US Funds Aggressive Tech To Cut Solar Power Costs 272
coondoggie writes "The U.S Department of Energy wants researchers and scientists to 'think outside the box' and come up 'highly disruptive Concentrating Solar Power technologies that will meet 6/kWh cost targets by the end of the decade.' The DOE's 'SunShot Concentrating Solar Power R&D' is a multimillion dollar endeavor that intends to look beyond what it calls the incremental near-term to support research into transformative technologies that will break through performance barriers known today, such as efficiency and temperature limitations."
Definetelly better than subsidizing obsolete techs (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Definetelly better than subsidizing obsolete te (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not black and white. If there's been a history of wasted resources related to this particular objective, then more strict regulation should be enacted (and the natural reply to this would be: regulation is both expensive and corruptible... I guess some middle-ground is necessary).
Re:Definetelly better than subsidizing obsolete te (Score:4, Insightful)
And then you have less research being done, and therefore less chance of success, because only those companies with enough capital to work without pay for years on end can actually participate.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
How do you think nuclear got started? Once we went beyond coal, gas and hydro the cost of developing new sources quickly got too high for the market to fund. We, as a society, need this stuff to ensure our future prosperity and comfort so we have to encourage development.
You could argue that government is bad at investing in things, but part of that is because it is the only body willing to invest in expensive new technologies where the risk of losing out on your investment is high. Just look at the number
Re:Definetelly better than subsidizing obsolete te (Score:5, Insightful)
You could easily swap "solar power" for "defense systems". The scandals related to government support of solar power pale by a few orders of magnitude to the overt graft and fraud in military research and acquisition. What's your point? Are you suggestion that we shouldn't be funding either?
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Definetelly better than subsidizing obsolete te (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. Of course the "scandal that comes to mind" ignores the what, 99%+ of those funds that were NOT involved in a scandal there were put to work as intended. Heck, let's be generous to your point and say only 90% weren't scandal-laden. Also, solar power is now beating grid parity in parts of the US, largely thanks to solar incentives and investment over the last several years getting the market going. Not just in the US, but here, in europe, and in china as well. This is a huge moment, where those with enough capital in parts of the us (including the northeast) could choose to "prebuy" their electricity for the next 25 years with PV... WITHOUT incentive... and not lose money compared to grid electricity. In a few more years it's going to be a slam dunk.
Public policy works. Funding research works. Give up the tired, weak whining that it's not perfect. Waiting for teh "free market" to fix it all isn't perfect either, and it cares a lot less for the collateral damage of a sudden catastrophic shift than we do.
http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/guest-blogs/pv-systems-have-gotten-dirt-cheap [greenbuildingadvisor.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Haha, you are so naive. Of course there are other scandals in the pipe from this blatant Democrat crony enrichment program (and yes Republicans are worse). Fisker and Tesla, and more to come. I'm from Crook County, IL, and I know how the scum work. You "progressive liberals" opened the sewer by voting in Obama (who is neither progressive nor liberal but a bitch to the wealthy fat cats) and now the chicago turds have flowed into washington.
Re: (Score:2)
To campaign against these programs that given you technology you use every day and produced real results and scientific achievements, and have allowed America to maintain its technical edge for many years... you wouldn
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Look at the history of government funding solar power in America...any scandals come to mind?
You're the paranoiac, you tell me.
I'll do it for DNS-and-BIND; here's one - Solyndra [chicagotribune.com].
Here's the next one - Fisker [discovery.com]
I think you knew at least one answer when you made your post. If the US government supports a particular business, it should be on strict, well known criteria; not because some "civil servant" will personally benefit. Basically, Solyndra is a "cute and green" version of Halliburton and Steven and Allison Spinner, Steven Chu, (and others) are the Obama administration's version of Dick Cheney and Richard Perle. At least no one
Re:Definetelly better than subsidizing obsolete te (Score:5, Insightful)
The argument goes like this: if the private sector invests in something risky and fails, it is Capitalism and it is Good; when the government does it, itis Socialism, and it is Bad.
All the argument is specious: CEOs invest in their golfing friends' companies, and they don't invest their own money: they invest the shareholder's. Think of the governement as a very large, highly diversify corporation (really, it is not very diversified, it mostly does insurance and has an army; but it also has a whole buch of minor subsidiaries doing a bit of everything). The question is, since the government is this huge corporation which cannot go bankrupt, what should it invest in?
