Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: bobbtmann on February 28, 2013, 05:51:27 pm
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-28/shell-sees-solar-as-biggest-energy-source-after-exiting-industry.html (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-28/shell-sees-solar-as-biggest-energy-source-after-exiting-industry.html)
It's about time.
I'm still surprised at the opposition solar energy gets. It seems like everyone understands how useful it is (solar powered trickle chargers, solar powered water heaters, solar powered bobbing toys, etc), yet at the same time it's seen as not practical. It can never be scaled up to meet industrial demands. According to wikipedia, the sun's radius is 6.96342×105 km. How much scaling up do we need? The only limit is our technology, and that changes all the time.
The only sad thing about this is that the positive scenario still has solar becoming the main power source at 2070. That seems kind of late in the game for dealing with global warming.
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Fast enough. I'd like to see this "global warming" over here. It's only been 3 days since temperatures went above freezing. I hate winter, I'd gladly have above 0 temperatures through the whole year.
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as long as fossil fuel emissions are cut by 85% by 2100
sides. its about time
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Did anyone ever get around that whole 'solar tech costs more energy to create than it will ever produce' thing?
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Rubbish. Solar cells can pay for themselves in a matter of days. The trouble isn't making them, it's installation, paperwork, etc.
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Well, the technology is improving, so it's getting better. Solar power is nice, because it's everywhere and it doesn't run out, so hopefully there won't be any squabbles over it (well, the British will have to import it, but that's it :)). Also, it scales much better than nuclear power and doesn't require that much trained personnel to use. If it can be made cheaper, it'd be a good source for the next century, and after that we'll hopefully have fusion power.
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Solar is brilliant in places where you can typically expect sunny weather for most of the year, but like Dragon says in countries like the UK where I am it is just too unpredictable to be viable, even a sunny day there are often hazes of cloud or there are huge chunks of cloud floating about, the only time we can expect consistent sunshine for a decent length of time (i.e. 2 weeks or more) is in the late summer and early autumn and even that is far from a guarantee.
In these regions other, non weather related sources need to be found for our long term bulk needs which imho is where fusion will come in handy when the large scale experiments of the next couple of decades will start coming into their own.
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Also, it scales much better than nuclear power
..... you mean, DOWN, right?
solar is great for little doodads that don't need much power like toys and calculators. it's a good supplement for residential use. it's possible, if inconvenient to use for some larger powered things that don't demand absolute uninterrupted power without a backup source. but it will NEVER be a baseload. there is a hard limit on the energy density of the sun that can never be exceeded, no matter how far technology progresses, which is around 1300 watts per meter. that's if you collect and convert every single photon that is emitted from the sun to that one square meter. the average microwave is 1100-1200 watts. my hair dryer is 1600.
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Rubbish. Solar cells can pay for themselves in a matter of days.
lolwot
Solar is the most promising energy tech I have ever encountered. Emphasis on promising. It's still too expensive, and it has a wide range of technical problems, being the most heinous the fact that you need the sky to be up there with a clear sun powering up your tech. Which is something that isn't available during the night and cloudy days. It's intermittency issues are damning, and forces energy companies to have a thermal power plant (gas, coal) in the pipeline "just in case" solar is failing. Which kind of negates the entire point if you think about it. Yes, wind power is also extremely facepalmish in this.
So yeah, Solar is amazing. In two or three decades. No need to over-invest in silly non-functional energetic architectures that will only waste resources and piss off everyone when the blackouts turn out to be a lot more prevalent, etc.
edit: And what Klaus said.
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Please correct me if I'm wrong, but don't conventional solar cells require relatively large amounts of rather rare semiconductor materials? If that's true, the economic implications of such a fact would be significant, in a word.
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Materials research in solar panels is an area of extremely vibrant activity nowadays, so I don't think that's some kind of a show-stopper in the long term. But yes, that is a current barrier. *By current I don't mean "traditional solar panels". I mean cost-effective thin-film generation solar panels. "Traditional solar panels" are mostly using silicon.
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Batteries are also a massive issue for solar power. The ones we have are expensive, inefficient and environmentally terrible at end of life. There are some innovative ideas about, but nothing commercial yet. Sort out power storage, and renewables start to look more interesting. Until then, sign me up for nuclear.
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That too -- power storage technology is pretty hilariously inadequate. I believe solar should be a large component of world energy production in the long term, but for right now I hope to nuclear to tide us over. Wind seems to be proving itself in certain areas but it's almost certainly not going to be a main player.
