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Grim stuff...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4660938.stm

"It's the irreversibility that I think brings it home to people"...

The sad thing is is that I live in Arizona right now and have seen some interesting statistics on how much energy could be produced if an area the size of Maricopa county was turned into the solar farm. I got this information from a solar panel provider, they stated that the entire country's power needs could be filled by just such a solar farm. In looking around Maricopa county all we would really have to do is put solar panels on top of all the stores, warehouses and strip malls and we could get there fairly easily.

Will probably not happen in my lifetime though, no money in it.

My uncles in Germany have solar panels on their houses and not a month goes by where they are not selling power to the power company there. It is such an easy, clean and readily available source of energy.

60 mi^2 are necessary to solar generate 1 GW electrical. In 2003 the US consumed 8.9x10^15 BTU electrical,

http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/iea/wecbtu.html

or 2608 GW-hrs. You would need a continuous sheet of 156,000 mi^2 of the best solar cells to generate it. Call it 400 miles by 400 miles of continuous primo silicon solar cell.

Silicon has a density of 2.33 g/cm^2. Your basic solar cell is 500 microns thick, with 50% starting lost to wire-sawing the ingot to wafer, polishing, etc.,

(0.1 cm)[(400 miles)(5280 ft/mile)(12 in/ft)(2.54 cm/in)]^2(2.33 g/cm^2)(1 tonne/10^6 g) = 966 million metric tonnes of single crystal silicon assuming 100% chip yield.

The us produces 3 billion tonnes/year of aggregate (crushed stone). You would need that much purified quartz sand to make the silicon. You'd have to vacuum every beach down to bedrock from Maine to Washington State. Now then git - how much energy does it require to make a kilogram of single crystal silicon? A kilogram of solar cell?

How long must you run your solar farm to replace the energy necessary to create that farm? During how much of its nominal 20-year life will the farm generate net energy? What is your discounted cashflow/return on investment?

http://www.solarbuzz.com/SolarPrices.htm

Solar electricity costs more than 4X what average electricity costs - including massive tax breaks ("incentives"). The day the free ride quits solar energy quits.

Idiot.

Thanks Al.

It is always good to know there are people out there that can murder any potential solution by taking an extremist position.

The current problem does not qualify for one monolithic solution. Or haven't you noticed we currently have a mixture of nuclear, hydroelectric, coal, and other sources.

If you find a way around arithmetic, tell us. (Alain Connes doesn't count). A stupid idea in the small is still a stupid idea when wrought huge.

Having one insanely expensive way to generate negative net energy is not better if divided up into ten insanely expensive ways to generate negative net energy. The E*L*E*C*T*R*I*C car was thermodynamically impossible. How much research would fix that?

Actually they have an electric sports car the Tzero I think that has better acceleration then every other sports car out there and a very long battery life.

As far as solar, if you look into what scientists are doing with making it more efficient and less costly you will see that it is quite possible to supply a large amount of power for relatively cheap cost. I am at work so I cannot source hunt but I will put links up next week when I am back from my trip to California.

Blair thinks, that his "scientists" understand the relation between warming and fuel emission.

If they had a good model, there would be no need in uncertain statements by the report and by every person quoted in the article.

They do not know what they are talking about.

ES

I can double your projeted output with a simple correction right here. Unless you are throwing the silicon dust from your cutting/polishing process away, you should be using 0.05cm as the thickness. Recycle.

With engineers like you, the problem will never be solved.

The economics of the problem are very simple. Energy is still relatively cheap with an oil based economy. This will only get more expensive with time. So, the smart countries will buy oil now and use it to make as much alternative energy capacity as they can.

The cost of solar energy has dropped dramatically in the last 30 years. The cost of oil is going up. You can use the numbers in today's economy, or be intelligent. The ratio (cost of solar/cost of oil) is obviously going to change in our lifetimes. Whether one can obtain a net energy gain from solar is a question that should be debated by people who don't throw 50% of their recyclable raw materials in the dump.

