Some Knowledge

I read about Solar energy for a while this afternoon.  There’s a company in China called Shine Solar that makes solar panels for a low cost.  They have 500 or so people working at their factory.  I thought it was interesting that a company in China would be trying to make cheap solar panels.  Most of the companies in the western world who make solar panels pride themselves on making expensive solar panels.

I looked up on Google approximately how much it costs to build a solar cell factory.  Apparently this is about a hundred million dollars.  The Sharp solar panel factory is supposed to produce 480 megawatts of solar panels a year.  It would take a lot of factories like that to replace all the coal and gas fired power plants.  A typical coal plant might produce 2000 megawatts, if memory serves me right.  The Sharp factory would have to run for a lot of years to make a dent in conventional power production.

I’m not sure why car companies can not figure out electric cars.  You have Chevy getting ready to build a hybrid they call an electric because it can go 40 miles on a charge.  They haven’t got the battery figured out yet.  Maybe it’s because they are trying to reinvent the lithium ion cell that a lot of other companies already make and hold patents on.  Maybe GM should grow a brain and buy batteries from a battery factory.  But no, the car companies have to try to do every bit of design themselves because they don’t want any other companies to make a profit off their precious car product.  Tesla buys batteries.  Their car goes 200 miles on a charge.  Why is GM so backwards they can’t appreciate years of research already done?

It would be nice if the world ran on solar power.  People would not have to burn oil and pollute the atmosphere just to have energy.  It would be nice if there were safe, efficient electric cars.  The oil companies have been suppressing that technology for over 100 years.  It would be nice if appliances were not designed to break down after a given number of years.  It would be nice if houses were built so that they didn’t blow down in a storm.  We don’t live in a world where things are made to last.  We live in a world that works, after a fashion, until it breaks down and people have to fix it again.

I can’t help thinking that the economic problems that the world faces right now are tied to the high price for energy.  It takes energy to do anything.  I’m using energy right now to type this on my computer, and the server that stores this data is using energy just to stay online.  The cost of doing any kind of operation or business is tied to the price of energy.  When costs go up, prices must go up, and then sales drop off.  There is a lot of feedback in the economy.  When it costs more money for people to do their web surfing, page views will drop off.  Of course, maybe people are just watching TV to see if the world is going to end yet.

Look, the sun is not going anywhere for another five billion years.  The only thing that cuts into solar power is clouds.  Even when the sky is not clear there is some energy coming from a photovoltaic panel.  The only thing holding back the technology is the cost.

From what I saw on TV the other day, I think the program was How It’s Made, they still assemble solar panels one cell at a time by hand.  A good part of the cost of a solar array has to be the wages of the tech in the white lab coat doing all the soldering and assembly.  Perhaps they need to make some robots to do this job.  Maybe design a better solar cell that would be easier to connect up into a panel.

Of course, one of the main costs in building a solar cell is the price of the ultra-pure silicon that they are made out of.  It also takes a good deal of energy to refine this material.  There is a lot of research that has been done on optimizing the design of solar cells for maximum efficiency.  Maybe some factory should do some research on optimizing the production costs and profitability.  Of course, the major manufacturers already do this.  So, what’s holding solar energy technology back?

If anything it’s the cheap price of energy today.  Even with four dollar a gallon gas it’s still cheaper to burn petroleum than to buy and operate a solar car, if one is even possible.  I know that in the future when the oil starts running out people will be scrambling for alternative energy.  Even now Germany has a massive program of solar power generation and offers tax incentives to people who install solar farms.  Maybe if this was a priority to the American government we would have such a program in this country.  As it is, we just use more and more oil and pay more and more for the same energy.

If solar panels could be made ten times as cheaply, people could install them on their roofs and get a good deal of their electricity for the cost of equipment and maintenance and would not need to rely on finite sources of fossil fuels.  I know I’ve said this before, but if we wait for fuel to run out and fail to deploy widespread alternatives, we will have some hard times to deal with in the future.

