Whorled View » science

70% Solar Energy by 2050: Scientific American

January 24, 2008 - 7:04 am | Filed under: greenhouse, solar, planet, tree hugger, science, conservation, ecology, environment, earth, economics, energy, Technology

Probably one of the best layman articles on the subject from a contemporary perspective except for one major problem. Nevertheless it’s worth a good read. Check it out: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan

The problem: Once again it places more emphasis on Solar PV than Solar thermal. It pretends to justify this by throwing around some magical numbers that at this point are pure theory and highly unlikely. Compare that to Solar thermal where the numbers are even better and are proven.

Solar Thermal is cheaper and always will be.

Case in point: It says Cadmium Telluride (nanosolar film) will be able to produce electricity for $0.05/kWh by 2020. This is based on the theory that they can get efficiencies up to 14%. I’m sorry, but I’m quite convinced that in order to do that they’ll have to enable some technologies that will up the price of the manufacturing enough to blow that number out of the water. They think they can improve the efficiency by 40%, based on what? Silicon solar efficiencies have improved maybe 10% in the last 20 years? Sure Cadmium Telluride went from 8% to 9% in the last year, but they’re approaching a ceiling that will get extremely hard to raise. My guess is that it will top out at 12%, which leaves solar PV maxing out at $0.06/kWh assuming all other costs stay the same, which they won’t. Add to that $0.04 /kWh for storage and you get 0.10/kWh, AND YOU HAVE TO WAIT UNTIL 2020 TO SEE THAT RESULT.

Compare that to Ausra’s Solar thermal technology which by 2013 should produce electricity, including storage, at $0.07 /kWh.

HELLO!? Am I the only one running these numbers? Solar Thermal is so superior. Nothing, I repeat: NOTHING should go toward the development of something that will cost more near term and long term than Solar Thermal will.

Two more reasons Solar thermal is better:

TIME TO MARKET: Solar Thermal can scale up to supply all our needs at coal prices by 2015 if we wanted to. Unlike any kind of Solar PV solar thermal uses no fancy technology. It uses no special materials that require special processing. The materials and the parts and pieces that make solar thermal plants are found all throughout existing industrial parks across America -and at bargain prices. All you need is the money to buy the supplies (tons cheaper than what Solar PV factories cost), and people to build them (requires no special training or science). All these things are in stark contrast to the supply problems that have plagued the Solar PV industry. Solar PV, whether it’s thin film or otherwise, will never be able to scale up at the rate that the Scientific American author suggests. The materials and processing equipment demands are just too great even if the money was there … can’t be done.

LIFETIME: A solar thermal plant lasts almost forever if cared for correctly, with few replacement parts, and reasonable maintenance. Sure parts of the turbine needs replacing as with any turbine including the ones used by SolarPV to reconvert pressurized gas to electricity, but thats about it. No solar cells to replace. The mirrors last forever. The dewar tubes containing the molten salt or H2O (Ausra’s technology) should last a very long time if maintained right. Compare that to SolarPV where the life of the Solar Cells is 20-30 years at the most. Also you’ll have to replace the compressors as well as the turbines parts in the Solar PV plant (incidentally solar thermal needs no compressors - another bonys). Can you imagine that? With a Solar PV plant you’re replacing practically the whole plant every 20-30 years. Not so with Solar Thermal.

In short, media bias favoring Solar PV once again garners unworthy support, thereby siphoning off the funds from Solar Thermal, possibly in order to fatten the wallets of those who invest in Solar PV (Al Gore) or work for the industry. Solar PV, even in Cadmium Telluride thin films will forever be inferior, less efficient, and a more expensive technology than Solar thermal. Articles like this that have some fantastic information and promote the use of the Sun’s rays almost do more bad than good by obfuscating the issue and guaranteeing that our hard earned tax dollars will be taken away from Solar Thermal and reinvested in Solar PV assuming that Solar PV will someday meet the magic numbers that it was supposed to achieve 20-30 years ago, and neither will we solve our energy problems as quickly as we could if all the funds went to something like what Ausra does (www.ausra.com ).

