OT: Honest Analysis of Solar Power

Hey Billy, some one calling you out ? ;)))))

I hear some one calling you Bill, "Bill, Lets go out and Play"

Jamie

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able inputs, eg including whether windows & doors are open, and uses passiv e heating & cooling as part of the operational strategy as well as active h eat.

oors and windows, and it will be a while before that happens.

oject in an area where at one big corporation - Philips - is already active . Getting a job with them might make sense. Setting up in competition doesn 't.

oducts. They aren't all capital intensive.

oduct isn't going to be capital intensive, but you are NT and explanation i sn't your strong suit.

company can put together without spending megabucks then shrug, I'm not ab out to show you how. Lots of startups & individuals have done it.

If you don't appreciate the costs involved in engineering for really large- scale production of mass-market items, there's absolutely no reason to take your comments seriously.

You might read about Henry Ford's relatively slow progression into mass pro duction as an example of how an individual (with a lot of investors) did it .

there also think it has value you then have options to exploit it.

gy into designing it. In reality I'm aware - as you don't seem to be - that there's quite a lot of capital being invested there already. All the low-h anging fruit has probably been plucked.

? C'mon.

ASIC territory, and you can't develop an ASIC on a shoestring.

don't need to begin with an ASIC when you have no competitor.

It's not particularly clever to develop a new market with a product than ca n be undercut by a fairly obvious investment. You may may not have a compet itor when you open up the market, but you'll certainly acquire competitors as soon as you've demonstrated that there's money to be made with your kind of product.

he doesn't understand.

d you had these skills.

I've got a couple of patents. I couldn't have financed any of the invention s, or even paid the patent lawyers to cover the cost of the patenting proce ss. My father had 25 patents and knew quite a it about the costs involved - he didn't pay them, but he was high enough in the company that did pay for the patents that he knew exactly what they cost.

One of my friends eventually made a couple of million dollars out of a pate nt he'd taken out - rather against the advice he'd got from me and my fathe r (which he much later acknowledged to be most realistic of all the advice he'd been given). For a couple of years the ownership of that patent was un certain, and my friend didn't have the capital to do much development, but once the ownership was clarified, there was something for a venture capital ist to buy into.

I don't know what your skills are, but from what little you've said here "n on-existent" would probably cover them.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

:

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Unlikely. "Fiscally-conservative" usually translates as "right-wing nitwit" and anybody in the pocket of the Koch brothers isn't going to be silly eno ugh to do anything to upset people making serious money out of digging up f ossil carbon and selling it as fuel.

So was Reagan when he took out Carter's solar panels.

Dubbya was installed by the oil industry, and invaded Irak for the oil indu stry. That's fossil carbon extraction. They wouldn't have liked PR about so lar panels

Chicago isn't a great area for solar power of any sort.

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Not all that informative. Pellets of what?

Wikipedia says "compressed biomass" which is carbon neutral, in that the CO

2 released when it burns replaces the CO2 that was captured a few years ear lier when the "biomass" originally grew.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

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science on the basis of what he was told at a dinner party by a failed wou ld-be climate scientist.

the

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year or

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e're all

t as if this is a dumb newsgroup.

Either green or cheapskate. I tend to believe James is more cheapskate than green.

This is a matter of opinion. That 97% of the top 300 climatologists accept the evidence for anthoprogenic global warming comes from the Proceedings of the (US) National Academy of Science, who don't publish either "tripe" or "propaganda".

You can take James Arthuir's opinion seriously - despite the fact that he's a right-wing nitwit, with a rooted ideological objection to recognising th e "externalities" that distort the proper operation of ostensibly free mark ets - or you can think why 97% of the top climatologists might think better of the case for anthropogenic global warming than James Arthur does.

He isn't the first scientifically sophisiticated right-winger to reject goo d science for ideological reasons

lists a few others (all of them with better scientific credentials than Jam es Arthur - but even I have got marginally better scientific credentials th an James Arthur).

James Arthur may have read Fred Pearce's " The Climate Files" but he hasn't understood the science (any more than Fred Pearce did). East Anglia Univer sity came out of the Climategate affair with an unblemished reputation - th ere were several enquiries, and nobody was "discredited".

Fred Pearce didn't like the way the people whose private e-mails had been m ade public had gone after a rogue editor on some minor climate science jour nal - he published a rotten piece of denialist pseudo-science after four re ferees had rejected it, and the East Anglia crowd made enough fuss that the rest of the editorial board resigned, getting him fired.

Fred Pearce isn't a scientist - he's a British science journalist, and they are almost all trained as journalists, not as scientists - and he didn't u nderstand the importance of the integrity of the peer-reviewed publication system.