World reserves of fossil fuels are finite.  Looked at chemically, there is only a finite, yet large, amount of oxygen in the atmosphere to even burn fossil fuels.  What does this mean for the future of energy use?  It’s fairly obvious that if humanity is going to keep using energy at an accelerated rate, new sources for this power must be found.

The prime source of power in the universe is the fusion reaction that occurs in stars.  This energy streams down continuously on earth from the sun and costs nothing.  Solar energy keeps the earth from being a dark, frozen rock in the depths of space.  While this source of energy is not as concentrated as the energy derived by chemically combusting a fuel, it is available everywhere.  The only thing we need to do to harvest this energy is to collect it somehow.

Photovoltaic solar cells convert sunlight directly into electricity.  They are however, not very efficient.  Even the best solar cells only convert 27% of the light that falls on them into electrical power.  Still, even though there is loss of energy in this technology, the energy produced is easily stored and used.  Solar cells have a distinct drawback.  They are very costly to produce, both in terms of money and energy.  Still, it would be possible to power the entire earth if enough solar cells were made and distributed.  They last for a long time and have no moving parts.  The panels would have to be cleaned occasionally, and any defective cells replaced.  The only thing keeping people from powering this whole planet on solar electricity is the cost.

Wind and weather are other manifestations of solar energy on the earth.  Wind turbines can produce power, when the wind blows, but it takes some machinery to accomplish this.  Moving parts wear out.  Some days the wind does not blow.  Hydroelectric power plants are more reliable.  Rainwater stored in reservoirs falls through a turbine and spins a generator.  This technology has been used for many years.  Even ancient people used water wheels to grind grain.  The limits to hydroelectric power are that there are limited places on earth where these dams and power stations can be built.  They require rainfall and the control of vast quantities of water.  Dams use significant amounts of concrete and steel and take considerable effort to build.  Still, once built and properly maintained, there is no reason a hydroelectric station should not last for many years, perhaps even centuries.

Heat from the interior of the earth can be used to produce steam and spin turbines and generators.  In volcanically active regions, like Iceland, considerable potential for such geothermal power generation is available.  There are a limited number of regions on earth where the interior heat of the earth is close enough to the surface to supply energy for these stations.  Still, deep drilling and good design can make this source of energy more widely distributed.  Geothermal heat comes from the decay of radioactive elements in the interior of the earth.

Nuclear power is one source of energy that is being used to power society.  Nuclear reactors run on the fission of Uranium 235 or Plutonium in carefully-designed and fail-safed power stations.  There is a lot of Uranium available for use in reactors.  In some reactors, such as the Canadian Candu design, it is not even necessary to enrich the fuel.  Of course, like anything else, there are problems with nuclear energy.  Reactors, because of the neutron flux from fission, create radioactive waste.  This material can be hazardous for thousands of years.  Stable underground storage and responsible handling of radioactive waste is one of the necessary factors that must be considered in any plans to derive power from nuclear fission.

Scientists have been working on designing a fusion reactor for over 50 years now.  There is much potential for nuclear fusion power, but the task itself is extremely difficult.  It takes high temperatures and pressures to produce fusion.  In a fusion bomb, these conditions are produced by detonating a fission bomb in the vicinity of fusion fuel.  This approach is not useful in a power reactor.  Large vacuum chambers with powerful magnets are used to contain the compressed and heated hydrogen isotope plasma in such devices as the Tokamak.  Fusion reactors also produce neutrons, so radioactive waste is also a factor in their operation.

There are several other schemes for extracting energy from the environment.  Ocean currents, waves, and tides have all been harnessed to provide electrical power.  Many crops such as sugar cane, corn, soybeans, and palm oil are grown to produce biofuels.  Plants are not as efficient as solar cells at harvesting energy from sunlight, but they have been doing this for billions of years.  One of the latest areas of research is into the use of algae as a source for oil for biodiesel.  There is still a lot of coal in the ground, and it has been estimated that the world could operate at present energy consumption rates for the next 300 years on just this source of energy.