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The Vitamin C “Dead Zone”

November 20, 2007 - 4:50 pm | Filed under: medicine, Vitamin C, science, economics, Health

Most medical practitioners do not understand how the body utilizes high concentrations of ascorbates (Vitamin C and it’s buffered variants). As a result clinical studies for Vitamin C are poorly designed and result in inadequate and misleading conclusions. Ultimately such misleading conclusions discourage medical practitioners from using vitamin-based treatments despite a growing number of studies with seemingly polar opposite conclusions that strongly promote the use of vitamin-based therapies and treatments. This is a globally important issue, since vitamin-based therapies provide the world with cheap and effective treatments that are readily available. Sadly those same therapies are widely disparaged because of an overwhelming amount of research inappropriately done in what I call the “dead zone”. Read more about this “dead zone” here: http://www.the-austins.com/Vitamin%20C%20Dead%20Zone.html

Dead Zone Effectiveness

Dead Zone Economics

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Concentrated Solar Power: The claims just keep getting better

November 14, 2007 - 6:00 am | Filed under: planet, greenhouse, tree hugger, Geothermal, science, solar, conservation, earth, environment, economics, energy, ecology, Technology

According to this CNN article released today Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) that harnesses the heat of the sun (not the brightness of the sun, which is what Solar PV does) just keeps looking better. Among the claims:

Electricity produced by CSP can be as cheap as 8 cents per kWh. That’s about 20% cheaper than most people are paying in the united states right now for electricity. That’s 1/4 the cost of electricity produced by the ever so much more popular Solar PV panels.
A 92 x 92 square mile CSP farm placed in the empty barren desert in the SW United States could produce all the energy needed by the whole United States.
It could easily solve the desalinated water shortage crisis - which for many countries is a much bigger problem than any kind of oil shortage crisis.
Only 0.3% of the Sahara desert is needed to power most of Europe and upper Africa, resulting in a 70% carbon reduction for the region. It will save astonishing amounts of money too as cities must otherwise relocate costing of 100’s billions of dollars, whereas it could all be averted with a CSP plant in the $10 billions of dollar range.
Since 90% of the world lives relatively close to desert or to substantial power grids connected to such areas then 90% of the world’s population can be served by this breathtakingly economical and clear resource.

Strangely enough some of the biggest opponents to CSP appear to be a group of environmentalists and key Democrat politicians who seem to be letting expected tax incentives lapse. Based on my last post, you’ll see that this comes as no surprise to me. For 30 years they’ve been trying to keep CSP in the background so industry experts could make money off new alternative energy startups that will never compare with respect to efficiency, cost, and time to market.

These tax incentives for the power companies are vital. Even though CSP may be cheaper than filthy fossil fuels, power companies are making tons of money on fossil fuels. They have the right to jack the prices as high as they need, and at times like now when there is no shortage, but the cost is high due to political concerns, they make all the money. Why? Because they already own such a huge interest in the reserves. The only way to get power companies to build CSP farms is to financially encourage them - and that isn’t happening.

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Al Gore says something really stupid again

November 12, 2007 - 5:29 pm | Filed under: planet, greenhouse, tree hugger, Geothermal, science, solar, conservation, environment, earth, energy, ecology, Technology

He won the popular vote for President of the United States. He jumped on the green energy bandwagon. For those two things I applaud him.

Everything else he’s done reminds me what an incredible stroke of luck it was that he lost the electoral vote. I posted earlier about how awful of a job I thought he did on the “Inconvenient Truth”, and I suggested similar programs that were far better on a number of levels - although even they were seriously flawed. His moaning throughout the program about how unfairly he was treated and about how little data convinced him of global warming were tedious at best, and the treatment of any of the data he presented was excruciating from a statistical standpoint. The worst part of it was his solution to the problem (use less electricity and spend money on technologies that were entirely unlikely to help), which was the equivalent of stopping a fire hydrant with a stick of bubble gum. Besides, you cannot begin to legislate that. Neither can you force China to do that. The solution should have been this: we need tons of cheap clean energy and we need it fast, and stop investing in technology that has no chance of being competitive with coal.

Nothing else will work. Gore seems oblivious on this point.