Clearly, high risk, long-term stuff. In a way, like IBM. The only problem with those failed investments (and if you invest in high-risk stuff, you will fail most of the times) is that they clearly were way too application oriented and short-term!
On a more philosophical note, it is wholly reasonable that the governement does the high-risk stuff: it cannot fail. Also, we expect corporations to be profitable every quarter, whereas the government has the luxury of needing only to stay solvant -- which, when you can print your own money is not overly difficult.
Re: (Score:2)
The question is, since the government is this huge corporation which cannot go bankrupt, what should it invest in?
That bit in the middle seems doubtful these days...
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, it cannot go bankrupt: it can always print money to pay its debt. That this is not always desirable is a completely different issue. Also, it cannot be repossessed.
Now interestingly, it can still be sold or given away. So arguably, the brinkmanship of the GOP during the debt ceiling debate was nothing less than treason: nothing forces a sovereign government to pay its dues, and certainly, nothing forces a government to pay its dues in the most painful way possible for itself.
Government has duties to its
Re: (Score:2)
Also, it cannot be repossessed.
Beg to differ. Armed or peaceful revolution is basically this.
Re: (Score:2)
Ah, but no. You always owned your country. If it was mismanaged it is because you, the shareholder did not perform your role as a watchdog well enough. Hmmm, I like this view of the governement as a corporation: it makes so much sense. Government is mismanaged exactly in the same way companies are mismanaged by egotist CEOs under no oversight by the shareholders...
Repossession would be invasion or the official relinquishing of powers to a corporation. Both of which are illegal.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Look at the history of government funding solar power in America...any scandals come to mind?
Ok then what we need is a solar X Prize. It seemed to work well for space so why not. We need to get small and mid size companies competing for a prize that is funded by the department of energy. Also there should be some stipulation that requires the equipment to be made in America. Surely we have some smart people in this country that can make such a thing happen.
Re: (Score:2)
The article is about solar collectors not about panels. Different things with different uses.
Re: (Score:2)
Subsidising research and subsidising sales are two very different activities. Only one of them is economically sustainable.
6/kWh (Score:2)
"... that will meet 6/kWh cost targets by the end of the decade ..."
6 what ? 6 panels/kWh ? 6 technologies/kWh ?
6 cents (Score:5, Informative)
I admit to reading the article (sorry), thus I know it's 6 cents.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
That's still a mostly bogus number. Besides the hard facts (cents per kW under STC, usually called kWp or kW peak) that number also includes projections about the longevity of the cells and the environmental conditions of their use, which are wide open to manipulation.
The interesting numbers for solar cells are kWp/m^2 so that you can calculate the area you need and the price per square meter so that you can calculate the upfront cost.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I would assume that a researcher whose job role is to create longer-lived photocells would not be able to simply fudge the projected useful life. It's kind of hard to get papers published when your methodology is "it lasts as long as I say so".
Re: (Score:2)
For materials research, I expect that $/kWh is the more important figure. Obviously you need to know the price per square metre once you start thinking about engineering a device, but this work will be tacking problems of longevity, efficiency and cost first and foremost.
Re:6 cents (Score:4, Informative)
> That's still a mostly bogus number.
Um no. The article is clearly talking about LCoE, the basis upon which all industrial power pricing is compared.
> Besides the hard facts (cents per kW under STC, usually called kWp or kW peak) that number also includes
> projections about the longevity of the cells and the environmental conditions of their use,
> which are wide open to manipulation.
If that were the number they were referring to, you might have a point. But it's not, and you're wrong anyway. STC measurements are normally done at 3rd party labs for just this reason.
Re: (Score:3)
Around here you get about 4 kwh per day on a 1 kW set of panels. That may last about 25 years before it drops below 80% of it's current efficiency. That means over the useful life of the system you are looking at 36500 kwh for a cost of about $2k or about $.054 per kWh until you figure in the time value of money and as well as the costs of the inverter and other extras. If you figure in power currently costing about $.20/kWh then solar does make sense as long as energy increases at inflation levers or h
Re: (Score:2)
6 virgins/kWh
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Given it's a cost target I'm going to assume "dollars".