As long as people live in modern society, they will continue to use energy at ever-increasing rates.  Instead of waiting for supplies of fossil fuels to run out, people are actively working on alternative technologies for powering the earth.  As fuel prices increase and the cost of fossil fuels goes up, the alternative, renewable sources of power will become more economically feasible.  If industry and government do not realize the finite nature of fossil fuel reserves and begin to switch over to sustainable sources of energy, there will be a crisis at some time in the future that will be disastrous for humanity.  It is a simple thing to get power from the sun, which drives all life on earth.  It is stupid to waste the resources we have now and not work on ways to replace them with technology that will last for all time in the future.

There are many options available when considering ways to obtain power for the earth.  We can extract power from the solar energy that falls for free on every square inch of this planet.  We can extract energy from the winds and weather.  There are many nuclear fuels available for mining from the earth.  We do not have to keep burning coal and oil to power society.

Slowly, people are beginning to realize that fossil fuels are not going to be able to power the planet for a long time.  We can use this ready energy to build more permanent solutions to the energy needs of this planet.  The future will be all about electricity and less and less about inefficient complicated heat engines.  Some day people will figure out a way to make a practical electric car.

With the rising prices of fossil fuels, the alternatives become more economically practical.  There is no real limit to how expensive petroleum will get.  The cost of gasoline seems to go up every day.  Every day, more and more people buy the gasoline that is produced.  Any use of alternative energy will necessitate a change in the way people transport themselves.  We need to develop practical cars that use electric power and which are affordable.

Here is a site that has news of alternative energy.  A simple Google search will also yield thousands of leads on this topic.  With higher prices for fuel, people will eventually switch to more cost effective means of generating power.  It’s sad in a way, but it seems that people tend to do nothing unless there is money involved.  We do not have to wait for a catastrophe to happen.  The time to switch over to an endless supply of energy is now, before the fossil fuels run out, so that there will be no major hardship when supplies run short.

I just tried to look up the world total consumption of energy.  It seems figures on this number are not easy to find.  I’m talking about all the electricity, gasoline, coal, nuclear, everything combined.  I guess I would also be interested in the consumption of food energy, as this adds to the total and human and animal labor still account for a certain amount of the energy used on earth.

Now, the reason I was looking for this information is I wanted to figure out how many solar cells it would take to power the earth.  The sun shines continuously over the surface of the earth.  Most of the output of the sun just streams uselessly out into space.  There’s a lot of energy landing on the earth every day.  Plants only capture a very small percentage of this energy.  We could do so much more with technology.

A lot of the silicon that is produced goes into making solar cells.  This is about 30% of the total amount of semiconductor-grade silicon made.  It takes a lot of energy to make solar cells.  In general, a solar cell would have to operate for five years before it recovered the amount of energy that was used to create it.  This is a bit of time, but still, solar cells have no moving parts and there is no reason they should not last for a lot of years.  The time to convert to solar power is now, before the oil runs out.  When the oil is gone it is going to be a lot more expensive to make these things.

I’ve gone on and on in this blog lately about renewable energy.  I should have called this the renewable energy blog or something like that.  Still, with the price of oil going crazy and the world consuming more and more of this resource, it would seem like more people would be interested in doing something about the way the world is headed.  I would prefer to live in a world that did not fight over the black gloop that oozes from the ground.

It’s pretty silly when you think about the way the world’s energy is produced.  This is probably because energy use and production was dictated by the free market society.  The only purpose of the market is to make money for the rich.  If your main purpose is to rake in a lot of cash, you are not concerned about polluting the environment or running out of resources.  The market only thinks about one thing: money.  The welfare and sustainability of a system for the peoples of the planet is not something energy moguls are concerned about.  They are concerned about how many billions of dollars they can make from the system, which means they maximize profits, not utility.