Does such a ridiculous remark have anything to do with the fact that he runs a Venture Capitalist firm that invests largely in these inferior “competitive” technologies?

So what now did he recently say that filled me with disgust? What proved his underlying blind ignorance to institute “fairness” at the expense of achieving the ultimate goal? It was simply this: When an Ausra executive said that their Solar Thermal technology would produce electricity so cheap as to “thrash” all the other alternatives, Gore reprimanded him for “assassinating” the competition. You can read about it here at the end of this fortune magazine article from November 12th. Be sure to read also the blindedly ignorant opinion of the author of the article, gushing over Gore like he was a rock-star who could do no wrong.

Excuse me?! Why is Gore being overly protective of less efficient, more expensive, and slower to market technologies?! Can you say “biased”? Can you say “self-serving”? Does such a ridiculous remark have anything to do with the fact that he runs a Venture Capitalist firm that invests largely in these inferior “competitive” technologies?

… when someone says something extremely stupid that also reveals their true motives it’s time to call a spade a spade …

If Gore was truly interested in saving the planet, then he would have said something smart like “Wonderful! Let the competition begin!”. And that, my friends, is why we are in the current mess that we are in. Solar Thermal has been capable of providing us with near grid-cost energy for a dozen years while people like Gore have insisted that all the DOE funds go to more expensive and less efficient, and less eco-friendly projects.

Am I the only one that sees a conflict of interest in making a Eco-Venture-Capitalist-Advisor into the Czar of environmentally friendly technologies? Are people really so stupid as to think such a person could be objective? And journalists … when someone says something extremely stupid as well as revealing of their true motives it’s time to call a spade a spade instead of praising the person for senselessly sticking to their rusty and hypocritical guns.

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Solar Thermal energy to overtake Solar PV energy within 10 years

- 3:55 pm | Filed under: greenhouse, planet, tree hugger, science, solar, conservation, environment, earth, economics, energy, Technology

The cost of Solar Thermal electricity is half the cost of Solar PV, and expected to be 1/4 of the cost of Solar PV within the next 10 years. This has been true for dozens of years, but producing solar thermal as a business has never been as lucrative as solar PV because it can only be done in huge installations, so it’s been ignored relatively speaking. Solar PV has always received the bulk of government subsidies by far - largely because of lobbying power of big businesses and because it’s easier to sell Solar PV to consumers (rooftop panels) than Solar Thermal to power companies (giant solar farms). That’s finally changing. Power companies and the Congressmen who get funding for green energy are finally getting wise. As such some major Solar Thermal plants are in the works, and Acciona expects that by 1017 more electricity will be generated by Solar Thermal plants than all the Solar PV panels in the United States combined (including the one on your solar calculator). That’s cool. Read more about it here.

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South American Nutriceuticals are Changing the World

October 25, 2007 - 7:42 pm | Filed under: Vitamin C, medicine, science, planet, Health, Lifestyles, Technology

The modern medical society has gotten into the nasty habit of disparaging nutriceuticals. Nutriceuticals are “nutritional supplements” that actually have therapeutic value (like pharmaceuticals). They comprise many vitamins when taken in large doses, and many herbs (only the nutritional ones though). Many herbs are not nutriceuticals because they have no nutritional value are used like drugs, and are really no different than pharmaceutical drugs - and in most cases they are worse (imho). I don’t know why the concerted effort by medical societies to disparage nutriceuticals (for example: megadoses of vitamin C) but an in-depth analysis is enough to make a conspiracy theorist rabid. Indeed it seems many doctors have adopted a Hippocrates-be-damned philosophy when it comes to certain therapies. If it isn’t considered mainstream by their medical societies they’ll do their best to disparage it.

Fortunately for the rest of the world there are non-medical practitioners making unbelievable breakthroughs in the field of nutriceuticals. They’re chemists, biologists, nutritionalists, even double-laureate physicists. There is also a growing number of physicians who’ve decided patient health is more important than professional respect, and are starting to embrace nutriceutical research and treatments. One such person is Dr. Mark Miller of Albany Medical College.