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
On a related rant: it amazes me how blithely unaware most people are about their personal energy consumption. Some might be able to vaguely guesstimate what they paid the utility company for electricity or natural gas last month, but very few could actually say "I used XX kWh of electricity last month. The cost of the electricity was $YY, and the cost of delivery was $ZZ." What is the typical
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Off the top of my head, I spend about $0.105 per kWh, and it's 100% wind. That's a decent rate in Texas. My bill last month was about $200, of which I assume $20 was overhead bullshit and fees, so I'd guess I used maybe 1700 kWh. That seems really high, but that was the last bill for the 100+ degree stretch this summer with over 90 days over 100. My bill should drop greatly this month; the house has been stuffy because the AC hasn't been running some days since it's been so nice.
We're about to downsize
Re: (Score:2)
Why does it matter? My sons will still leave all the lights in the house on when they leave for school, then say, "There goes Dad, again. Complaining about the $400 light bill."
It's a gamble... with huge potential rewards (Score:4, Interesting)
That's how research investments should always work.
Either low risk, small reward (typically funded by industry), or high risk of failure, but aiming high with benefits for all of society (typically funded by government).
East peasey (Score:2)
A world leader as a disruptive patent troll? (Score:2, Interesting)
Add in tax payer/consumer paid feed in rates around the world that made most people who wanted to get cheap units buy in.
What is left for the US to "make"? Anything the US can dream up can be understood in the EU and Asian labs and "linuxed" back into the next gen.
Anything the US tries to build can be done for less outside the US
Can the US return to full em
Re:A world leader as a disruptive patent troll? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:A world leader as a disruptive patent troll? (Score:4, Informative)
The tech belongs to Germany, Japan, China. They did the research and raced to the bottom with production lines churning out many solar panels.
The key ingredient to solar panels (polysilicon) has a very strong U.S. player in the form of Dow Corning's Hemlock Semiconductor.
Re: (Score:2)
as if people with big budgets will solve this problem where people with big *brains* have been working on for ages.
The fund will provide research money to those big brains, so that they can keep doing their brain thing in an increasingly sterile funding environment. It's not startup money.
Fundamentally hard problem... (Score:3)
Achieving 6c/KWHr for baseload ie available any time you want it 24 hours a day, with solar is a fundamentally hard problem. You're up against the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Solar energy is both dilute and intermittent.
Nuclear is far easier. It is starts out incredibly concentrated. Third generation plants like the AP1000 are extremely safe. If you don't want to reuse the waste it's easy enough to bury it 1 km underground where it won't bother anyone.
It's far easier to change the minds of people than the laws of Physics.
Looks like the USA and Europe will leave it to China to develop cheap nukes and become the driver of human civilization in the 21st century.
Re: (Score:3)
Yes, the biggest problem with energy today is not production but storage and transportation. But nuclear has similar problems as its output can't be changed effectively. Consumption changes rapidly, and the only way to solve this today is a mixed system, where the constant part of electricity is produced by nuclear and coal while the dinamic part is produced by gas and water.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
But nuclear has similar problems as its output can't be changed effectively.
Not really. Properly designed nuclear plants (e.g. Bruce Nuclear) can do that just fine. You just adjust the power output via the steam loop rather than the reactor, neatly dodging the xenon poisoning problem.
Re:Fundamentally hard problem... (Score:4, Interesting)
Water is the real problem (Score:2)
Add to that the fact that more and more people are starting to work from home and small/distributed power generation (like solar plants) starts to become more and more cost effective.
Re: (Score:2)
Umm, no.
Power generation that uses water for cooling typically sucks the water directly from a river, and spits out the slightly warmer water back into the river.
And they don't meter rivers....
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps you missed the part where I said "certain areas [unl.edu]?" Do you suppose this is some conspiracy to thwart your world views with facts?
Absolutely Useless (Score:2, Interesting)
The mean street value of such an advancement in technology is over a billion dollars, easily. But we, the federal government, will pay half your R&D costs up to $2m because we think this is a neat objective and maybe we'll all have fun getting there? Please! That's exactly what Solyndra received over $500 million in loan guarantees for and they produced nothing.
Can
Re: (Score:2)
Not Absolutely Useless (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You know we spent $720 million per day on the Iraq War, right? Sure, bad spending is bad spending, but a few million dollars to hurry up our process of disconnecting our lives from the Middle East is well worth it.
