What Gore Didn't Say About Solar Cells 574
AmericanInKiev writes "Computer World posted a piece on Al Gore and his claim that solar cells will improve at the same rate as microprocessors. Vinod Khosla on the other hand has expressed disappointment that the doubling rate for price/performance of PV is 10 years rather than 18 months for transistors. Which of these two has the facts on their side?" Before anyone has him inventing the Internet again, note that Gore's claim as related in the article is much milder than that Moore's Law applies to solar cells per se -- namely, he's quoted as saying "We're now beginning to see the same kind of sharp cost reductions as the demand grows for solar cells." An optimistic statement, but not a flat-out silly one.
Al Gore and the Internet (Score:5, Informative)
In response to the controversy, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn argued that, "We don't think, as some people have argued, that Gore intended to claim he 'invented' the Internet. Moreover, there is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore's initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet."[101] In addition, Newt Gingrich, former Republican Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, stated: "In all fairness, it's something Gore had worked on a long time. Gore is not the Father of the Internet, but in all fairness, Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet, and the truth is -- and I worked with him starting in 1978 when I got [to Congress], we were both part of a "futures group" -- the fact is, in the Clinton administration, the world we had talked about in the '80s began to actually happen." - Wikipedia
Re:Here we Go.... (Score:5, Informative)
37% is available. Oh did I mention they cost 100 times as much ;)
Re:10 years ain't bad. (Score:5, Informative)
Solar isn't competing against oil unless you a solar powered car. Solar power is competing against coal, natural gas, hydroelectric and nuclear for electricity generation. In the U.S. oil accounts for 1.6% of electricity generation [wikipedia.org]. Don't mean to be pedantic but it drives me up a wall that people have no clue where their power comes from.
Coal is nearly half of America's electric power. Its price is going up but not as much as oil and it is in much greater abundance in the U.S. Unfortunately coal's impact on the environment, both mining it and burning it, tends towards devastating. The Chinese are using huge amounts of coal for their electricity too.
Moore's law is a bad analogy (Score:2, Informative)
Moore's law is a measure of the maximum number of transistors per single integrated circuit changing over time. Evoking Moore's law to explain greater efficiencies of production or advances in technology that produce cheaper products are unfortunately all too common.
Re:it's not a huge stretch (Score:5, Informative)
Granted, he never said "I invented the internet", but it's not hard to get that from "I took the initiative in creating the internet". What he presumably meant was something like "I took the initiative in starting programs that ultimately led to the creation of the internet", which is sort of what the following sentence more vaguely tries to say. But just the flat-out "I took the initiative in creating the internet" does read like a claim that he, well, created the internet.
Actually it's a language issue that created a misunderstanding of intent. In Congressional terms initiative means starting the process and has nothing to do with creation. He was instrumental in establishing the the environment that made the internet possible. No one ever argued what he said they used the spin and ignored the facts. Everyone got a good laugh out of their own ignorance of how the Congress works and it cost him the election and got us eight years of Bush. Was a joke made at his expense really worth eight years of Bush? It was really a misunderstanding of terminology not a wild claim made by Gore so is it still funny? Would there have been a joke in it if he had instead said I helped write and push through a Bill that set the ground work for the internet? Just not as funny as twisting his words. This may have been the most expensive laugh in history. It was the 4 to 6 trillion dollar laugh so I hope the people who thought the misunderstanding was funny got their money's worth. He never once said "invented" the comedians and Republicans did but everyone foolishly went along with it and sadly Gore waited too long to correct the error.
Re:Yeah, but it could be (Score:2, Informative)
i just don't get this obession with PV, it's not "free" energy, it's bloody expensive energy. cpu development has nothing to do with PV development i don't understand where he got that comparision from...
They'll improve at the same rate as LCD panels (Score:5, Informative)
Applied Materials, the largest maker of semiconductor fab machinery, makes fab gear for solar panels. Their CEO likes to show graphs of cost per watt vs. year, and there's a steady decline, at roughly the same rate as LCD panels. Applied Materials solar cell fabs are using technology borrowed from LCD panel fab, and they're now making 5 square meters of panel at a time. The machinery for manufacturing such huge panels is appropriately large, and that's part of what's bringing the cost down. Despite much hype, no single improvement has produced a big drop in panel cost. But the cumulative effect of continuous improvement is working.