Just today Dr. Tariq Haqqi confirmed that Dr. Miller’s Progrado is the first substance known to block the molecules responsible for cartilage damage in joints. Progrado is one of two substance Dr. Miller has extracted from a Brazilian rain forest tree that grows 30ft/year that has amazing antioxidant properties. In addition to treating the causes of arthritis and joint problems (instead of treating the symptoms) Progrado is also an antioxidant that is 6 times stronger than Vitamin C. Glucosamine, a $1 billion/year industry, comes closest to repairing cartilage and yet even it doesn’t even really compare. And, like Vitamin C, Dr. Miller’s treatment (called Reparagen ) is remarkably safe - you have to exceed 700 times the prescribed amount to reach toxic levels. There are so many benefits to these two substances from anti-aging to ulcer remediation that it’s approaching miracle-cure status among it’s users. Unfortunately you can’t use the word “cure” in an official setting because then the FDA considers it a “drug”, will regulate it, and the price will then go through the roof.

Dr. Miller has done tremendous research with regard to many other South American nutriceutical remedies that have also had astounding results. Take the Peruvian maca, a radish-like tuber that comprises a major part of the Peruvian diet, also called “Inca Gold”. Medicinal qualities were reported before Dr. Miller came along, but Dr. Miller through a leap of logic decided to feed them to fish (6% of the diet) to see how it dealt with hypoxia (a common prenatal problem), and after 100 days the biomass of the fish increased 800% compared to standard, through improved reproduction and better health. This has lead to human trials to observe similar phenomena with amazing results.

What makes these advances so remarkable? They are nutriceuticals. That means that by being nutritional supplements with the oldest track records in the world, products can be brought to market quickly. Dr. Miller has combined efforts with Paul Bobrowski of Rainforest Nutritionals to offer these supplements directly to the public so they can be obtained with as few middlemen as possible. He sells his Reparagen at a reasonable price at www.reparagen.com and Nutrazon at a reasonable price at www.nutrazon.com. As far as I can tell the nutrazon product is a better value. His plan, it seems is to use viral marketing techniques instead of big-buck pharmaceuticals to get the word out.

This is yet another example of a Hippocratic patient-oriented approach. Dr. Miller has patented the manufacturing process for extraction of these nutriceuticals as well as formulas designed for specific uses, however has not chosen to sell them to pharmaceutical companies who’d then pump the prices way up.

I’m convinced that we’ve just scratched the surface with all the benefits that nutriceuticals (and especially those in bio-diverse regions like south america) can bring us. If we can just get the information out to the consumer, and convince enough doctors to break away from their pharmaceutical kick then we’ll see a massive revolution in health that will result in a much healthier, happier, prosperous and productive world.

ps - if you want to enjoy the benefits of Dr. Miller’s work, you’ll get it best with his nutrazon fluid supplement, found at www.nutrazon.com . You can buy wholesale if you join, so I’d suggest you click “join” and in the application process (very simple) you’ll get an opportunity right then to buy the product. Note that joining costs $35, but if you buy a case (4 bottles) it pays for itself. All future orders will then be at wholesale. If you need a sponsor id use 100377.

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Winning the War on Terror through Vitamin C

October 21, 2007 - 3:12 am | Filed under: science, Vitamin C, medicine, defense, war, earth, economics, Health

The war on Terror costs money. Lots of it. It seems then that the best way to win the war on terror is to free up tons of money, making it available to the economy so the war on terror can be funded.

Where to get such money? Well, according to the results of a British researcher: http://torontosun.com/Lifestyle/2007/10/20/4590932-sun.html we could very likely solve heart disease problem cheaply and efficiently. Heart disease is the #1 killer in the United States. It costs Americans more money every year by far than does the Iraqi conflict. The wild thing is that tons of research backs up this claim the cheap doses of Vitamin E (an antioxidant), cheap resveratrol (another antioxidant), and cheap megadoses of Vitamin C can prevent, and even reverse the conditions that lead to heart attacks, and yet our “noble” allopathic tradition discourages it, claiming that it’s dangerous because it can give you diarrhea … or even worse: it might make you fart!

Oh! The horrors!