Fast enough. I'd like to see this "global warming" over here. It's only been 3 days since temperatures went above freezing. I hate winter, I'd gladly have above 0 temperatures through the whole year.
I'm sure we can all cope with global economic and ecologic collapse so that you never have to worry about below-freezing temperatures in winter ever again. :)
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I understand why people like nuclear, but nuclear power needs an exhaustible fuel source. How common is uranium? Is there going to be a peak uranium?
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At the current rate, a better power source or the end of civilization will happen before we even come close to exhausting Uranium.
Solar energy is extremely useful but, ultimately, terrestrial solar energy isn't enough. Putting the solar arrays in space might do the trick, but we're way too early for that.
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I understand why people like nuclear, but nuclear power needs an exhaustible fuel source. How common is uranium? Is there going to be a peak uranium?
Short answer: No.
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I understand why people like nuclear, but nuclear power needs an exhaustible fuel source. How common is uranium? Is there going to be a peak uranium?
Its possible we will hit peak uranium some time in the future (probably not this century though) if we continued to use current once-through light water reactors which extract at best just 0,7% of the energy potential of uranium and discard the rest as waste. If we develop breeder reactors (uranium or thorium based) capable of extracting all the energy then we will practically never run out of fuel. With breeders, there is enough U/Th to sustain our energy consumption for longer than the Sun will exist.
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Let me just drag something down from upthread.
Solar power is nice, because it's everywhere and it doesn't run out,
Yes, the sun shines everywhere. However, most of that energy is expended on clouds, making us rely on specific geographic features (such as clear skies for most of the year), which are not that common.
(well, the British will have to import it, but that's it )
So would the polish, french, germans, norwegians, americans, canadians, chinese..... the list goes on. Not every country has the kind of geographical features mentioned above that make Solar a good, viable contender for a major role in the energy generation business.
Oh, and btw, the only reason solar tech is where it is at is because of billions upon billions of government subsidies to make solar viable in an area where it really isn't (Namely, Germany). Solar works best in areas that are rather lacking in the necessary infrastructures for the moment (like, say, the Sahara).
Finally, I am going to predict that someone is going to say something about solar energy stations in space that beam down energy. Let me just point out that any beam capable of delivering a worthwhile energy load through the atmosphere to a receiving station closer to the ground is functionally indistinguishable from an orbital death ray.
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lol The_E, I think your prediction was made a little late. Check the thread :D
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Seriously? We're having this discussion again?
Until someone invents a solar colelction mechanism that doesn't require a traditional photovoltaic cell panel, it's a non-starter. The materials are expensive, they can only be situationally-deployed based on local climate, they have a short finite life span, and they require significant storage capacity.
Meanwhile, both the panels and the batteries requiring mining, refining, and manufacture using heavy metals, and all three of those process have a larger AND more lasting environmental impact. The mining alone is pretty brutal.
Meanwhile, LNG is actually quite a clean energy source, and while nuclear relies on mining as well, you need a lot less material to run a few nuclear power stations than you need to run sufficient photovoltaics to be a useful power source. A nuclear plants last a lot longer than solar panels.
*shakes head*
A lot of my co-workers keep drinking the solar kool-aid too and it drives me nuts - solar is NOT environmentally-friendly and NOT practical as a long-term mass power source with the collection methods we are aware of. Now, if someone comes up with a way to coat homes in chlorophyll and harvest that energy relatively cheaply, then we can talk about the usefulness of solar power.
Solar is not economically viable, and is heavily subsidized in every jurisdiction it's used in.
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I understand why people like nuclear, but nuclear power needs an exhaustible fuel source. How common is uranium? Is there going to be a peak uranium?
You and I live in Canada. The Canadian Shield is loaded with uranium. If our governments built nuclear plants today in key areas of the country - literally atop uranium mines, in some places - we wouldn't have to build another coal-fired station, solar panel, or wind farm for the forseeable future. Between hydroelectric and nuclear potential, Canada could abandon fossil fuels for electrical power tomorrow if our governments had any balls and planning foresight with infrastructure dollars.
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Yup. I am all for conserving the environment, and I am also pro nuclear, since modern nuclear reactors are among the safest, most efficient energy producers available.
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Yup. I am all for conserving the environment, and I am also pro nuclear, since modern nuclear reactors are among the safest, most efficient energy producers available.
Indeed. I have a couple "save-the-planet!"-type co-workers who rant at me because I hate the focus on solar and wind, yet when I point out how safe, efficient, and sustainable nuclear power is all I hear is crickets.
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I shudder to think how much progress we could have made if research into new reactor designs hadn't been effectively stopped two or three decades ago.
