OT: "Science" on the other side of the pond

Yes, the sunlight is free. Remember, we are talking here about a facility located in a desert - for practical purposes, you have unlimited space and can get as much energy as you want by covering more area with solar panels (or other methods of generating electricity from sunlight). You have an up-front cost in the equipment, but virtually zero running cost.

This is a different situation from having a solar power station located near people to generate electricity for a city - space considerations are far more important in such cases.

There are a lot of American right-wing religious fanatics who see pollution and global warming as a /good/ thing - the sooner we destroy this earth, the sooner we will see a "second coming":

And you are wrong. The only effective way of getting this to happen is to get the cost of renewable power below the cost of using fossil fuel for power. That will happen, but it is not true now.

Dan

for practical purposes, you have

So you are saying that solar panels have an infinite life?

Dan

ld be injecting less CO2 into the atmosphere, but I've also said that the o nly effective way of getting this to happen is through good old-fashioned s ocialist collective action.

o get the cost of renewable power below the cost of using fossil fuel for p ower. That will happen, but it is not true now.

It seems to have already happened for wind power, and it will happen for so lar cells when manufacturing volume goes up by yet another factor of ten. G ood old socialist collective action would enlarge the market for solar cell s enough to make that happen more or less overnight - the market enlargemen t, anyway.

Economies of scale don't happen automatically - someone has to work out a w ay of making a higher volume of parts more cheaply - but they do happen rel iably.

Solar towers with overnight thermal storage don't seem to be quite that che ap yet, but we can hope.

Depends where they are. In space radiation damage eventually kills them. On the ground I've seen figures like 25 years quoted, but the high volume modern parts haven't been around long enough for anybody to make particularly confident assertions.

There are some loss-per-year figures here

You do have to wash off dust from time to time, and the bigger set-ups have gear to do that automatically.

Huh? what's your ethanol recipe?

There are lots of greenies who want to wipe out humanity so that the earth can return to its pristine state,

Lots of whackos around.

Imagine what your briefcase would smell like!

Really? Got a link?

You'd be one of them. You seem to be willing to believe anything the Murdoch press claims, no matter how bizarre or improbable.

Methanol has agreeable odour.

Of course, if there's enough of it around that you can smell it, there's probably enough of it around to eventually rot your central nervous system.

Hey, right-wing neanderthals like lattes too!

I suppose that a swimming pool is never too hot. So the pool could be a heat sink for a/c too.

But I never understood why so many people want swimming pools. They are messy, a pain to maintain, expensive, and are really dangerous to small kids.

CO2 is not "pollution". If you think it is, quit exhaling.

Sourcing from a water bath is much more efficient than "air"!

Probably 1/3 of our neighbors have pools. I doubt any of them see more than 2 days of use / year. Neighbor two doors down sees the most use -- when her (very young) GRANDCHILDREN are in town visiting (*she* never uses it!).

And, pools tend to be pretty small -- the idea of *swimming* in them is a joke (an adult "pushing off" one wall would crash into the other wall in *seconds* -- long before you could get your arm out of the water to take the first stroke!).

Most folks are too thin-skinned to even consider using them outside of the Summer season (water temperature is too cold even for their "heavily insulated" bodies).

They lose a lot of water to evaporative losses. Neighbor across the street was away for most of last Summer and forgot to turn the auto-filler on. Returned to find the pool water level down a full two *feet*! (Did I mention our annual rainfall is 11"?)

You effectively lose your backyard (lots tend to be smallish, here, in town) -- you wouldn't want to plant anything near a pool lest you end up with lots of litter in the pool (so, your yard is basically empty of shade trees, etc.).

Pets are problematic as they are at risk of falling in. Or, not having any place to "do their duty" ("pool deck" surrounding the pool consumes space that they could have used for that).

Has to be cleaned regularly. Dates, palmfronds, etc. from neighbors' properties don't honor property lines. Pump needs maintenance. Filter needs to be cleaned. Chemicals to treat the water.

And, of course, the pool can easily "go green" (algae) if not diligently maintained -- which is a city violation (mosquito breeding ground... 3 day gestation period?) as well as a brutal challenge for the filtration system (clean the filter every few

Adds to assessed value of house -- yet increasingly does not "return" that value in resale (esp in an area known for retirement!). Increases home owner insurance premium (one more thing that can suffer damage/loss; additional liability).

No, pools don't really make sense. OTOH, we've considered an "infinite pool" (spa sized with forced water flow against which you can "swim in place") as it is much smaller (could be housed indoors), easier to maintain, more *useful* (e.g., exercise), doesn't consume your entire yard, can be used in "lazy mode" (i.e., when not swimming) as a spa, etc.

Perhaps what passes for right-wingers (e.g. the Governator) in Kalifornia like lattes. ;-)

So are cars and (in the last case) 5gal buckets. So? We had a pool in our first house. It was great when the kid was young. We moved before he lost interest.

The latest in generating hydrogen from sunlight;

"But anyway, :-)

Feasibility demonstrated

However, there is still a lot to do. Currently, the majority of the required voltage between the composite photocathode and a platinum counter electrode of around 1.8 volts is still coming from a battery. Hence the solar-to-hydrogen efficiency has to be clearly improved. "But anyway, we demonstrate the feasibility of such future-oriented chemical robust photoelectrocatalytic systems that have the potential to convert solar energy to hydrogen, i.e to chemical energy for storage. As a consequence we have successfully developed and tested a demonstrator device for solar hydrogen production with a company in Schwerin under the Light2Hydrogen project, according to Schedel-Niedrig.

Video:

Pollution means TOO MUCH of something.

CO2 in large enough quantities is certainly pollution. World levels of metabolic production by us critters is (1) a natural source that hasn't changed much over the millennia (2) balanced by dietary intake of vegetation that recently absorbed that gas, or something very similar

That same bogus argument has already been taken to the US Supreme Court; they rejected the silly thing...