Meanwhile the war on terror is bankrupting the world, yet heart disease costs even more. Same thing with Cancer (costs more than the war on terror), which disease is also very treatable, very effectively by extremely cheap IV based ascorbate treatments (as high as 200 mg/day, but usually 70 mg twice/week is adequate). So if we started using these cheap treatments and reinvesting that money usually spent on Cancer and Heart Disease into the economy then we would have more than enough to pay for the War on Terror. Not to mention it would save 100,000,000’s lives every year worldwide - allowing the patients to live full and productive lives.

But then who’s going to pay for all the yachts? No wonder the AMA and your very own doctor frowns upon anything that has anything to do with Vitamin C. And so we’ll bankrupt the economy of the world. Just remember - it wasn’t the war that did it. It was the refusal to save money where money could have been saved.

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Solar as cheap or cheaper than coal

September 29, 2007 - 10:10 pm | Filed under: greenhouse, solar, planet, tree hugger, science, conservation, ecology, environment, earth, Sociology, energy, Technology

I’ve heard this batted around before, but when I’ve talked to the industry experts they have always said that the only way solar can be cheaper than coal is after the government provides significant subsidies. In other words: no, not really cheaper …… until now.

Enter Ausra , the Palo Alto solar startup that thinks it can be done - without requiring subsidies to hit the mark. Of course, they will get subsidies that will make it even more attractive for power companies to do it. In fact, such subsidies and rewards are necessary, as the power industry has no incentive to augment their current power production structure.

First of all, for you who are new to solar : solar PV is nowhere near to becoming a solution. Despite all the recent press releases about cheap solar silicon, and even remarkable technologies like ”LETG”, Solar PV will still be completely nonviable for 99% of Americans over the next 20 years. Even with amazing ramp-up schedules there won’t be enough solar silicon produced to appreciably affect the industry in any way. In the next 20 years economical (hence scalable) solar power can only be achieved with solar thermal, where you heat a fluid and then use the resulting expansion and condensation to drive a turbine or a piston.

Solar thermal however is already currently providing electricity in the $0.17/kWh range in the Mojave desert. Some people will say it’s around $0.11/kWh range, but that’s after government subsidies so that doesn’t count. That’s also using old equipment. Those solar fields are 20-30 years old. So it’s reasonable to expect that with the latest advancements solar can become at least as cheap or maybe even cheaper than what coal is producing.

So how? As far as I can tell there are 3 things at work here:

1) Ausra proposes to convert only half of the thermal energy to electricity in real-time, and store the other half into an array of pressurized tanks (http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/19440/ ). That means that the heat engine - in this case a turbine - only needs to be half as large as what is currently used. This greatly brings down the cost. It also allows electricity production from the thermal energy in the storage tanks during the night or on cloudy days - something that you can’t do with a windmill or with a solar PV without huge extremely expensive batteries, flywheels, or capacitors.

2) The new process technology is much cheaper. Currently they use salt or oil as the heating fluid, and then pump that fluid through a heat exchanger to create steam to drive the turbine which results in a complex system that loses efficiency in the heat transfer process. The new process uses water directly as the fluid heated up by the sun instead of some intermediary fluid - and create the steam right there in the heating element. This simplifies overall design (although it presents new design challenges), and results in better overall efficiencies.

3) The new equipment is more efficient and robust. As I understand it the most costly consumable in the parabolic trough system is the dewar tubes. A series of these high-tech tubes are connected end to end to make up the pipes that contain the heating fluid (in Ausra’s case this is water). They’re made of stainless steel on the inside and transparent glass on the outside, with a vacuum chamber between the stainless steel and the glass exterior (to reduce heat convection) - similar to how a thermos works. The top side of the glass tube has a mirror to reflect the rays back onto the encased stainless steel tube, which tube is black to maximize heat absorption. As you can imagine the cost of these tubes is outrageous. After 30 years of use however, the cost and their robustness, and efficiency has improved dramatically - which has been one of the primary reasons to cost to run the Mojave facility has come way down in the last 10 years. Other equipment, like the primary parabolic reflectors has come way down too.