He thought that the East Anglia crowd were upset by denialist content of th e paper, when they were more upset because it had been published after bein g rejected by four referees.

Nothing in the published e-mails suggest that they were shoddy workmen. The source code that James Arthur thinks of as "theirs" seems to have been a g raduate student's "sandpit" where people learning how to code climate model s swapped puerile attempts at coding.

James Arthur hasn't revealed any time spent as a graduate student. Graduate students can combine equally remarkable levels of incompetence and over-co nfidence. My favourite example was of another graduate student in chemistry who wanted to dismantle the vibrating reed electrometer (that I was lookin g after at the time) to extract the 100M resistor in the head, so that he c ould drop the very low current he wanted measure across enough resistance t o develop a voltage he could measure with a multimeter.

It took me a while to explain to him that his multimeter was actually a 0 t o 50uA current meter, and the electrometer was actually designed to measure the sorts of currents he wanted to measure. Rather than taking away the el ectrometer and doing the measurement, he rethought the experiment.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

excerpt:

Researchers have developed a clever way to turn everyday surfaces into solar panels: Just cover them in a flexible film treated with spray-on solar cells.

"My dream is that one day you'll have two technicians with Ghostbusters backpacks come to your house and spray your roof," University of Toronto's Illan Kramer says in a news release. And it's not just for the roof of your house. Spray-on solar works for surfaces ranging from patio furniture to car tops and airplane wings. You might even be able to use it to power your tablet.

Kramer and colleagues developed the "sprayLD" system using tiny light-sensitive materials called colloidal quantum dots (CQDs). Once they're printed onto a flexible film or bendy plastic, these miniscule solar-sensitive dots can be used to coat various surfaces. A car roof wrapped with CQD-coated film can convert enough energy to power three

100-watt light bulbs or 24 compact fluorescents.

The name sprayLD is a play on ALD, or atomic layer deposition, a manufacturing method where materials are laid down in single one-atom-thick layers at a time. Until now, CQDs were only incorporated into surfaces through a slow, expensive process called batch processing, which works like an assembly-line for chemical coating. Instead, with sprayLD, liquid containing CQDs is blasted onto flexible surfaces directly--like printing the news onto rolls of paper. Compared with the assembly-line approach, the roll-to-roll coating method simplifies the incorporation of solar cells into existing manufacturing processes. ...

--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: snipped-for-privacy@netfront.net ---

Interesting. I have no problem with solar where it makes sense. More and more of our traffic signals like flashing yellow in curves, etc., are solar powered.

Of course Arizona is near optimum for available sunlight. ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142     Skype: skypeanalog  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

No. However, if the owner were a politician shopping for votes, installing solar electric or heating on their own home is a cheap way to convince the GUM (great unwashed masses) that they're somehow doing something for the environment.

Sure. That's one of the fringe benefits of being president, mostly because the base salary of $400,000/yr doesn't go very far. For example, the Clinton's claim they were nearly broke when they left office:

I couldn't find a photo or better description of the alleged "deterioration". If the solar water heater panels could be easily disassembled and saved, then a replacement roof rack could be repaired or replaced for a tolerable cost. My wild guess(tm) is that someone mixed the wrong metals (usually copper and aluminum) causing the rack to corrode merrily away. (Just a guess. No evidence that this happened).

I would accept their conclusion if they had also tested a "modern" solar water heater panel which demonstrates 70% efficiency using the same methods. Incidentally, the common measure of efficiency is the "solar fraction" which is the portion of the total conventional hot water heating load (delivered energy and tank standby losses), typically 0.50 to 0.75.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

You want people to save energy, but don't, and disparage them when they do.

You're forever malcontent that other people do what they do, whatever it might be, even when it serves your 'cause.' A puzzle.

James Arthur

can be undercut by a fairly obvious investment. You may may not have a comp etitor when you open up the market, but you'll certainly acquire competitor s as soon as you've demonstrated that there's money to be made with your ki nd of product.

I do not understand your reasoning. If you have little money , are you not better off developing a new market with a product that can be undercut by a fairly obvious investment than to not do anything at all? As soon as you have demonstrated there is money to be made, you will either have some mon ey or you will be in a position where you can borrow money.

In any case as soon as you have demonstrated there is money to be made, you will have competitors regardless of how you started.

Doing something seems much more clever than not doing anything. If you do not develop the new market, it will be done by someone else. It might be a few years later, but there are enough people in the world that someone w ill think of that product.

Dan

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nd

than > > green.

I don't see much point in getting people to save energy. Civilisation is al l about controlling progressively more energy and using it sensibly.