People are not stupid.  Still, they do dumb things from time to time.  For a long time it was cheaper just to dump toxic waste into the environment.  That was before people found out they could sue companies for damages related to their harmful waste disposal practices.  In general, it takes the government to put a set of reigns on industry so that businesses do not harm people.  A few multi-million dollar lawsuits are sometimes what it takes to make the free market economy change its harmful ways.  What happened with pollution in the twentieth century is about to happen with energy in the twenty-first century.

What if we lived in a world where people could sue governments for wrongful death as a result of the practice of war?  It might make war more economically disastrous.  It’s hard to sue a suicide bomber, but you could sue the government agency or the chemical corporation that sold him the explosives.  If you could sue the gun manufacturers for every homicide that was done with their product, you might send a message to these factories that there is little profit in making death machines.

We live in a very wasteful world.  Most of the energy that is used is wasted.  Most of the thermal energy in a gallon of gas only goes to producing heat in the environment because internal combustion engines are so inefficient.  A lot of petroleum could be saved if companies would just design more efficient transportation.  The thing is, saving energy is not a priority in an age of cheap oil.  Until some resource equates with a significant amount of money, it will be squandered like so much waste.

I think the world will survive without as much energy as it uses now.  The alternatives to petroleum will eventually come online and provide the bulk of energy needs in the future.  This is the power of the free market economy.  It will self-regulate based on cost.  This does not mean it will provide the best solution to any situation, only one solution.  Wasteful government policies of violence and exploitation are also to blame for a lot of the problems on this planet.  The energy problems that are about to plague the world are just one of the things that have to be solved for people to live in peace and happiness.

Once again I’ve spent the afternoon reading about windmills on the net.  I found out that there are probably hundreds of small windmill factories in China making all kinds of wind turbine systems.  The only price I saw was pretty low, but still, I would have to buy in quantity and pay for shipping from China.

I found out by looking up American windmills that the Aermotor company is still making the old-style water pumping windmills that were designed in the 19th century.  I think this is very interesting.  I wonder how many people actually pay thousands of dollars for technology that’s 100 years old.  I suppose if I lived out on the plains far from the grid and needed to water a thousand head of cattle I might look into buying a windmill.  I might also think about saving some money and buy a new technology Chinese windmill and some batteries and an electric well pump.

I started to read a very long PDF from the General Accounting Office about wind energy and it’s possible effects on farming.  Apparently the point of this report was that it may be profitable for a farmer to lease land for wind turbines to the power company.  They also came to the conclusion that you might make three times as much money setting up your own multi-megawatt wind turbine farm.  Of course, it would take a lot of capital.  Leave it to humans to find a way to make something free like the wind cost money.

I did some looking around at the various Chinese manufacturers of windmills and found out they also make and sell the low-speed permanent magnet alternators that people are building out of magnets and old brake rotors.  This is very interesting.  If I had some money I might invest in some of these things and sell them to people trying to make their own cut-rate wind turbines.  With the higher price of fuel, which has been coming down lately, I might be able to make a profit retailing Chinese wind generators to American customers sick of the high price of power.  Of course, that’s the thing.  Electric power is not as expensive as gasoline because most of it is generated by coal, which is still cheap.

It’s no big leap of imagination to make a windmill design.  Even an old design can be fit out to make electricity with the right generator.  The thing about wind power is that you need a generating system with a lot of dynamic range.  Wind power is highly variable.  When the wind blows slowly, you only get a few watts out of a turbine.  When it blows fast you can get multiples of thousands of watts out of the same machinery.  The dynamic range of the system is essentially infinite because it goes from dead zero power to a high value in, for instance, a hurricane.  If you could design a system that would hold up in extremely high winds and generate a lot of power, you could get a fair amount of energy for the cost of the equipment.  Of course, that’s the thing.  As you design for more stress and power the cost goes up exponentially.