Applied Materials people make the point that installation is now half the cost of the completed solar system, and the solar industry needs to move beyond the "guy with a pickup truck" level of installation. Bigger panels reduce installation cost, and they're working on panels that are roofs themselves, instead of being installed on top of roofs.
The actual rate of price drop is maybe a factor of 2 per decade. Which isn't bad. As the Applied Materials solar division head says, "This is a great business. Everybody else's costs are going up, and ours are going down. And we're nowhere near market saturation."
Re:Al Gore and the Internet (Score:5, Informative)
He did not, however, write the Commodore 64 port of GOPHER, nor did he start up his own ISP in his basement. But it does look like he did play a role in supporting the building of a robust nationwide backbone for data traffic, and allowing those outside research institutions and the military to have access to it.
Re:Here we Go.... (Score:5, Informative)
No need to get so fancy. Normal lenses ("concentrators") and used with high-efficiency triple-junction cells to collect light from a large area (see Emcore's page [emcore.com] for an example). In fact these cells perform better with higher intensity light anyways.
Fraunhofer is using a slightly different approach that looks to get better and better as light intensity increases: article [compoundse...ductor.net]
Re:Here we Go.... (Score:5, Informative)
Sounds like something that solar thermal plants might have a lot of. Some {coal,gas,nuclear} plants already sell their excess heat to industry during the day, but they could also keep solar plants from going offline overnight..
Re:10 years ain't bad. (Score:3, Informative)
Lots of people use heating oil for their homes, especially in the US. According to the Dept. of Energy [doe.gov], over 8 million of the 107 million homes in the US use heating oil (roughly 7.5%) and rougly 4.1% in Canada [pwgsc.gc.ca]. Typically, they have to refill their tanks 4 to 5 times a year. Heating oil accounts for about 25% of the yield of a barrel of crude oil, the second largest "cut" after gasoline (petrol). With solar generated heat/power in place, heating oil would no longer be needed
Re:The reason the world has experts (Score:2, Informative)
Not 10 years (with current technology). Try 1 to 2 years energy payback time.
See the graph on page 4: http://www.clca.columbia.edu/papers/Photovoltaic_Energy_Payback_Times.pdf [columbia.edu]
A misunderstanding of Si-based technology. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Here we Go.... (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.energy.rochester.edu/nordvarm/env/ [rochester.edu]
http://www.energy.rochester.edu/uk/chpa/commheat/eursuccess.htm [rochester.edu]
Already done on a quite large scale in finland, norway and sweden.
Re:Al Gore and the Internet (Score:5, Informative)
Somehow I doubt that Al Gore played a significant role in democratizing the information age. That role would fall to a new category of leaders. And I think you of all people should know :)
Al Gore was instrumental in securing funding for the development of the internet. One can infer that the internet was always intended to eventually make its way to public use based on its initial test: The initial test involved VOIP! (You can see the truck used for testing the internet at the Computer History Museum. http://www.computerhistory.org/events/index.php?id=1191351626 [computerhistory.org])
Furthermore, if you take the time to watch the video, you can listen to Vint Cerf's attitude towards internet. The internet was a way to make multiple networks talk to each other. Vint seemed to indicate that he always pushed for IP to be the protocol used to connect different networks together, which is why it beat OSI.
Thus, I think we can infer that there was always an intent to make the internet public and we can thank Al Gore for helping to fund its development. That's what Vint seems to indicate.
Re:We just need to plant more trees (Score:2, Informative)
The retention of this terrestrial energy IS the greenhouse effect
It seems you do not any idea regarding Greenhouse effect.
The Earth absorbs the heat radiated from the sun. It then radiates back the heat in the form of high-wavelength radiation.
Greenhouse effect is caused due to absorption of this high wavelength radiation by gases in the atmosphere. Chief among these greenhouse gases are CO2, methane, and to some extent CFCs.
Trees help the environment by fixing the free carbon in the atmosphere in the form of CO2, thereby reducing the Greenhouse effect.
Re:Here we Go.... (Score:5, Informative)
You're totally and completely wrong.
Consider a car moving at a steady speed along a level highway. It will slowly lose energy to rolling resistance and aerodynamic resistance. The Prius is highly streamlined, which helps with the latter. The former is essentially constant for any vehicle.