Uncle Al has no vision. This is a man who copies other people's work off the web in order to look intelligent. This is a guy whose idea of vision is a proposal that someone "start" looking at organic superconductors (a field with an active 40 year history and over 50 demonstrated examples). His plan is to be a bitter old man sitting in his rocker saying, "I told you things were going to get crappy". He is waiting for the future to happen.

The future is created by those with vision.

From my grade school days, I would put it this way--the intersection of the set of people with vision and the set of Uncle Al is the empty set.

Go back to your lighthouse. Any scheme that denies thermodynamics is empirically impossible. Drive that through your thick skull into your tiny overheated brain.

Make the loss of ingot sawing to wafer zero. Make the process yield 100% both for wafer area and finished devices. Let space aliens from the Star Nebula pay for it all. Nothing about the unavoidable arithmetic conclusion alters by more than a factor of 3. 1600 mi^2 of primo silicon solar cell cannot be manufactured. If it were manufactured, most of its useful life would be devoted to repaying the energy expended to fabricate it. All Enviro-whiner green schemes are energy-negative or grievously inefficient. STOOOPID.
The future is created by those who show up for work. Go ahead, piss and moan and whine and fart and expostulate and puff your hollow chest. "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."

The Space Scuttle boosts mass into low Earth orbit for a direct (not amortized) cost of $30-40 gram. A disposable Saturn V booster did it for $8-10/gram (constant dollars). Fly the Space Scuttle all you want. It's STOOOPID as an act and LETHAL as national policy. It's porkbarrel and political cynosure - FEMA in space.
Let's extrapolate the curve so that they'll pay you to take their product. Power too cheap to meter! Where have we heard that before?

A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick. Go back and read it as a warning rather than as a suggestion.

You stated "If you find a way around arithmetic, tell us." Well, a first glance showed that you made a mistake in the arithetic. Perhaps you should have copied your arguments from somone else on the web. It seems to work well for you.

You seem to have difficulty staying on topic. Shuttle/Saturn V?!? FEMA? Your debating skills are on a par with your technical ability.

There is very possibly no answer to the problem of supplying energy in the future. The answer will take more than showing up for work. The answer will require creative people showing up for work and actually doing work. The answer isn't on Google, so I don't expect to see you post it.

As noted above, the only contribution I have seen you make to what research should be performed is organic superconductors. Predicting the past, now that is vision!

GIVEN 100% MATERIAL CONVERSION AND FREE FINANCING, THE NUMBERS ARE STILL ARITHMETICALLY IMPOSSIBLE. What part of IMPOSSIBLE do you claim is negotiable?

Do you have a bad case of theological canthariasis? Oh, of course you do. Your mantra is that everything will be OK if we all work together and believe. Enviro-whiner motherboards built of macerated chicken feathers and soybean-derived resins are a bad joke,

http://www.firingsquad.com/news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=7724

In a proper world we'd gene-gineer factory farm chickens without feathers. In a proper world nobody would caterwaul about 1600 mi^2 of single crystal silicon solar cells as though it had some basis in reality. That is the total water area of Alabama.

J. Arthur God and his lighthouse could be an advocate for amorphous silicon solar cells. The price would be way lower than single crystal silicon... and he'd be buying 77,000 mi^2 of them for the same energy output. Would the bulk discount be large enough to render the purchase price negative?

US Patent 6692985. "Production costs for solar cells with thin film polysilicon are quite low, because glass is used as substrate." Hey J. Arthur God, ya wanna put in an RFP for 77,000 mi^2 of microscope cover slip?

What will Enviro-whiner's say about putting a land area exceeding that of Nebraska into perpetual darkness? Self-righteous idiot.

"Wool, the University of Delaware researcher, receives the feathers after Emery converts the feather fiber into keratin mats that resemble paper towels. They are then placed into a mold, layered on top of one another and infused with a soybean resin that hardens and forms the composite. The material is then put through the circuit-printing process to become a circuit board."

