more factories in china and other countries where low wages can be found.

this only perpetuates the problem.

now lets look at it this way.

what if the chinese workers were paid $5.00 U.S. per hour.

just suppose it takes 1 hour for 1 employee to produce the product and the factory has 100 employees.
thats $500.00 an hour labor.

wallmart still makes $1,400 profit from the sale of the 100 products.

now suppose those 100 employees put 100 dollars an hour in the bank for 1 year , that would be 547,000 dollars a year in savings.
given that they still get to work 15 hours a day.

they still have $400.00 an hour to spend durring the year.
they will buy product after product and because they buy so many products those 100 employees can buy land , build factories , and work in the factories they now own.
or they can hire more employees at $5.00 per hour to ensure that the economy continues to sustain itself.

they would be building their own sustainable economy.
even if they reduced exports their economy would sustain itself.

and they could think of exports as extra income not as their prime source of income.

and as long as the rich in china dont horde all the profits the growth will continue.

I know its more complicated than that but you should understand that a sustainable economy depends on people spending money and if they dont have enought to spend then
the companies that hire them will eventually have to fire them.

here is a film about the year of leap forward
it was made in 1958.
was this before free trade?.

http://www.archive.org/details/gov.archives.arc.643188











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Chinese workers are doing the same thing Marx's English workers did. They're getting richer and becoming able to buy the things they make.

Unfortunately I couldn't watch that whole movie because my internet is too slow. But the great leap forward is widely regarded as one of the worst tragedies in human history, putting the holocaust to shame. Tens of millions starved to death because farmers were made to work in factories, despite the fact the people wanted food more desperately than they wanted steel.

You're still assuming that people who have very low living costs actually need as much money as somebody living in New York. When I worked in England I thought I'd be fabulously rich, until I realized my rent was 3 times higher and food was twice the price.

You're also putting fairness ahead of quality of life. It actually doesn't hurt anybody if some rich guy gets rich. The only problem is jealousy.

If the workers are so disgruntled, why don't they go back to their farms? The Chinese are laughing all the way to the bank with their fistfuls of US dollars. Walmart is already helping Chinese people by giving them jobs. If you want to provide charity then pay out of your own pocket, don't ask them to give away money just because they're rich.

But getting back towards science (oops!), did you see the 'wood burning bus'? Those things, wood gasifiers, are amazing. Who needs petrol when you can just pour sawdust into the tank! Hehe well not quite, but it certainly works, and could help us if we suddenly run out of oil. Greenies should love them, totally carbon neutral, better than batteries.

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Hey have a look at 9:20 in the video! It's even perfectly on topic for this thread!

It almost makes me want to go bush just so I can build one of those. And drive into town with my wood gas car :P

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Quote:
Chinese workers are doing the same thing Marx's English workers did. They're getting .......... give away money just because they're rich.


what ever , I guess you pretty much have it all figured out.

Quote:
did you see the 'wood burning bus'?


it caught my eye , there not as amazing as you seem to think , the wood gassifiers like the one on the bus use wood as a heat source to release the hydrogen gas that the engine burns as a fuel.
they were used durring ww2 on a large scale.

heres a gassifier that can be built at home it uses wood pellets.

http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/1322/

and heres a link to plans to build one ... its extremely informative.

http://www.gengas.nu/byggbes/contents.shtml


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Yep I do have it all figured out :P

About the woodburners, but sorry matey, after seeing that Jefferson video, I seem to think they're even more amazing than before! Yea they take time to warm up, and maybe the fuel doesn't last long, but you can just chop down some more fuel along the way :P

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LOL...
you would be chopping down trees along the highway
and I would be driving by and waving because mine would
be runing on 100% water !!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JbXLGIL_fc&feature=related

the backfire is occuring because the spark plug fires each time the piston is at just below TDC and because the intake valve is opening at this time the spark ignights the Hydrogen that is being fed into the engine.

Im sure that this would also work fine with a small engine that is powering a small generator , perhaps a 3kW gen set

I know most people think that the same amount of energy required to generate the hydrogen is all you could get out of a engine that runs on hydrogen , even less.

I have seen hydrogen generator cells that consume apx 130 watts @ 13 volts and 10 amps , so using a 3 kW gen set should leave apx 2870 watts room for more gas if needed
and whatever is left over is free energy.

before long we might see people reaching down and pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.


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