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Photovoltaic Energy will improve the life of many in country's without reliable electrical grid.
Nations like India for example there the rich now use a diesel or gas operated generator to power up their electrical light, TVs or refrigerators.
But in industrialized nations with a working nation wide electrical grid... it has interesting effects.
During the last few years a lot of new photovoltaic plants have been connected to the German grid.
At noon they produce a lot of electricity, so that the price for the electricity falls down to zero on the spot market.
But the owners of the solar plants get a granted price for each kWh, if it is needed or not. The difference is paid by the end consumer.
The big producers of electrical energy (mostly owned by Towns, Countys and States ) shut of their gas plants during noon and put 'em on again during the night.
So their gas plants run only a few ours, but have to be maintained the whole day, and spoiling the company s profit.
From a technical point of view the whole technology is interesting.
It's not needed to use the highest quality of silicon for solar cells, so there is no effect on the price for ICs.
But the chemistry is demanding. For example: silicon is usually etched with Hydroflouric Acid. Handling that stuff isn't without risk for the workers and the environment - what's the unknown side of "green" energy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrofluoric_acid
Some alternative cells are based on alloys of Copper and or Germanium... and partners like Arsen, Selen or Tellur. Most of the chemical compounds of these elements are toxic.
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Perhaps the environmentally friendly solution is to have all the politicians that inhibit our nuclear technology (or otherwise screw us over) turn hand-generators for 16 hours a day?
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I shudder to think how much progress we could have made if research into new reactor designs hadn't been effectively stopped two or three decades ago.
What more research is needed!? Gen IV test reactors of half a dozen types have been built and tested. They worked. It is time to build the damn things, but I'm sure Klaus will tell you all about the regulatory bull**** that makes that a near impossibility.
[caveat] I'm not actually suggesting that research into newer and better reactor designs isn't a fabulously good thing we ought to be doing. I just wish we'd use the knowledge we've already obtained rather than sitting on it and doing nothing.[/caveat]
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Why do people always assume that solar=photovoltaic?
thermal tower technology has been proved at much larger scales, and some of the plant being planned now are of the same power output as the smaller conventional power stations (100-200MW). Their more interesting features include being able to store power in the workings of the plant itself, to the extent of storing around 1/3rd of the the power they produce, and then releasing that power during the night. Of course, they still rely on clear skies, which is major disadvantage.
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Why do people always assume that solar=photovoltaic?
thermal tower technology has been proved at much larger scales, and some of the plant being planned now are of the same power output as the smaller conventional power stations (100-200MW). Their more interesting features include being able to store power in the workings of the plant itself, to the extent of storing around 1/3rd of the the power they produce, and then releasing that power during the night. Of course, they still rely on clear skies, which is major disadvantage.
They're even more climate-dependent than traditional photovoltaics. Mirrors are subject to major scouring, and ambient temperature poses a problem (either because cooling is necessary, or because of thermal inefficiency due to loss). Not saying they're a bad idea, but they aren't nearly as practical as nuclear for wide-scale industrial electrical supply.
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Nuclear is not practical because humans are an irrational paranoid bunch.
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Perhaps the environmentally friendly solution is to have all the politicians that inhibit our nuclear technology (or otherwise screw us over) turn hand-generators for 16 hours a day?
I'd think their hot air alone could drive a turbine. :D
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There's No Tomorrow (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOMWzjrRiBg)
I posted about this last year in another energy-related thread. For relevance to this particular topic, I'd recommend watching from 07:14 to 17:15 as it's a good primer on the current state of alternative energy resources (however, this film was released about a year ago). Then again, I think most people in this thread probably know about all this stuff already. Still, the whole film is worth watching as I think it's a good overall summary of the situation.
Some of you may find fault with some of its claims, though - for example there's really nothing positive said about fusion, just that it faces massive engineering challenges; in fact it almost seems to dismiss it completely. Personally I hope that the ITER Project and others like it can contribute towards enabling fusion power to be made viable, preferably before the full extant of the damage of fossil fuel consumption is realized.
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Well... that was depressing. We need more planets. :(
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There's No Tomorrow (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOMWzjrRiBg)
I posted about this last year in another energy-related thread. For relevance to this particular topic, I'd recommend watching from 07:14 to 17:15 as it's a good primer on the current state of alternative energy resources (however, this film was released about a year ago). Then again, I think most people in this thread probably know about all this stuff already. Still, the whole film is worth watching as I think it's a good overall summary of the situation.
