Solar cell

In-breeding will do that.

OK - just barely kidding. WV is the kind of place you have to spend some time to really get the whole story. Passing through on I-77 won't quite cut it.

I can also state with certainty, that WV has the most (shall we say...) innovative way to distribute food to the poor.

Sure, one can't really schedule technology breakthroughs. The history you've cited there certainly ought to be included as part of whatever policy considerations fund PV R&D, certainly (or just outright purchases, although I think Don's made a pretty good case that that isn't really helping anything).

I'm pointing out that what happens to be cheapest today is often as much a function of history as it is of the actual cost of the technology *today*. This fact is one argument for government policies that attempt to change behavior away from the status quo.

I didn't know IBM wasn't allowed to bid.

I actually had a VMNet e-mail address back in 1989 -- several years before I had an Internet address.

One order of magnitude would be plenty though, in the case of PV.

I suppose that Moore's Law makes me think that many technologies can be cost-reduced/performance-enhanced by orders of magnitude over time -- it's just that the time period is sometimes much longer than the 18 months it is (or at least was) with transistors/IC technology.

---Joel

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

They do it for the money, though, don't they? On the surface it just seems like a response to, "well, we asked for more money for the schools, the voters wouldn't give it to us, so this is a cost-cutting measure...," although I realize that due to cronyism and teachers' unions and whatever, when there's a lack of funds what cut is sometimes not at all would be the least damaging to the kids.

I seem to recall you were on the school boards for awhile when your kids were in school? Or was it just the PTA?

You're a good husband. :-)

I thought it was Chicago? ;-)

---Joel

PTA. I ran for school board ~1972, finished 6th in a field of 7... #7 was certifiably insane.

Teacher's Union endorsed me, then un-endorsed me when they found out I had achieved the unachievable... I succeeded in getting a teacher fired :-)

I know :-)

I guess there are parts of Chicago as slummy as Huntington. ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             |
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     |
             
      The only thing bipartisan in this country is hypocrisy

Cost of a Pizza Hut Pizza? That's not counting labor and business overhead, just materials, right?

On Apr 24, 8:50=A0pm, mpm wrote: MPM > I can also state with certainty, that WV MPM > has the most (shall we say...) innovative MPM > way to distribute food to the poor.

Are there any squirrels left in the trees?

A well prepared squirrel is much better for your health than a Big Mac..... (and tastes much better too....)

But they've had free access to every other semi breakthrough and still can't come within two orders of magnitude of interesting.

"Green" research support academics. That's enough for Obama.

It's not working. Diesel has been around as long as gasoline.

You mean VNET? I don't remember when I first got email access but we were sending data around in the mid-'70s. "WideBand" was the first network, but batch oriented (used mainly for sending chip data around the company). VNET came about shortly after, by 1980, certainly.

With subsidies, perhaps.

But PV has already had the benefit of Moore's law. You can't count on squaring Moore.

As long as PV cells are made by cutting wafers out of huge pure silicon crystals, the price is not going to go down significantly, no matter what subsidies are used.

Perhaps someone invents how to grow the cells on a flexible base material that can be processed roll to roll just like paper processing, the price might drop one or two orders of magnitude. Just cover the roof and walls of a building with sheets of flexible solar cells.

Much of Moore's Law has simply been the line width reduction of individual components. Much more functionality has been obtained over the years from a single wafer and hence the cost of a single chip has been reduced significantly.

In a solar cell, you are interested in having a large surface area as possible and there is no benefit from using smaller line widths. Ultimately the solar cell cost depends on the wafer processing costs. Cutting the wafer into multiple chips, reducing the chip cost, but at the same the power output also drops proportionally :-), thus, there is no point in cutting the wafer and hence the Moore's Law does not apply.

Actually, that's were many of the efficiency gains have been made. "Lines" are opaque.

Current prices are around $4/W Nanosolar, for example, claims they can manufacture for $0.70/W But since they are selling everything they can produce for a lot more than that, why would they drop the price?

--
Dirk

http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/onetribe - Occult Talk Show

It's called thin film processing eg Nanosolar Watch them being printed:

--
Dirk

http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/onetribe - Occult Talk Show

Well, That had to do SOMETHING with all the empty soup cans...

--
Anyone wanting to run for any political office in the US should have to
have a DD214, and a honorable discharge.

Those prices are based on peak output.

A fixed mounted panel average daily output is one quarter of the peak output during the best season. When calculated with the average power, those price should be multiplied by four, thus $16/W. During other seasons, the solar angle is less favorable, so calculated with the annual average output power, the price is even higher.

Using a dual axis tracker the average annual output can be increased, but this also increases the costs.

Compare this with the construction cost of $2-$3/W for nuclear and $1-$2/W for conventional power (especially gas turbines, but of course, the fuel cost is significant).

The peak power price should drop with one order of magnitude, before the PV cells are competitive.

Hi Keith,

I think it's more like "one order of magnitude of interesting," but I realize that's pretty subjective.

Yeah, but up until the past couple of decades, the engines were a lot more cantankerous than gasoline-powered engines. You still see glow-plug switches on some trucks today, yet even the cheapest automobile hasn't had a manual throttle in about 35 years now. Bizarre...

Yep, that was it. Very slick for the time -- being able to e-mail anyone within IBM and print to any printer anywhere. I was working out of Madison, WI (we just did sales & customer installs/service -- no software/hardware development), the 128kbps, I think it was (might have only been 64kbps) leased-line we had went back to Rochester, Minnesota.

---Joel

The "magic" number that has always been quoted for cost competitive solar electricity is $1 per Watt peak. Obviously for domestic users competing with grid cost it's probably a lot more favourable eg around $2 per peak Watt (and right now it is possible to buy such raw units at that retail price).

--
Dirk

http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/onetribe - Occult Talk Show

The dollar per peak watt total true installed cost is the price at which the panels cease being a gasoline destroying net energy sink and become a totally pointless "paint it green" musical chairs scam. Such total installed cost would demand a panel cost in the fifty cents per peak watt region.

For a useful net energy solution, panel costs would have to be at or below the quarter per peak watt class.

A 1000 watt peak panel properly sited and oriented can typically produce

5 kilowatt hours per day of energy. Of that, only a fraction would be net renewable energy, perhaps 1 kilowatt hour. The remaining 4 would be conventional gasoline destroying energy in its amortization disguise.

Domestic users competing with the grid would, of course, demand much LOWER panel pricing because no means of pv storage is known that is remotely as cheap or safe or simple or effective or reliable as synchronous inversion to the power grid. Such an offgrid market is highly unlikely to EVER become significant. People simply are not that dumb.

--
Many thanks,

Don Lancaster                          voice phone: (928)428-4073
Synergetics   3860 West First Street   Box 809 Thatcher, AZ 85552
rss: http://www.tinaja.com/whtnu.xml   email: don@tinaja.com

Please visit my GURU's LAIR web site at http://www.tinaja.com

Don, do you still write columns like that for any of the remaining hobbyist magazines out there?

Got a list of all the magazines you've written columns for anyway? :-)

Weren't you even in Midnight Engineering for awhile? (Great name for a magazine -- I quit subscribing after I graduated from college, apparently it ceased publication not too long thereafter?)

---Joel

?Itemnumber=3D44768

one: (928)428-4073

He wanted a solar battery charger, not an inverter, nor a synchronous inverter.

Michael