I do see a lot of point in not burning fossil carbon to generate that energ y. It's cheaper in the short term, but the long term consequences seem very likely to be dire.

Saving energy - as such - doesn't serve my "cause". Generating energy in a way that doesn't screw up the environment strikes me as sensible. I don't p ursue it as a cause, any more than you pursue your silly ideas about how so ciety should be organised as a "cause". You do seem to like hanging out wit h Tea Party nitwits, so your tolerance for nonsense does seem to be higher than mine. I hope they provide social rewards commensurate with the intelle ctual damage they inflict.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Now let me see. if I burn wood and generate say a hundred lbs. of CO2 some how it is better than if I burn coal and generate a hundred lbs. of CO2.

Oh Oh I understand now. The 100 lbs of CO2 from burning wood has a different percentage of isotopes. That must be the reason. Other wise a hundred lbs. of CO2 in the atmosphere is the same whether it resulted from burning wood or coal.

Dan

Any simpleton can google "97 percent climate" and see no where near 97 percent of climbots endorsed your notion of catastrophic AGW.

Here's your shoddy study:

"We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed NO POSITION on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming."

So, actually, 2/3rds expressed no position whatever on even the human-caused element of the question, much less the doomsday catastrophic projections. But you knew that.

There's more detailed criticism here:

Not that it'll affect your emotion-based case.

It's an unscientific argument anyhow. Once upon a time there was broad consensus--possibly 97%?--among alchemists that potions could turn lead into gold. 97% of phrenologists and soothsayers also agreed you could use more of their valuable services.

How'd that work out?

Cheers, James Arthur

Burning the wood, on net, doesn't increase atmospheric CO2 as compared to digging up old plant stores that were sequestered underground.

The wood would've decayed and released its carbon anyhow, is the rationale, which it fairly harvested from the atmosphere. (Sparing us carbon-based life forms from carbon's evils.)

If that were strictly true there wouldn't be any fossil fuel...

Cheers, James Arthur

CO2 released when it burns replaces the CO2 that was captured a few years e arlier when the "biomass" originally grew.

From Wuki

Global warming

There is uncertainty to what degree making heat or electricity by burning w ood pellets contributes to global climate change, as well as how the impact on climate compares to the impact of using competing sources of heat.[4][3

1][32][33] Factors in the uncertainty include the wood source, carbon dioxi de emissions from production and transport as well as from final combustion , and what time scale is appropriate for the consideration.[4][31][34]

A report[4] by the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences, "Biomass Susta inability and Carbon Policy Study" issued in June 2010 for the Massachusett s Department of Energy Resources, concludes that burning biomass such as wo od pellets or wood chips releases a large amount of CO2 into the air, creat ing a "carbon debt" that is not retired for 20-25 years and after which the re is a net benefit.[4] In June 2011 the department was preparing to file i ts final regulation, expecting to significantly tighten controls on the use of biomass for energy, including wood pellets.[35] Biomass energy proponen ts have disputed the Manomet report's conclusions,[36][37] and scientists h ave pointed out oversights in the report, suggesting that climate impacts a re worse than reported.[31][38]

Until ca. 2008 it was commonly assumed, even in scientific papers, that bio mass energy (including from wood pellets) is carbon neutral, largely becaus e regrowth of vegetation was believed to recapture and store the carbon tha t is emitted to the air.[39] Then, scientific papers studying the climate i mplications of biomass began to appear which refuted the simplistic assumpt ion of its carbon neutrality.[34][40] According to the Biomass Energy Resou rce Center, the assumption of carbon neutrality "has shifted to a recogniti on that the carbon implications of biomass depend on how the fuel is harves ted, from what forest types, what kinds of forest management are applied, a nd how biomass is used over time and across the landscape."[30]

Dan

e CO2 released when it burns replaces the CO2 that was captured a few years earlier when the "biomass" originally grew.

me how it is better than if I burn coal and generate a hundred lbs. of CO2.

That's exactly right. The carbon in the wood was in the atmosphere until a few decades ago, and can be assumed to be going to be captured and turned b ack into wood again.

The coal has been underground for a hundred millions of years or so, and th e last 150 years demonstrates that we can burn it lot faster than plants ca n capture CO2.

ferent percentage of isotopes. That must be the reason. Otherwise a hundr ed lbs. of CO2 in the atmosphere is the same whether it resulted from burn ing wood or coal.

The difference in the isotope content - fossil carbon has less C-13 which c omes from cosmic rays hitting N-14 in the atmosphere - does allow us to see where the CO2 came from. It doesn't make any perceptible difference in its effectiveness as a greenhouse gas.

