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Solar Power, now!

daenku32 said:
While Indiana is not exactly a great place as far as sunlight (compared to pretty much every other place in the states), a nice government subsidied program to build huge solar collectors on all of the over 100,000 square foot buildings.
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I don't know how smart it would be to install solar panels in such a manner if you are not in the desert. I did not think that solar panels were that versatile, so if your area experienced any major weather problems, I am willing to bet the solar panel system would suffer damage. Especially if it were to hail, or maybe even snow.
 
NoZed Avenger said:
Efficiency of the cells means more than higher cost.

Has anyone run the math to see what the surface area of solar collectors/cells would have to be in order to generate even 10% of our national energy needs?

I'll try to do some looking later, but my memory was that current technology would require the panels to cover the entire surface of a small-to-medium state in its entirety. I don't trust my memory on that item, but I do question the practicality -- at the current level of efficiency.
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I'll take 10% if I can coat my future house' roof with it for a couple grand. 10% would provide tremendous revenue for solar development. I imagine groups of scientists in universities are cheaper than oil explorations in the arctic.

Check this out!
http://www.spheralsolar.com/8_products/4_building-integrated.asp
ps. Sorry for all the links to companies, I certainly do not advocate the purchase of any of these products, merely the discussion of solar usability.
 
Living in the American southwest, I've always been a big advocate of solar power and considering that annual rainfall where I am typically amounts to nearly two inches a year, I couldn't imagine a better place than the SW to position solar collectors. Wind power is also grossly underestimated, and I know of at least two LARGE canyons nearby where the wind ALWAYS seems to be blowing.

I do think it's hilarious that the people everyone used to point at and call "tree-huggers" are going to be seen as visionaries in the near future. ;)
 
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It will happen slowly if at all. You will see solar powered cell phones and lawn mowers long before houses. The sun cant meet the energy needs of my PDA so how can I expect it to power my house anytime soon.

Why do people expect soloar power to instatnly make the leap from calculators to cars and houses? Thats usually not how things happen the technology has to develope you cant just force it.
 
daenku32 said:
I work in an industrial park that has huge warehouse type buildings, and not a lot of pollution. I have no doubt the park uses plenty of electricity though. Most of which is probably made by the coal plant in our city.

While Indiana is not exactly a great place as far as sunlight (compared to pretty much every other place in the states), a nice government subsidied program to build huge solar collectors on all of the over 100,000 square foot buildings.

I believe if the government worked with large manufacturers they could easily agree to build few hundred square miles of solar paneling and it's equipment at relatively low per unit cost, thereby reducing solar energy products to commodity easily afforded by individuals.

Using mass production and vast empty spaces above warehouse type buildings would generate cheap and invisible energy solution, not to mention thousands of jobs.

What better time to get this project going than during the fall, so that by next summer we'll be enjoying it's benefits.

While coal would still need to be used especially during winter, the plants could use the low consumption summers to maintain and upgrade their systems.
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Sorry, but fossil fuels are still very much a victim of there own success.

Take gasoline, for example. Once is produced, it can be easily transported, stored, and its energy content does not diminish with age. Further, due to its viscous liquid state and high energy to mass ratio it can be used to power everything from a small wheedwhacker to a very fast airplane.

Or, take coal, for example. Once it is mined, like gasoline it can be easily transported, stored, and its energy content does not diminish with age. Unlike gasoline, it is solid and does not have the high energy to mass ratio, therefore is not well suited to portable engines. However because of its very low storage costs (just pile up outside in large heaps) low cost, and vast reserves, it is ideally suited for large, stationary, facilities which need a substantial amount of raw energy, such as power plants.

The real problems with solar power are low efficiency (I think the current record is about 20%), variable lighting conditions, and the lack of a way to store large amounts of electricity. Things like batteries and fuel cells are rather good at storing fairly small amounts of electricity for the purpose of powering small devices for a brief amount of time, but are unsuited to the vast amounts of storage that would be supplement the grid during days of cloudy weather and/or times of darkness.

If someone could come up with a very efficient solar cell (say in the 50% range) and a practical way to store millions of kilowatt-hours, then the use of fossil fuels would drop markedly.
 