I find it interesting that backwards countries like China have more advanced manufacturing than America.  If you want an electric bicycle for a decent price you are not going to find it in America.  If you want to power your house from the wind or the sun, you are not going to get any kind of cost-effective system in the United States.  I saw a 20 kw wind turbine that runs about $1200, supposedly, on a website that advertises Chinese windmills.  A similar system from America costs over $50,000 and will never pay for itself.

I suppose the answer if you want to go into alternative power is to look to the global market.  Other countries have different priorities than our own.  In many parts of the world people are concerned with the damage and waste that is being produced by the use of fossil fuels.  There are simple alternatives to the continual burning of petroleum and coal.  Perhaps it will take the loss of fossil fuel supplies to trigger a turn to cleaner alternatives.  Perhaps the high price of energy will finally make the cost of wind and solar competitive with the petrochemical industry that is bleeding the people dry from all their savings.  Who knows.  Maybe someday I will get my stuff together and start my own alternative energy company.  All I really need to do is look into raising enough capital to start a factory.  Good old capitalism.

Here’s a site that has all kinds of information on do it yourself wind turbines.  There are many links to different literature about building your own wind machines.  If you are interested in any aspect of affordable wind power this site should be informative.

Further down on the page are pictures and articles about various wind turbines that people have built and tried out.  The designs range from ones made out of mostly wood and scrap metal, to more complex designs incorporating many features found on production models.  I found it interesting how people make alternators out of old brake discs and other parts they get from the junkyard.  You would think that a small windmill could turn a car alternator, but there are not a lot of windmills that use these parts in their construction.

I find it interesting how these people test their designs.  In general, they bolt the windmill to a truck and drive down the road recording performance at various speeds.  This is just funny to me, but then, if you can’t afford a wind tunnel and don’t want to just wait for the wind to blow at various speeds, I guess you have no choice but to rig something up.

I looked at some of the stuff on this site a few months ago.  It seems they have some new information now and links to different wind turbine manufacturers.  At the cost for some of these commercial systems, it would take 100 years of windy weather before you paid off your costs and began to see a profit from selling power.  A small wind turbine is just not the way to go if you are thinking about becoming a power utility.  Then again, if you can rig something up that works from junked auto parts, you might be able to turn a profit in the power business.

Sunlight streams down onto the earth for free.  Unfortunately, the technology to convert this free energy to useful power is expensive.  To start a company that generates and sells solar power to the people, it will take some funding.  In fact, it will take a lot of money.  Here is a breakdown of some of the expenses:

• Land for your energy farm.
• Silicon solar panels for generating the power.
• Mounting supports to keep your panels off the ground and pointed at the sun.
• Wiring to connect the panels together.
• Power electronics to convert the DC from the panels to AC for distribution.
• A substation to transform the power you harvest to line voltage for distribution.
• Maintenance to keep the solar farm in good repair.
• A person to clean the solar panels and remove snow from them.

There will of course be more expenses.  You will have to pay property taxes on the land.  You will need to maintain the grounds under the solar panels.  Then also, there will be times when the sun does not shine brightly.  Cloudy days will reduce the amount of power you can generate.  Still, the expense is not necessarily prohibitive.

You will need to raise capital for your project, unless of course you are already a billionaire.  One way to raise some funds is to attract investors.  You will probably have to form a corporation and sell stock in your company.  You will need to hire a lot of people to work for you.  These people will have to administer the funds and make the deals with suppliers and land owners.  If your power plant is going to be big, several square miles of area, you may end up expending multiple billions of dollars.  This is no problem, really, as you will be able to arrange volume discounts with your suppliers.  Of course, payback will take some time and maintenance costs go up with increased collector area.

It will probably take ten years for your solar power company to start making a profit.  Energy prices are still low because there is a lot of coal and other fossil fuels.  Once electric cars become more common, there will be increased demand for electricity and prices will probably rise.  In the future, your energy company will supply power and make you money, as well as money for your investors.  It is only a matter of time before we turn the deserts of the world into solar power plants.  Why not start now and beat the rush to the new energy goldmine that is solar power?