The sole advantage of burning biomass is that it isn't coal. In theory, eve rybody who burns biomass is contributing to moving the economy into a state where nobody digs up coal and burns it, which is where we need to get to.

In practice, growing biomass isn't a particularly efficient way of capturin g the power of the sun, and it would be much better to carpet Arizona with solar powered generating plant - taking particular care to include Jim Thom pson's backyard - than it would be to devote a similar area to growing tree s (not least because there isn't water there to grow anything like enough t rees).

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

e CO2 released when it burns replaces the CO2 that was captured a few years earlier when the "biomass" originally grew.

wood pellets contributes to global climate change, as well as how the impa ct on climate compares to the impact of using competing sources of heat.[4] [31][32][33] Factors in the uncertainty include the wood source, carbon dio xide emissions from production and transport as well as from final combusti on, and what time scale is appropriate for the consideration.[4][31][34]

tainability and Carbon Policy Study" issued in June 2010 for the Massachuse tts Department of Energy Resources, concludes that burning biomass such as wood pellets or wood chips releases a large amount of CO2 into the air, cre ating a "carbon debt" that is not retired for 20-25 years and after which t here is a net benefit.[4] In June 2011 the department was preparing to file its final regulation, expecting to significantly tighten controls on the u se of biomass for energy, including wood pellets.[35] Biomass energy propon ents have disputed the Manomet report's conclusions,[36][37] and scientists have pointed out oversights in the report, suggesting that climate impacts are worse than reported.[31][38]

iomass energy (including from wood pellets) is carbon neutral, largely beca use regrowth of vegetation was believed to recapture and store the carbon t hat is emitted to the air.[39] Then, scientific papers studying the climate implications of biomass began to appear which refuted the simplistic assum ption of its carbon neutrality.[34][40] According to the Biomass Energy Res ource Center, the assumption of carbon neutrality "has shifted to a recogni tion that the carbon implications of biomass depend on how the fuel is harv ested, from what forest types, what kinds of forest management are applied, and how biomass is used over time and across the landscape."[30]

Good point--if you truck the wood, or use fossil energy to cut it--it's not neutral.

Wood is plentiful in my area--people pay to be rid of it. Thus (and on other grounds) super-efficient, super clean-burning wood stoves have a certain appeal...but natural gas is a lot more convenient.

Cheers, James Arthur

te:

r

ing

ept the evidence for anthoprogenic global warming comes from the Proceeding s of the (US) National Academy of Science, who don't publish either "tripe" or "propaganda".

rcent of climbots endorsed your notion of catastrophic AGW.

Wrong, That's *your* shoddy study from "Environment Research Letters" - not the Proceeding of the National Academy of Science, which I did specify as my source.

The simpleton has googled and come up with the wrong paper.

The paper I was referring to was

which was published in the "Proceeding of the (US) National Academy of Scie nces" on December 22, 2009 which has a rather higher impact factor than "E nvironment Research Letters".

Your paper is an obvious "me too" published three years later, on 15 May 20

13

Sure. People publishing papers aren't in the business of declaring their po sition on the credibility of anthropogenic climate change. I'm a bit surpri sed that the authors thought they could detect a position in as many as a t hird of the papers they looked at.

That's not "detailed criticism". It's all about some denialist nitwit peste ring the University of Queensland about the paper. The pestering is a stand ard denialist tactic - as spelled out in

It doesn't affect the rational case either.

Perhaps, but nobody persuaded the Proceeding of the US National Academy of Science to publish anything on those - hypothetical - shared opi nions . Since any such a consensus would predate the evolution of the moder n scientific method of presenting propositions in the peer-reviewed literat ure and testing them against observable data, it's not all that relevant to the subject under discussion. like most of the straw men you come up with.

Not that the 97% agreement has ever been touted as any kind of "scientific evidence" about anthropogenic global warming anyway. It's just a snap-shot of expert opinion. If you want to devise your own hypotheses about why 97% of the top 300 experts on climate think that anthropogenic global warming i s real you are free to do so - if I remember rightly you endorse some kind of conspiracy theory ...

You produced your usual careless and ill-informed response - so it's busine ss as usual. If you are being paid to act as a denialist propaganda mill, y ou haven't even come up to their dire quality control criteria.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Your imperfect reading comprehension is leading you astray - again.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

I do, broadly. Where I differ is that it all seems inevitable, I don't really care as much, and there little point debating with the 'religious' right.

They all seem to be saying, "If you alter the constituents of the primary fluid in which climate operates, then nothing at all will happen, inshallah."

Cheers

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Syd