Anti_Hypeman said:
It will happen slowly if at all. You will see solar powered cell phones and lawn mowers long before houses. The sun cant meet the energy needs of my PDA so how can I expect it to power my house anytime soon.

Why do people expect soloar power to instatnly make the leap from calculators to cars and houses? Thats usually not how things happen the technology has to develope you cant just force it.
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Certainly you are right, but had we dedicated more attention to the technology we could have been closer to that "jump" than we are now. Still, solar and wind power could amount to a fair amount of usable power for homes and businesses. Of course, the problem is, after the intial expense and routine maintenance there's very little overhead - corporations couldn't claim rate increases were the result of foreign dominance over that power source.

BTW, I already have a solar powered lawnmower - I've got a Mexican with a rotary that does the lawn once a week. ;) I'm also very interested in Xeriscaping which is something closely tied to my interest in Japanese landscaping and Ikebana. All easily tied to energy efficiency. :)
 
My take on Solar cells is that they just don't cut it. Producers currently use junk and surplus silicone form the semiconductor industry. Otherwise, production costs more in electricity than the cell will make over it's life time. But, they are good for small scale 'off the grid' uses, like emergency battery chargers for off road travelers, or the convenience of calculators.

BUT, there are some much more complicated solar energy plants using parabolic reflectors to create steam for a generating plant. Computers are used to run actuators to keep the heat focused on the receptors. I don't know how long the pay-back is though, probably so long as to not be profitible or we would all have one already. I am a firm believer in the capitalistic evolution system: if money can be made, a company will evolve to make it... once the technology gets invented.
 
casebro said:
I don't know how long the pay-back is though, probably so long as to not be profitible or we would all have one already.
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I had a lab instructor who build a home 'off the grid,' as part of a pilot for a commercial venture. I had an opportunity to take a tour (we also conducted measurements using smaller panels in her yard). She calculated the pay-back as 20 years.

Clearly, you'd have to care about the emissions. If you did care about free power, you'd have to plan to live there for decades.

There could, perhaps, be some sort of massively parallel effort to 'supplement' the grid, I suppose.

Check this out:

http://www.nrel.gov/csp/1000mw_initiative.html
 
As I understand it, it currently requires almost as much energy to construct a solor cell as that cell can be expected to produce in it's lifetime. Plus, there are all sorts of nasty waste products including PCBs resulting from the manufacture. Takes more energy to clean those up. Plus the materials used to make them are not that plentiful so large-scale manufacture of photovoltaics could result in shortages of other kinds. I can't find any good sources for this, but this little website has a couple of interesting links.

Does that mean we should abandon research into solar energy? Absolutely not. Just realize that it is not the silver bullet that so many are hoping for. Everything comes with a price tag.
 
Tricky said:
it is not the silver bullet that so many are hoping for. Everything comes with a price tag.
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No technology is.

The only technology I have ever seen that even vaguely resembles some sort of magic silver bullet is nuclear fusion. Re-create a star on earth, and you have a much more accessible energy source than with solar panels. Just a few wee problems...

:D
 
Jimbo07 said:
No technology is.
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But in this case, it's not even a lead bullet. It's more like a tofu bullet.
Jimbo07 said:
The only technology I have ever seen that even vaguely resembles some sort of magic silver bullet is nuclear fusion. Re-create a star on earth, and you have a much more accessible energy source than with solar panels. Just a few wee problems...:D
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Where's that dang cold fusion we were promised by the woos?

But if we could build a wee star on earth, then couldn't we create a wee black hole here on earth? Then we'd have a place to put the nuclear waste from conventional fission reactors.
 
Tricky said:
But if we could build a wee star on earth, then couldn't we create a wee black hole here on earth? Then we'd have a place to put the nuclear waste from conventional fission reactors.
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There have been people who have wondered if particle accelerators could achieve a black hole (I don't know what the current thinking is).

The mechanism to achieve fusion on earth is different than a star. In a star, you're relying on gravity from the incredible mass of material. On earth, you are relying on high-temperature plasmas (much hotter than the sun's core), and magnetic or laser confinement, and have to watch for high-energy neutrons.