Plants are wonderful things.  They feed on sunlight.  All the energy animals need for their metabolic processes comes from plants.  There is so much sunlight striking the earth that plants have built up a surplus of energy which has been buried by silt and been converted into fossil fuels.  Plants might not have brains or nervous systems, but they are some of the most intelligent forms of life.

People are finding out that they can harvest some of the solar energy that comes to earth freely each day and that is stored by plants in chemicals they synthesize.  Even with his huge brain, man has yet to discover how to convert sunlight into chemical energy.  A one-celled plant figured out how to do this billions of years ago.  Still, even though people do not know how to convert sunlight into chemical energy, we have figured out how to use plants to do this for us.  This is the potential for biofuels.

It is one thing to turn food into energy, it is another to grow crops specifically for energy.  Even though the end results are different, the methods are the same.  Farmers use the techniques of agriculture to grow crops that store good amounts of energy.  It is a simple thing to turn this plant energy into electricity, all you have to do is burn it in a boiler to make steam for a steam turbine to turn a generator.  It is slightly more complex and less efficient to turn this biomass into liquid fuel for our vehicles, but fermentation is a technique that has been used for thousands of years.  The only limiting factor in the use of biomass for fuel is the availability of land.

Land area may not in fact be a limiting factor.  A lot of the earth is covered by seas and oceans.  Algae are an aquatic plant.  It would be a simple matter to seed the oceans with a super algae that was genetically engineered to produce large quantities of oil.  Harvesting this source of fuel would be as simple as sucking seawater through a pipe and filtering the algae out of it.  A good portion of the solar energy striking the oceans could be converted into algal oil and be harvested by coastal factories.  Perhaps the fish would recover some of their numbers with a diet of genetically engineered extra-fatty algae.

With the increasing prices for fuel people are looking into growing more of their energy.  Plants may not be as efficient at converting solar energy to electricity, but it is one technology that can be used to harvest the natural resources of earth for the benefit of man.  When the fossil fuel eventually runs out, we will need something to power our mechanized and industrial society.

I’ve been reading about energy this morning.  I read about solar steam turbines for a while.  There was a person in the late 1970’s who built a solar boiler out of 100 1-foot square mirrors and a lot of metal.  The square solar concentrator had to track the sun to focus all the light it collected onto a boiler that generated the equivalent of 6 kw of steam.  Very interesting, but not very practical.

Then I read about windmills.  The Siemens corporation makes some giant windmills.  I read all about how they cast the blades out of a wood-epoxy-fiberglass composite, all in one piece.  I read the technical specs on their 3.6 Mw wind turbine.  What it said nothing about was the cost of all this machinery.  I’m sure these things run in the millions.  It costs a lot of cash for tons of materials.  Still, it would be a good solution and the wind is basically free.  If I had billions of dollars like T Boone Pickens I too would probably buy a lot of windmills.

I just got done reading about using grass as a fuel for a powerplant.  Apparently, some places in England and Iowa are already doing this.  The plant in Iowa plans to replace 5% of the coal they burn with switchgrass.  This will take 50,000 acres of land to grow all this switchgrass.  Still, it is supposed to be marginal land that is not in production of food crops.  I’m not sure, but there must be a lot of solar energy that falls on 50,000 acres.  A quick calculation shows me that that much land could produce 40,000 Mw of peak power if it were covered in photovoltaic panels.  That’s not small potatoes.

Of course, the ultimate energy alternative is to just not use so much power in the first place.  It is a well-known fact that most of the energy that is used in the world is just wasted.  Look at incandescent lightbulbs.  These things waste 80% of the energy that they use because they generate so much heat.  Just replacing them with fluorescents would cut the energy cost of lighting by 2/3.  Still, people use the filament bulbs because they are cheap.  Maybe the problem is really not energy.  Maybe the problem is money.