(Yes, most of our oil comes from other places, but the global supply and global pricing is still based on Middle East stability.)
The end of the golden age of oil and coal and gas (Score:3)
I suppose somebody in government watched this video. [youtube.com]
But the gov't shouldn't be subsidizing anything, it shouldn't be taxing/borrowing/printing and subsidizing with that money. It should leave people alone and should allow them to work it out in the market.
How would gov't know that the best course of action is these solar panels or anything for that matter? What gov't should be doing is stepping out of the way, dramatically shrinking its own spending (now 10% of US population is working for gov't, this includes contractors and military, this gov't force should be 100 times smaller).
But the point is that private sector has to figure out the way, companies must try and fail, most of them will fail, somebody will figure something and if that doesn't happen, then there is no way, and gov't spending is just a waste and another resource mis-allocation.
They really shouldn't be preventing private companies and people from trying more stuff with nuclear power, that's most likely the only true source of energy that we will be able to use once oil and coal and gas run out. Nuclear and at some point thermonuclear. Solar is great for local applications, but it will not replace the constant need for energy that only things like oil/coal/gas/nuclear/hydro can supply. At some point this will become the revelation that people don't have a choice and they have to rely on nuclear.
As I said many times - I want my nuclear car.
Re: (Score:2)
[T]he gov't shouldn't be subsidizing anything, it shouldn't be taxing/borrowing/printing and subsidizing with that money. It should leave people alone and should allow them to work it out in the market.
Oh the irony of reading this on /.
Re: (Score:2)
There is no irony, this could be any forum on any network that didn't have to be specifically using the packet switch protocol designed with a gov't subsidy. It's not like there were no networks before TCP/IP was created.
With DARPA the gov't had a goal of using it for its military, and you don't know how much money is spent that is wasted and never transforms into anything. Sure, TCP/IP is a success in itself, it doesn't mean it had to be this specific protocol.
Re: (Score:2)
You can always pretend the free market "would have" done something. Electric infrastructure. Roads. Internet. Pure research. But that doesn't mean it will. If you want viagra, the free market will deliver that. If you want to avoid a catastrophic shock to the system when energy prices spike with no ready to deploy alternatives already going, however, it can't. That takes years and years of development and deployment and a serious focus to get going, in conditions that are not yet "economical". But
Re: (Score:2)
I don't have to pretend, that's what free market DID do before intervention by government, that really started in 1913.
Free market DID create all sorts of things and it DID provide all sorts of research. From airplanes, to cars, to telephones (so the phone infrastructure), and electrical power plants (and that infrastructure) and roads and rail roads as well, which were destroyed during the ridiculous 'new deal'.
The transistor is all pure research, but it was useful and it was done privately. Same with tho
Re: (Score:2)
If you think oil prices drops are anything but natural fluctuations on an ever-rising overall price curve, you are not paying attention to the overall trend.
If it takes massive depression to dampen oil pricing, that is a pretty damning indicator right there. Or are you suggesting that crashing the world economy is a viable solution to energy prices?
Re: (Score:2)
But the government didn't create "The Internet" as we know it today. It provided the money to some researchers to create a resilient network for military purposes. It was the private sector that glob onto and made the network viable, and then expanded it to what we now know it for.
Only an extremely small percenta of the packets ever transferred across the Internet touched a government router. Well, that is if you exclude the illegal and unconstitutional wiretaps.
Re: (Score:2)
The only reason that nuclear power was introduced when it was introduced and the reason it works the way it works were government subsidies, that's true. But it's false to say that nuclear power exists because of government subsidies. People were working on this outside of government, the physics and mathematics of this were being discovered and the work was done privately.
What I am talking about is gov't stepping out of the way and removing its subsidies and allowing the market to set prices correctly th
Re: (Score:2)
Hold on, hold on, that insurance shouldn't be there subsidized by any government. The cost of investment must include the cost of insurance, and you are wrong thinking that a private entity cannot get into that.
There are plenty of things that are even MORE expensive than nuclear power plants that are done privately. The cost of building a new microchip fabrication facility is at least in the same ballpark.
At least with gov't out of the picture, there would have been adequate insurance bought (which is also
Re: (Score:2)
TODAY no nuclear power plant would get insurance, but if gov't wasn't there providing fake insurance (and all insurance that gov't provides is fake, it only relies on money printing, not on any actual insurance, as in interest bearing assets). If gov't is not subsidizing an activity, the price for activity goes down due to increase of competition, because subsidies imply various regulations that prevent competition.