This guy sounds like a modern-day George Washington Carver! Neat link, Al, thanks for posting it.

George Washington Carver deftly avoided discovering peanut butter. Almost of of his loudly touted work simply disappeared. Nobody is going to build an inferior mobo for 10X the cost of fiberglas-epoxy... unless government subsidized. Consider the Trabant and the E*L*E*C*T*R*I*C car. Both evaporated like morning dew during a Santa Ana wind when their respective Federal subsidies ceased.

Discovery (knowlege) into science (mathematical model, stuff) into technology (reduction to practice) into engineering (things) into Sales and Marketing. The early part justifies itself if for nothing else then to avoid repetition. As we touch engineering we should always ask, "if we had such a thing, would we want it?" If the answer is "no," stop. That works for social engineering, too - if all our education resources were devoted toward empowering cripples to eventually play baketball and certified morons to eventually do arithmetic, would we want it?

Wouldn't we be better off tossing some resources to our most intelligent students, the ones who could be creating employment and paying taxes as adults?

Another example of an inopportune "yes" answer is Microcrap's Origami, just debuted at CeBIT. It's a truly wonderful amalgam of technologies minaturized into a small, very full garbage can. It's unsalable crap. Somebody should have screamed loud and long before Micrcrap made two of them.

As I recall, the origional post was about rise in sea levels.
Where is our cry of 'stoopid` to the application of funds to the
rebuilding of New Orleans, below sea level, in an area that is
subsiding, next to an increasingly unmanagable elongated,
artificially maintained river channel, in a Hurricane vulnerable area.

Pragmatist

"Politicians are not born, they are excreted."
- Some perceptive antique Greek.

Politicians are not born, they are excreted."
- Some perceptive antique Greek.

- Now I like that.

Welcome Pragmatist.

Regards,

Blacknad.

As promised articles regarding the waiting lists for electric cars which states that electric cars were not killed due to lack of demand and some new breakthroughs in solar energy that make it cheaper and more efficient.
Enjoy Al and all

electric car

", but the company claimed that it could not sell the car in enough quantities to make the EV1 profitable, despite long waiting lists and customers motivated enough to market the EV1 on their own dimes. The program was stopped in 2003. [4]"

waiting list2

solar

spray on solar cells using nanotech This is a National Geographic article from 2005

Bulldoze New Orleans flat. Add soon to be underground utilities (power, water, natural gas, sewage, communication) and a subway system. Fill in the hole with dredge. When New New Orleans is comfortably above sea level less 100 years' subsidence, start building.

It won't cost any more than what they are doing now. Civil engineers dream about a big existing hole to be developed, then filled over, then built upon.

The bigger problem is abolishing Code Napoleon and installing a real legal system based upon English Common Law.

Ah, the old schoolyard/internet debate trick--misrepresent my argument.

Here was my statement:
"There is very possibly no answer to the problem of supplying energy in the future."

You are obviously in this to argue, shout and insult rather than take part in an actual debate.

As to what part of "impossible" do I find negotiable? Well, when a plagiarist with poor math/science skills tells me it is "impossible", I don't take him at his word.

Now, go ahead an misrepresnt what I stated and pretend that I am supporting PV solar as the solution to the world's ills.

Wow, you do have a problem staying on-topic.

If you can educate someone of below normal intelligence and make that person a productive, tax-paying citizen, eyou have gained something tangible for society.

When you pay for a smart doofus to go to grad school so (s)he can avoid life for a while, you have wasted resources.

As I recall, the government paid for you to go to graduate school with an NSF grant. When you dropped out (or was it thrown out, you have been vague on that point), did you pay that money back? Think of the person who didn't go to grad school because that grant was wasted. (S)he might have finished. Is society better off?

As one who has sucked hard at the teat of government largess, you seem somewhat bitter that anyone else would do so.

J. Arthur God never posts numbers or valid references to back his wild and petulant claims. J. Arthur God's universe is one of compassion. Liberalism fails when it runs out of others' money.