Start here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion

BTW, I got sidetracked browsing ITER's website. My inner skeptic takes a back seat as I uncritically label fusion protestors as 1D10Ts :D
 
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NoZed Avenger said:
Efficiency of the cells means more than higher cost.

Has anyone run the math to see what the surface area of solar collectors/cells would have to be in order to generate even 10% of our national energy needs?

I'll try to do some looking later, but my memory was that current technology would require the panels to cover the entire surface of a small-to-medium state in its entirety. I don't trust my memory on that item, but I do question the practicality -- at the current level of efficiency.
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I ran these numbers a couple of years ago assuming 100% our electrical production needs at a crazy %50 eff.

The state of Florida would just about suffice, IIRC.
 
daenku32 said:
I work in an industrial park that has huge warehouse type buildings, and not a lot of pollution. I have no doubt the park uses plenty of electricity though. Most of which is probably made by the coal plant in our city.

While Indiana is not exactly a great place as far as sunlight (compared to pretty much every other place in the states), a nice government subsidied program to build huge solar collectors on all of the over 100,000 square foot buildings.
Click to expand...

Depends on what you want to do.

Solar heating and water heating are doable. The technology couldn't be simpler. Get some pipes and paint them black. Run water through them. If you want to get fancy, you can do better than this.

Solar air-conditioning is doable, but it still gets hot in the mornings while the air conditioners are getting up to speed. And you're going to have to do a tiny Bhopal with some really nasty chemicals, like ammonia gas.

Solar lighting is, of course, doable. Skylights and windows.

Solar power generation is not doable. People talk about costs, but of course, most people are so stupid that they imagine that it's just green pieces of paper, and not energy costs. Three decades ago, the best photovoltaic cells had to run for three decades at the Equator just to recoup the energy that it took to make them. They're better, now. I think it's down to one decade at the Equator and a couple of decades where you live.

And if you talk about replacing them with better ones, then you're talking about using more coal to make some more.

Not that many leftists will care. The leftist enviro-whacked thing is all about feeling superior, masturbating, and spooing on the ceiling. Many of them really don't care that proposals will result in more fossil fuel use, so long as they can say, "Wow, solar!" between bong hits. There was a big governmental program to add ethanol to gasoline in the early 1980s, and it went on for a while. It was called "gasohol." Automobile manufacturers didn't like it because ethanol tends to wear out engines, which also of course require energy to replace, but they were required by the Federal Government to say that gasohol was OK. Anyway, eventually, someone in the government who didn't smoke so much dope realized that the production of ethanol used more oil than just making the damn stuff into gasoline, and it was stopped. Now people have forgotten all about that, and people are trying to do ethanol again.

Note, however, that there do exist techniques for solar power generation. They involve using mirrors to concentrate sunlight onto boilers for conventional steam engines or Stirling engines. They're pretty, too. But you need an awful lot of land.
 
epepke said:
There was a big governmental program to add ethanol to gasoline in the early 1980s, and it went on for a while. It was called "gasohol." ... eventually, someone ... realized that the production of ethanol used more oil than just making the damn stuff into gasoline, and it was stopped. Now people have forgotten all about that, and people are trying to do ethanol again.
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Wrong.

You wouldn't happen to be Cornell's David Pimentel would you?

:D
 
We have ethanol in our fuel at certain times a year here

It is AWFUL! I can lose up to 5 degrees of total timing in my car running that junk, it just pings mercilessly, or I can run quite a bit richer, losing fuel mileage

Now if we could get straight methanol...
 
pipelineaudio said:
It is AWFUL! I can lose up to 5 degrees of total timing in my car running that junk, it just pings mercilessly, or I can run quite a bit richer, losing fuel mileage
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Year? Make? Model? % Blend?

That runs counterintuitively. In the States anyway, ethanol is being used as an oxygenate, replacing MTBE. Presumably, the higher octane rating should reduce pinging (if you were even experiencing it in the first place). In a modern vehicle, maybe your O2 sensors are leading to an adjustment in your mixture, I don't know.

Carrying on: regardless of energy efficiency, none of ethanol, methanol, low sulphur diesel, or c H2 are magic bullets, either.

From the little that I can tell, ethanol is being adopted in U.S. fuels simply as a 'least of green evils.'
 
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