If nuclear power was too expensive today, it would only mean one thing: the pricing structure
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the more likely result is that without government intervention there would be no nuclear power at all.
How exactly do you insure it? There's no defined bound to how much a disaster may cost, which means that any insurance company would be insane to accept. Earlier in the thread there was a mention of the possibility of having Tokyo evacuated. How do you see an insurance company covering that? And what would the insurance payments be?
Re: (Score:2)
As it happens I am old enough to remember Ike beating Stevenson and the introduction of the Atoms for Peace program. I think we should take care if we try to conclude the subsidies were focused on *developing* nuclear power, per se. The geopolitical issues were the real drivers and I am not thinking precisely of the threat posed by Stalin. Now I did look at your link. The part that really amused me was the proposal to assess nuclear plants for protection against terrorist threats and avoiding nuclear p
Re: (Score:2)
The gov't intervention into economy actually causes the short term thinking, my journal is filled with thoughts on this exact topic, here is an example. [slashdot.org]
No, it's not the role of government to finance gigantic projects, because then you'll have non-stop gigantic projects to the detriment of the rest of the economy, and by the end you will have produced nothing, but you would have moved lots of earth around with lots of shovels.
Re: (Score:2)
PV already cheap enough. We need better batteries (Score:2)
We've already hit the tipping point with $1/kw and falling PV. PV has no moving parts, a long service life and works well at the point of consumption (households). It is not so much more expensive than fossil fueled utility power after cost of carbon and power distribution is taken into account. Utility scale solar requires huge amounts of land. We should only do that after our southern facing roofs are covered in panels (or north for the aussies).
We need better batteries, not better solar power. A cheape
Re: (Score:2)
This is not about PV. This is about thermal solar collection, which also allows the storage of energy (focus sunlight on a tower, melt salt, store reasonably large amounts of energy in molten salt so as to be able to continue generating during the night).
Are they going to follow the rules this time? (Score:2)
Or will Obama be allowed to pull a Solyndra and funnel money to campaign contributors without the mandated oversight?
Re: (Score:3)
MW: Disrupt - verb: to break apart / to throw into disorder. Origin: Latin disruptus, past participle of disrumpere, from dis- + rumpere to break.
Contrast with: "Disruptive technology [wikipedia.org]"
But people are lazy, so they drop the context. Rather than adding the "technology", which would change the meaning (through context), they just say "disrupt" in the same way that we might say "grep" or "ping" in a non-technical conversation. It's annoying but i
Re: (Score:2)
Is it me or is the word "disruptive" the new buzz word?
Well, it was either "disruptive" or "game-changing". Pick your poison.
Re: (Score:2)
With my game-changin paradigm I'm going to totally disrupt outside of the box with my synergistic relationships and realize great efficiencies of scale by outsourcing labor to an aggressive team of PR strategists in China.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Screw disruptive; I want to see disruptors [memory-alpha.org]!
Re: (Score:2)
IE:
These projects have started and they might just save us, for they wil concentrate the usage of power on the peak supply moments.
I am just weird
Re: (Score:2)
Re:The other costs (Score:5, Informative)
Even if solar panels were free, solar electricity still has a high hurdle to jump before it becomes competitive with other sources.
The costs include the mounting structure and the power inverter.
The article isn't about electricity from photovoltaic panels mounted on roofs. It's about large industrial scale solar concentrators like this one. [ieee.org] It has the potential to be cheaper than PV generated electricity and it keeps producing electricity after the sun goes down.
Re: (Score:2)
"The costs include the mounting structure and the power inverter."
This is called "Balance of System", or BOS. Right now it breaks down roughly like this:
$1.25 for the panels
$0.40 for the inverters
$0.30 for the racking and install
This is for small systems, larger systems reduce that roughly linearly by 30 to 50%.
So if you're trying to reduce the cost of solar, clearly hitting the panel cost is the way to go. For instance, if the panels drop in price by 1/2, then the total system cost goes from $1.95 to $1.33
Re: (Score:3)
Probably. But they've tried the "let's wait until industry solves it" method for a few decades, and nothing has come out of it, so they're trying something new.