Some of you may find fault with some of its claims, though - for example there's really nothing positive said about fusion, just that it faces massive engineering challenges; in fact it almost seems to dismiss it completely. Personally I hope that the ITER Project and others like it can contribute towards enabling fusion power to be made viable, preferably before the full extant of the damage of fossil fuel consumption is realized.
Oh noes, more Peak Oil stuff. Apparently, a movement whose predictions of global oil production peak have been failing for 40 years in a row still seem to find the courage to condescendingly inform us that the end is nigh.
The irony is that the figures of the video are mostly correct, albeit extremely biased in the interpretation of it. There are a wide number of claims about how difficult a certain task is, or how the economy works (oh boy they make so many econ mistakes throughout the video), or how discovery works that are just untrue or skewed to the video's agenda. The video is, however very funny, in the sense that it voices perfectly all the talking points of the crazy people like Simmons, Kunstler, etc. By the 9 minute mark I was already listing in my head the talking points that were in the queue and boy did the video produce them! Even the silly dependance on the categorization of new energy fuel as "unconventional" just to show that the old "conventional" is gone was argued.
Then at the 12 minute mark, I said "wait, this isn't even listing mainstream peak oil arguments, this is outright LATOC material". Yeah, that bad.
By 17 min mark, we are taught that growth is impossible because things are finite, and because growth is exponential we are doomed. Then it goes on to educate on how "exponential" is a nightmarish concept. Then they "educate" on the nature of how the banks "create" money and how "growth" is mandated on how the world economy is architected (LOLWOOOOT). Oh, and did you know that exponentials are bad? Let me tell you again... *sigh*
Anyone that considers the video's arguments somewhat interesting and scary or something, I'd advise to not panic, and check out independent historical sources of the "Limits to Growth" movement, and what the critics of it have and had to say. As a general wide criticism, I'd just say that the video merely lists some problems and some other pseudo-problems that we have been facing for the last 40 years. It does not provide the other side, how many of these barriers have been solved, how many *other* nightmare problems have been easily solved, or were just way overhyped (Erlich, the main voice of the "Limits to Growth" think tank "predicted", using the same kind of mathematical arguments that this video uses that in the year 2000 the USA would have less 50 million americans due to death by famine, yeah). It doesn't understand the manner in which we have been solving these issues (it assumes we would have all to be perfectly synchronized by a world government perfect and corruptless), etc., etc.
But, I am wasting my english. Just look at the picture below and then facepalm at the reality of so many people "stressed" about some kind of peak energy:
(http://rankexploits.com/musings/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Screen-shot-2011-04-06-at-6.20.18-PM.png)
PS: Just to inform that these kinds of "arguments" about peak oil usually make one of the biggest mistakes, which is to say that the "discovery" of oil peaked a long time ago. This is statistical shenanigan. What is true is that while the discoveries of the fields per se peaked a long time ago, the reserves of available oil have not. Many discoveries within the already discovered fields never stopped happening and new technologies make what once were unavailable spots now easy to drill. Funny fact: The world oil reserves have never been so big as of today. See here:
(http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/proven-world-oil-reserves-production-years-left1.jpg)
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kitty!
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Thanks for your informative views on this Luis. Originally my only real concern about the film was about how it seems to dismiss most alternative energy sources, with no consideration given to how further research may make them viable in the future. But now you've provided me with more to think about. I used to regularly follow Idleworm's blog (that's the film's animator's handle, this is his current website (http://www.idleworm.com/blog/); his old one had more of a doomerist nature) and I might have focused too much on some of the more pessimistic sentiments on future energy availability.
I don't really envisage a scenario in which peak oil effectively means "zero petroleum available, end of the world, therefore end of story"; I see it more as a gradual realization of the decline of the profitability of extracting oil as the process becomes more expensive. There will still be oil there for those that can afford it, but there may be a slow revolution of sorts, in which society switches to cheaper hydrocarbons and alternative energy sources for their needs.
I suppose the "We're on a finite planet with finite space for growth potential, hence exponential growth = bad" argument presented in the film is perhaps not quite fully thought through enough, if population trends (http://www.prb.org/Publications/Datasheets/2012/world-population-data-sheet/fact-sheet-world-population.aspx) are anything to go by. By reducing poverty in developing nations (where the overall birth rate is still high but apparently projected to start to slow down somewhat within the next 2 or so decades) it would be expected that birth rates would decline, reducing energy demand as a result.