Also, a smaller engine is an asset, not a liability. An engine is more efficient when working closer to its maximum capacity. A huge BMW engine still has to move heavy cylinders around rapidly and lubricate components designed for a high power output even when only a small portion of that power is needed. On the other hand, a Prius' smaller engine is sized precisely correctly for the average load it handles. Larger peak demands are supplemented by the battery.
Also, the Prius' transmission is an advantage here: it's a continuously variable design, meaning that the engine can operate at precisely the most efficient speed all the time, whereas the BMW's engine speed is dictated by a combination of road speed and transmission gear ratio. That speed is likely not optimal.
As for diesel hybrids: I'd love one. But manufacturers have had difficulty making diesel engines meet strict emissions standards imposed by states like California and New York. Besides: I spend so little on gasoline these days that the incremental advantage of using diesel doesn't make me miss it much.
PV efficiency numbers (Score:3, Informative)
The efficiency numbers you see on these things are by and large the product of someone's imagination.
The testing procedure involves the solar company building a very small sliver of a PV cell under lab conditions (not mass manufacture conditions) and then sending it to a test facility. The smaller that sliver is the more likely the efficiency numbers are inflated. The more experimental a technology is the harder it is to manufacture anything big enough for meaningful results. This means that all these reports of 37% efficient PV technology being 5 years away are probably incorrect.
My friend works in an office that does energy retrofits of government buildings and one of the lists they have is the factor for each PV manufacturer between what the manufacturer claims their panels will do and what kind of energy the panels actually generate in the wild, based on monitoring previous installs they've done themselves.
These efficiency numbers are all academic until you've tried the cells out in the environment from which you need to generate energy.
Re:Except it's still inaccurate (Score:2, Informative)
The Internet today is worth anything because of the hundreds of other bits and protocols that were tacked on top of it. E.g., probably Tim Berners-Lee's WWW concept was _the_ one thing that took the Interent from the ivory tower of academic curiosities and made it useful for the common man.
So? That doesn't mean the Internet didn't exist before them.
You're arguing that writing didn't exist before Gutenberg because it was a pain in the ass to make books before movable type was invented.
The Mosaic browser, and thus the WWW as we know, it owe much to the "Gore Bill" funding the NCSA. To quote Marc Andreessen, "If it had been left to private industry, [Mosaic] wouldn't have happened, at least, not until years later."
What makes it _the_ Internet isn't just the underlying TCP/IP protocol, but the whole eidifice of applications and protocols on top of them.
None of which would be possible without TCP/IP and the network of networks underneath.
At any rate, what Gore championed wasn't that. It was ARPANET, a toy for the military
This is an outright lie.
The first ARPANET link went online in 1969, the same year Al Gore was enlisting in the Army. He was not elected to Federal office until 1977. By the time Gore was sworn in, ARPANET needed no champions.
Al Gore championed the educational NSFNet, whose importance was not apparent to most in Congress. In hindsight, it was the major step between the closed military ARPANET and the open public Internet.
So basically it's a bit like crediting Karl Benz with inventing the tank. You know, 'cause he made a car, and later someone else added a bigger engine, treads, armour and gun(s) and got a tank. But, hey, if you want to, you can still see it as just Karl Benz's car.
What you are doing is a like not giving Benz credit for the car because his car didn't have a radio, air conditioning, and air bags. You've moved the goalposts, redefining the word "Internet" to mean something other than the Internet.
Regardless of whether he "invented" the Internet or not, his taking credit for it is still highly misleading and a bit bullshit.
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn say Al Gore's statement is accurate. Marc Andreessen gives him a measure of the credit for the web browser as we know it.
We would probably have the Internet without Al Gore. But we probably would have had to wait a bit without him greasing the governmental wheels.
Re:Here we Go.... (Score:3, Informative)
See - this is the problem;
Everyone makes this immediate leap that prices will move against the first rule of supply and demand.
I would submit that prices move against supply/demand only when their are breakthroughs in production or material constraints. Computers went from hand production to pick and place production, whilst transistors got smaller and smaller.
The problem is that these 37% cells are already being produced on the best equipment. So those gains in cost are already priced in...
AIK
Re:Here we Go.... (Score:3, Informative)