They’re still quiet however as to which design they’ll use: the parabolic trough or the huge-amongus heliostat array. My sources indicate the parabolic trough type - and most of the designs for expected solar fields in the next 10 years are of that type. If you ask engineers in the industry what they’d like to do most of them will point to the heliostat. The difference? About a 100,000 degrees.

With a parabolic trough you get a ton of water really hot (300 C). With a heliostat array you can get a little bit of water outrageously hot (theoretically even up into the 6 figures Celsius). They both have the potential of creating tremendous amounts of electricity but employ a very different energy conversion processes. Engineers love the heliostat array just because that’s an unbelievable amount of thermal energy - and really cool stuff happens at those temperatures. For example, get hot enough and the hydrogen disassociates from the oxygen. You can thereby end up generate hydrogen for the hydrogen economy extremely efficiently. However, that isn’t the intended use for the near future.

Anyway … very cool stuff happening here. That’s why FPL (http://biz.yahoo.com/bizj/070927/1526791.html?.v=1 ) has just announced that they’ll be sinking $2.4 billion into solar with austra’s designs, as is PG&E as they double their solar capacity over the next 5 years (http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/070927/aqth135.html?.v=16 ).

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Solar PV efficiency to improve by 250%?!

September 26, 2007 - 1:57 pm | Filed under: greenhouse, planet, tree hugger, science, solar, ecology, Technology, environment, earth, energy, Uncategorized

Every now and then some genius comes up with a good idea that changes everything. A Houston company called “global warming solutions” claims to have just done that.

This effectively makes solar 1/3 it’s current cost - which makes Solar PV competitive with grid, WITHOUT SUBSIDIES!

See, one of the main problems with Solar PV (those panels you can put on your roof to generate electricity) is that they usually only covert about 13% of the sun’s energy into usable energy. Solar thermal however, which is only feasible in a power plant setting, can convert over 50% into usable energy. Until now the idea to improve PV (Photo-Voltaic) efficiencies involved modifying the solar cell so that it could use a larger spectrum of the light. These involved using multiple junction cells (layers on top of layers), with each junction capturing a different range of the light spectrum. This, of course adds siginificant cost to the PV solar cells, which are already much more expensive than was predicted 10 years ago for today. In fact, one of the reasons AstroPower (the company I worked for) went belly up was because they couldn’t get the costs down (there were other more important reasons, but that’s H2O under the bridge). What GWS did was to modify the incoming sun’s rays instead of modifying the solar cell. Brilliant idea really. It’s surprisingly simple too. They have the sunlight pass through this liquid, and liquid can be made to change a light’s wavelength. They claim that it could improve efficiencies by 250%! That would make a 13% efficient cell 13*(1+2.5)= 42.5% efficient. More importantly, it should take an 18% efficient cell (like some of the more expensive sharp solar cells) and make them 18% * (1+2.5) = 63% efficient! Believe me when I say that is truly mind-boggling. In fact, it’s way too mind-boggling. Those are best case numbers - based on their best case estimates. My guess is that they’re never get efficiencies better than 50% with Silicon solar cells - and even that has to be proven in a real world setting. However, assuming that this is true then suddenly Solar PV is competitive - even beyond competitive in some ways with Solar Thermal for Power Plants. It even puts distributed electricity (domestic roof panels) attractive for the masses instead of the rich. In short, this effectively makes solar 1/3 it’s current cost - which makes Solar PV competitive with grid, WITHOUT SUBSIDIES! I won’t do the math for you, but believe me … with current solar pv subsidies (50% in many states), it will make you money the day you install it (assuming a decent 7 year loan).

Call me a cynic if you must, but come on …

I’ll believe it when I see it. Call me a cynic if you must, but come on … some things are just too good to be true. Or are they? One thing is for sure … it will never happen unless they cut the cost of PV grade silicon by 75%. That’s supposed to happen within the next couple years based on some new technologies… again: I’ll believe it when I see it. I also wonder if when they said 250% more efficient (1 + 2.5 more = 3.5x current efficiency), what they meant was 250% of it’s current efficiency meaning it’s only 150% more efficient (1 + 1.5 more = 2.5x current efficiency). There’s a huge difference there. Still if it’s only 150% more efficient, that’s still incredibly significant, as it puts Solar PV in a whole new market.