Re:Why not 1/kWh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because cold fusion doesn't seem to be coming any time soon. If it's possible at all, it's a very long term investment, which this isn't.
In my understanding, there are no problems of this kind to solve in geothermal energy. Drilling is well developed, heat exchange too. There's no particular challenge in manufacturing that could make it a lot cheaper if solved. There's nothing much to throw money at.
RTFA. ""The overarching goal of the SunShot Initiative is reaching cost parity with baseload energy rates, estimated to be 6Â/kWh without economic support, which would pave the way for rapid and large-scale adoption of solar electricity across the United States."
Because the result woudln't be something that can be driven on a real road. It would be a single ocupant tin can without AC or anything else.
Re: (Score:2)
In my understanding, there are no problems of this kind to solve in geothermal energy. Drilling is well developed, heat exchange too. There's no particular challenge in manufacturing that could make it a lot cheaper if solved. There's nothing much to throw money at.
Besides which, there's nothing to preclude a DOE funding project for geothermal research.
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder if it ever occurred to the well meaning busy-bodies in the government that the professionals in their respective industries might just know a little bit more than they do?
And this funding drive will interfere with their ability to continue that research how, exactly? If you don't fund this research, the outcome is "whatever private comes up with", and if you do fund this research, the outcome is "whatever private comes up with, plus better solar". That seems like a gain to me.
Re: (Score:2)
The other way it's like the The Broken Window Fallacy is that it's taking from the overall research pie and assigning it to something that it would not have ot
Re: (Score:2)
You are espousing another fallacy.
Likely if that money hadn't been taxed away it wouldn't have been spent on research at all.
Arbitrary targeted research into any somewhat promising field from a government trumps no research at all and that one simple fact invalidates your argument.
Re: (Score:2)
Every year dozens of people die in the installation and maintenance of solar panels and wind generators
That argument comes back all the time but it sounds completely ridiculous to me. How is handling solar panels or wind turbines more dangerous than working on a nuclear power plant construction site, or any power plant for that matter? Just enforce similar security measures for workers and you'll get similar fatality rates.
Meanwhile nuclear has caused zero deaths in its history in this country - but somehow nuclear is unsafe and we need to devoting more resources to solar?
Fukushima went inches away from collapsing Japan as a country [guardian.co.uk] it seems. Would the wind have blown in the wrong direction (i.e.,inland) during those fateful few days, Tokyo might have had
Re: (Score:2)
Are you seriously trying to propose that nobody died during the construction, maintenance and everyday operation of a multiple major industrial power plants? What you are probably stating is that nobody has died from radiation from a nuclear power plant. I suspect the same is true of solar. No deaths from runaway solar power generation.
Nice try though.
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder if it ever occurred to the well meaning busy-bodies in the government that the professionals in their respective industries might just know a little bit more than they do?
Actually they talk to a lot of professionals in the industry before making such decisions. It's not some magic number they research find out things like what cost level would be needed before the industry would be viable, what cost numbers are achievable, and how long the industry professionals think it would take to achieve these goals. I know its en vogue to assume government is some sort of nameless entity full of stupid but in reality there are actually lots of well educated hard working people there
Re: (Score:2)
So you think the DOE should distribute research funds on the time-tested "throw the money into the air and see how much people can catch" approach?
Re: (Score:2)
Dah indeed (Score:2)
Out of which orifice did you pull that figure? And how many multiples of current retail cost per kWh would it be costing us steady state? We'll never know, because you didn't offer anything in support.
Re: (Score:3)
This will never, ever work. Even in theory.
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2011/06/21/the-maury-equation/
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Fine, if you believe this, run the same equations and tell me what you think will happen.
But honestly, why don't you just say "well, when I wave my magic wand, it will look different". One can imagine all sorts of science fiction solutions to this problem, but, and this is critical, one can also imagine all sorts of science fiction solutions to making the same power cheaper hear on earth. For instance, if we invent a low cost superconductor we could ship power from north africa across the Atlantic. Right?
No
Re: (Score:2)
LOL I love Slashdot.
government decides to vomit money in effort to save economy.
+ scam artists concoct company to score off this free money by forming company.
+ company evaporates with $500 million of guaranteed gov't loans in 2 years.
+ everyone points fingers.
+ government announces new piles of money being shoveled at a problem
+ someone references the issue
= flamebait!