At the end of the day I feel that, due to climate change, our current way of life in this apparent "golden age" we ("we" being those that can afford a consumer lifestyle/live in a developed nation) live in may have to be abandoned to some extent in the future. Sustaining it in the long term may turn out to be only viable for a privileged few. Being less wasteful in our energy expenditure now would help in prolonging the availability of more easily extractable oil resources for later generations and in reducing CO2 emissions, perhaps hopefully long enough for a cleaner energy source to become mainstream. That's easier said than done however.
(Actually, although I admit this isn't much of an effort on my part, I've developed a habit of switching every electrical appliance in the house that has a "standby" function off at the mains supply. Even my monitor usually gets switched off if I need to leave the computer for a moment, despite having a blank screensaver (kind of daft, I know)).
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during the holocaust the nazis disposed of bodies using bodies as fuel to burn other bodies. what i think we should do is kind of like that, except instead we hook up a boiler and turbines to the whole thing and use the heat from burning people to generate electricity. of course to make the plant as efficient as possible we will throw the bodies in alive, to save the expense of killing them. such a method of power generation also has the side effect of reducing power demands the longer its used. as for who gets thrown in first, i say we nominate all the anti-nuclear peeps that wouldn't let us build new nuclear reactors and have kept nuclear research in the gutter for the last 40 years. after we run out of them, then we can hold a vote to see if everyone would rather continue using the murder mills, or switch to nuclear energy.
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I'm suddenly not so anti-nuclear for some reason.
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Does Kusanagi still have that van-cum-partially-solar-powered-living-space setup (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=71215.0)? I admire his work on that, and wish I had the skills to do something similar. Whether I could tolerate the living conditions would be another matter.
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lostllama, yeah that's mostly what I think. The Peak Oil rabbit hole is very deep, and it is easy to get somewhat scared by it if you only pay attention to the pessimists, usually dwelling sites like The Oil Drum and so on. Back in 2006, I got a scare out of it. But then very shortly thereafter a blog named "PeakOilDebunked" (you can google it) started to make me see the cracks. And then I noticed the cracks where everywhere in the narrative.
Curiously enough, a very similar process happened when I started reviewing the most alarming narrative about global warming. The cracks are subtler and the criticism is also subtler and reasonable than the polarized webgannigans would have you believe. Not that it isn't a problem, but I am now way less worried about it.
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Why do people always assume that solar=photovoltaic?
thermal tower technology has been proved at much larger scales, and some of the plant being planned now are of the same power output as the smaller conventional power stations (100-200MW). Their more interesting features include being able to store power in the workings of the plant itself, to the extent of storing around 1/3rd of the the power they produce, and then releasing that power during the night. Of course, they still rely on clear skies, which is major disadvantage.
Another disadvantage is that thermal towers needs a lot of capital. So only big greedy cooperations are able to build and maintain them, cooperations what only want to make profit.
But everyone who has around 12.000 to 20.000 €uros and owns a house with a sunny roof can build a photovoltaic plant. He doesn't even have to make profit, because the electricity he produces will be heavy substituted by the consumer.
The same applies to wind farming. Everyone who has 1000 -10.000 €uros can buy a share on a wind mill. And because the small windmills on hills are owned by shareholders that are ordinary citizens whose small windmills are much better than the big ones in the sea what can only be build from big, greedy cooperations.
And because nobody likes big greedy cooperations who only want to make profit, there is no alternative to private photovoltaic plants on the roof of the homes of the rich and successful ;)
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Didn't someone make non-photovoltaic strips that were relatively cheap? And didn't someone make some kind of solar-power paint?
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:wtf:
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It's actually true and true, IIRC. The problem of those are their own very low efficiencies, on the order of 1 percentage point. That's radically bad.
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Found this surfing the web, seems relevant to the topic:
http://www.earthtechling.com/2013/02/graphene-supercapacitor-battery-thats-not-a-battery/ (http://www.earthtechling.com/2013/02/graphene-supercapacitor-battery-thats-not-a-battery/)
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Critical? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely. In fact I would go so far as to say Graphene Supercapacitors alone make our current economy possible. :drevil:
(Quote may be incorrect in several places due to inexperience with Alpha Centauri.)
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ultracapacitors are insane:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoWMF3VkI6U
i can see them eventually taking over the battery market. especially with their long life capabilities. they are a tad heavier for the same power and capacity than batteries, but who cares. devices are getting too small to be used comfortably anyway. higher rates of self discharge might be an issue though.
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/me likes flywheels, and thinks more people should be talking about flywheels
Also, RE: that comment earlier where I said solar cells can pay for themselves fast: that was me repeating something my dad told me, and apparently repeating it wrong. But he doesn't even remember the original thing, so bleh.