Re: if you were president

On 13 May 2007 11:36:26 -0700, $Zero <zero@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

repost:

On May 13, 12:46 pm, Josh Hill <userepl...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 13 May 2007 08:04:39 -0700, $Zero <z...@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! --

yeah, but the sun ALWAYS comes up the next day.

even dimmed on cloudy days, it's far more reliable than wind.

point mine.

Not really, because cloudy days are common in many parts of the
country, and on a solidly cloudy day, the cells will produce perhaps
1/4 or 1/5 of what they do on a clear one. Solar cells work best in
the desert.

and it may actually be easier to tame the intermittency problem by
tying wind farms together.

same with tying solar farms together.

No, not at all, because night strikes everywhere.

ideally, both.

Some synergy for reasons I already mentioned, but doesn't solve the
intermittency problem.

plus, solar has the added advantage of being far more portable than
your average windmill.

Doesn't matter except in specialized applications, e.g., the military
uses them.

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.

which would ideally be moved to the moon where waste and whatnot would
never pose an earthly problem.

We've been over this! Too dangerous and too expensive.

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 --

for no good reason, most likely.

That's just plain wrong.

we could very likely go to 20% or so wind without raising the retail
cost of electricity more than a fraction of a cent --

i see absolutely no scientific reason that wind power can't be FAR
cheaper than ALL of the stuff that we're handcuffed to now.

"Can" and "are" are two different things. Right now, they're
struggling to make it cost competitive with coal. (Of course, that
doesn't include externalities, as it should, but such is life.)

and we have to
move /right away/ if we're to head off global warming.

maybe. maybe not.

No maybe about it. It's already here.

we fucked it up in short order, so hopefully we can repair it in the
same way.

if it doesn't wipe us out first, that is.

It's not going to wipe us out. And we don't know how to repair it. So
in the short term, we're only talking about slowing further greenhouse
emissions to a tolerable rate. At some point, we may be able to suck
some of the carbon back out of the atmosphere.

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.

Gawd.

that is EXACTLY the perspective i'm looking at this from.

in a far purer engineering sense than you are, FFS.

"Costs are largely inextricable form market manipulation"? Beyond the
fact that it isn't true, it has nothing whatsoever to do with
engineering, which, insofar as it deals with costs, deals with
/actual/ costs.

Engineers don't care about market manipulation.

but you do.

But not as an engineer.

Engineers look at the cost of
components and labor and capital and so forth.

all of which are based on market manipulations.

Get real. They're based on free markets which are sometimes
manipulated. And in the end, on reality, because some things are
scarcer or require more labor than others.

duh.

"components" FFS?

i mean, hello?

obligatory commercial break:

"have you seen your Raypert-brand Toyota-thinking today?"

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.

yep.

and all of that applies to component manufacturers as well.

and labor unions/non-unions, and capital managers, and so on.

for instance, if those who lend their capital can make a quicker buck
loaning it to X instead of Y, guess which loan gets approved?

Doesn't matter in the end, because pretty much everything is subject
to that sort of stuff, and, overall, the market is self-correcting,
and anyway, what difference does it make? You can't make a cheap solar
cell, and nothing except technological progress is going to change
that.

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.

i think the likes of Cheney and Bush need to learn how to derive
pleasure and peace of mind from things other than feeding their
pathetic egos.

until then, there is almost no hope of any real progress since they've
got an unholy lock on most ***.

sad state of affairs.

They aren't going to change. Fortunately, the occupants of the White
House will, in less than two years.

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.

how naive and tunnel-visioned of you, Josh.

you really need to step back and consider how willing you are to
accept that the prices of things are somehow related to objective
reality rather than pure bull*** market manipulation.

no matter what the item is.

be it labor, capital, components, or otherwise.

not to mention that labor X can almost always be substituted with a
more efficient technique Y, regardless of whether or not Y uses human
labor or not.

I'm not the one who's naive, Zero. You're not an engineer: you haven't
designed products or facilities. When you do do that, you're faced
with budgets and you're faced with costs -- the costs of labor, the
costs of components. Needless to say, the suits and the purchasing
department try to get the best deal on the components you spec. But in
the end, those costs limit what you can do at a given price point.
Clever as you may be, you can't make an audiophile sound system for
what it costs to make a clock radio or an intercontinental jet for
what it costs to make a bicycle. It just doesn't work that way.

Coal, oil, gas, and
nuclear energy all receive subsidies, and that's a genuine problem,
but so do solar cells.

what's the comparison dollar for dollar?

You won't find it. This information is hard to come by, and when you
do find it, it tends to be incomplete and accounts differ. You can't
even get very good estimates of the relative cost of these products,
just study after study, each with its own estimates and limitations.

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 yet you are *still* unable to state *why*.

you simply accept that as scientific fact without using any, um,
science.

see how easy it is to brainwash even the smart people?

I can't state why because I haven't bothered to look, and I haven't
bothered to look because I've no reason to believe that there's some
kind of controversy that keeps the cost of solar cells high when there
are a zillion solar cell companies competing on the basis of price and
trying to break into mainstream energy markets.

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.

certainly not you.

Right, I don't. Why would I? I'm not involved in designing solar
cells, and I don't find solar cells very interesting from a scientific
or engineering perspective.

because you readily believe all the hype, without first verifying for
yourself.

