Re: if you were president

On 13 May 2007 08:04:39 -0700, $Zero <zero@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On May 11, 11:11?pm, Josh Hill <userepl...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Solar cells aren't the main course for that, although
they are on the menu a la carte.

well, i certainly don't disagree that harnessing wind power has a
higher ERORI than solar power at this point. and it may always be that
way.

still, as predictable sources of energy conversion go, solar is
probably still more widely reliable than wind, and even if it wasn't,
it makes for a GREAT supplement during those times when winds are not
efficiently usable.

They can complement one another, since the sun tends to shine when the
wind isn't blowing and vice-versa, but solar isn't really more
reliable than wind -- even in the desert it goes away every night! --
and it may actually be easier to tame the intermittency problem by
tying wind farms together.

and we both agree that electrical storage techniques are a high
priority, innovation-wise.

It's the only short- or moderate-term solution I know of other than
large-scale carbon sequestration, which may not be possible, that
would prevent dependency on nuclear power.

meanwhile, the sun remains the single most important and reliable
factor in energy conversion.

As I said elsewhere, every source of energy we have save fission
depends on the sun.

yes. and solar panel energy conversions are probably the safest and
least damaging to the environment. hence my thinking that they should
be a high priority, research-wise.

Probably, but wind is really very very good, and it's a lot cheaper --
we could very likely go to 20% or so wind without raising the retail
cost of electricity more than a fraction of a cent -- and we have to
move /right away/ if we're to head off global warming.

No, it's not the same at all: I'm talking about costs and you're
talking about market manipulation.

no you're not.

how you miss that is beyond me.

anyway...

unfortunately, costs are largely inextricable from market
manipulation.

You aren't looking at this from an engineering perspective. Engineers
don't care about market manipulation. Engineers look at the cost of
components and labor and capital and so forth. In the real world, of
course, there are subsidies for the politically connected, and greedy
oil companies that will dump their product to hurt competition or
withhold products to drive up the price, depending. The best we can do
from an engineering perspective is to provide the most practical
technological options, and hope that the public will catch on and
elect politicians who will pay more attention to the public good than
to the likes of Enron. Which, given that Ken Lay was Dubya's largest
campaign contributor and *** Cheney still hasn't revealed the members
of his "energy task force," requires a /lot/ of hope.

The electricity from solar panels
costs something like three times as much as the electricity you buy
off the power grid

and you somehow think that isn't mostly due to market manipulation?

yikes.

Has little to do with market manipulation, Zero. Coal, oil, gas, and
nuclear energy all receive subsidies, and that's a genuine problem,
but so do solar cells. The semiconductor business goes through periods
of dumping and periods of price fixing -- I don't know if they quite
cancel out, but they don't account for the main problem: solar cells
are genuinely expensive, and while the cost has been coming down
steadily, we're still very far from where we have to be and AFAIK
nobody yet knows how or when they'll get there.

-- and that's only because you get to use the power
grid as a gigantic battery of sorts.

"only"?

nope. not even close.

Yes. Consider that the power company has to build and staff and
maintain enough capacity to provide the power for /every single solar
cell/ that's hooked up to it. That's expensive. So the only savings
are fuel, and even there, solar cells tend to shift baseline load to
peak load, so to some extent you're talking about substituting the
most expensive fossil fuel, natural gas, for the least expensive one,
coal.

Expecting people to switch to it
at the current level of technology is like expecting people to wipe
themselves with dollar bills: it would serve no purpose and it
wouldn't be affordable and they would probably be scratchy besides.

strawman alert.

No, it's the issue precisely.

Nah. Anybody with half a brain can see that we'll eventually have
solar cells with a positive EROEI.

"My well-considered response to that is it don't mean ***.
You have a positive EROEI or you don't bother."


Many are working towards that goal right now.

yes.

and the more the merrier.

point mine.

you'll counter claiming that there's no more needed at this point, to
which i say, WTF?

or you'll say that the resources would be better applied to wind
coversion research or some other "more promising" technology to which
i say, WTF?

why discourage ANY alternate clean energy research of which you
yourself concede will "eventually" have a positive EROEI:

I don't want to discourage anything -- if it were up to me, all
promising technologies would be receiving more funding. But if you
have limited funds, you apply it where it's most likely to do good.

"Anybody with half a brain can see that we'll eventually
have solar cells with a positive EROEI. "

that's what puzzles me, just so you understand my smartassed bantering
here.

that's why i later compare your thinking to that of George W. Bush.

meanwhile, i know that you're a gazillion times smarter than him, but
sometimes you're a bit careless in the presentation of your logic.

well, this is Usenet afterall.

right?

so..

i await your counter-banter.

Perhaps. I mean, I can't vouch for my presentation, since I'm not
writing an essay but responding tit-for-tat. But for whatever reason,
I think you've missed some of my points, or dropped the original
context, which was my presidential campaign promise to achieve energy
independence and stop global warming. And to do that at a cost we can
afford and people will accept, we have to move /right now./ So I've
examined technologies that are either here, or will be here in time.
Solar panels may have a role in the future, along with other promising
candidates like nuclear fusion, algae farming, and even lunar helium 3
mining. But, right now, our engineering options are limited. To
achieve the goals we need, we'll need to use some combination of
fission, cellulosic ethanol from energy crops, biodiesel, fossil fuels
with sequestration, efficiency improvements, hybrids and plug-in
hybrids, fuel cell vehicles. I see how it can be done -- several ways
it can be done -- but it's like threading the eye of a needle.

--
Josh

"Why should we hear about body bags and deaths,
and how many, what day it?s going to happen, and
how many this or what do you suppose? Or, I mean,
it?s, it?s not relevant. So, why should I waste my
beautiful mind on something like that?" - Barbara Bush
.