Dude, part of being smarter than Stan -- OK, I take that back,
everyone's smarter than Stan -- part of being smart is knowing what
you don't have to know. You could devote your entire professional life
to energy issues without being able to predict even the medium-term
course of energy technology. It's inherently unpredictable because new
paradigms come along with the regularity of Old Faithful and because
experience shows that 99% of waggy-tailed press releases about this or
that breakthrough never see the light of day. Ergo, I've chosen to
focus on short-horizon solutions, while letting the long term
possibilities compete for predominance.

-- 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.

try solving each of those problems scientifically (instead of
acceptingly) and see what happens.

Dude, scientifically is where that paragraph comes form. It's not
something I read, it's something I know, on the basis of principle,
namely, that when the sun don't shine you still gotta have power and
batteries are expensive. Albeit a simplified presentation of the gist
of it, since I've omitted such secondary considerations as the fact
that peak demand occurs during sunlit days.

So the only savings are fuel,

so you seriously believe that all of those other expenses are somehow
fixed and unmovable?

yikes.

not very scientific of you, is it?

staff? whoa.

Dude, you tell /me/ what happens on a not cloudy day when the solar
cells are making only 1/5 of what they otherwise would. What happens
is you spin up peak demand plants, or, if the overcast was
predictable, you put up some medium demand plants. And those plants
have to be maintained and staffed.

This isn't rocket science, Zero, though it helps to have a minimal
amount of knowledge so that you know forex something about the
relative costs and capabilities of various kinds of plants. You
haven't done that research.

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.

is any of that supposed to make some sort of sense?

why would one substitute natural gas for coal or vice versa?

and how is that relevant to building a solar power-fed grid?

or were you making some sort of lofty analogy?

This is precisely the problem -- these things all make a difference
and they're all important, but you haven't done any reading so you
don't know that.

Specifically, coal is a lot cheaper than natural gas, but it takes a
while to get a coal-fired plant up to speed, whereas a gas turbine can
be spun up quickly as load comes online. So coal is generally used for
baseline power -- the portion of the power that keeps going most of
the time -- while gas is used to meet short-term periods of high
demand, or peak load. A nuclear power plant pretty much has to go all
the time for economic reasons (the cost of the plant, rather than the
fuel, predominates).

Solar power, being intermittent and available only during the day,
will tend to offset peak load. This is good insofar as peak load
electricity is more expensive than off-line electricity, and not good
insofar as any intermittency has to be made up by the most expensive
fuel. I guess you could look at it is as a glass half full thing:
you're saving the most expensive fuel, which is good, but other
alternative power sources don't require the use of that fuel, e.g.,
hydroelectric power, which is also well suited to peak load service.

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.

so you believe, apparently.

because you buy the hype that claims that solar power is way more
expensive due to things that you can't even remotely state -- let
alone verify.

and that differs from GWB how?

Dude, go try to buy some solar cells. They're expensive -- so
expensive that the power they generate is something like three times
as expensive as the power you buy from the electric company /after/
the direct and indirect subsidies. And that's all there is to it. If
you're not off grid and you don't have some kind of godawful
government grant and you want to use solar energy that doesn't cost an
arm and a leg and an ear and a beak, look at solar water heating and
solar space heating. Those are the real winners right now -- wisely
chosen, they pay for themselves handily -- but it doesn't serve the
interests of the solar electric industry to let you know that.

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.

just what is this "limited funds" thing that you're talking about?

how much is it?

and what makes you think that it couldn't just as easily be more?

We can't even get the government to invest a few hundred million more
in the most promising technologies. Most of the money goes to oil and
gas subsidies and the likes of clean coal technology, because these
companies are powerful and make campaign contributions, whereas the
companies and researchers working on the likes of cellulosic ethanol
can't. Even within the alternative energy field, research money and
subsidies are given out on the basis of pork and political influence,
which means that we fund extravagant nonsense like ethanol from corn,
which takes almost as much energy to make as it yields. Did you know
that we actually tax cheap sugar cane ethanol from Brazil? That's
right -- a fuel that /doesn't contribute to global warming/ and can be
used to at least some extent in every vehicle on the road today, a
fuel that is produced by a neighbor rather than unstable dictatorships
that want to kill us, that fuel is taxed while oil and gas aren't. Get
the country out of the hands of wealthy special interests, and we'll
have the money to do what we have to. Until then, its beg, borrow, and
steal, and hope people vote for Democrats (though even the Republican
presidential candidates would be much better than Bush).

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.

what about Sal's cite of your own cite?

Solar panels may have a role in the future,

now you're back to "may"?

what happened to inevitable?

I said they'd inevitably have a positive EROEI, and that the price
would come down.

But the price is coming down on other technologies too, and other new
technologies will be coming on line, including some biggies like
controlled fusion. And some of those technologies may be cheaper or
more widely applicable than solar.

So I can't predict what will happen, and neither can anyone else. It
has to shake out. It's rather like 100 years ago, when no one knew
whether steamers or internal combustion or electric cars (quieter,
more reliable, and easier to start than a crank-started ICE) would win
out, or whether internal combustion engines would burn gas or alcohol.

along with other promising
candidates like nuclear fusion, algae farming, and even lunar helium 3
mining. But, right now, our engineering options are limited.

bull***.

Sez you. But it's a /lot/ easier to say than to do.

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.

but no solar panels?

In specialized applications, as I said. They're too expensive.

this is getting to be like a roller coaster ride.

can we harness the energy from a roller coaster ride?

yep.

But there's no energy gain from a roller coaster ride.

--
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
.

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