Are you talking about this kind of Nanosolar? That company was featured in the Biz section of the SJ Mercury News a few months ago.
Stranger: PV shingles are available now, although they are not as efficient as the more common panels.
Yes, though the company I read about a while ago was in South Africa. The cells are basically printed on flexible materials and can be put down like carpet or wall paper. They aren’t anywhere close to ready for prime time though…they don’t have the density required to be really cost effective. But…eventually I could see wide scale use of this kind of technology on building roofs and such to lessen external energy consumption. I just don’t see something like this replacing 100% of our energy use…but I can definitely see 20%.
And I still think you could convert solar power in, say, Arizona, to hydrogen fuel for use as a transport medium for use in personal transport. I can’t believe that there is so much money being thrown at hydrogen fuel cells if they aren’t viable or if there are no good logistical means for transporting the hydrogen.
-XT
This is kind of the point. Power generation doesn’t follow anything like Moore’s law. You’re not going to go from 1% of the total to 100% in 20 years by relying on technological breakthroughs. If someone proposed improving coal efficiency by leaps and bounds every year, I’d think they were nuts too.
I think you meant fusion here, but you’re right, it’s always 20 years away, even though it is really the holy grail of power generation. More solar is good, but you have to be realistic about how far it can go, and what the technology will be 20 years from now.
Very possibly true, but I was reacting to the claim that solar will compete with coal in 5 years and provide all of the Earth’s energy needs by 2028. That prediction is nonsense.
Easy!
You’ve heard that the Greenland glacier is melting, right? And environmentalists have predicted dire consequences should all that nice, pure, fresh icewater should go straight into the ocean. Therefore, we should build a giant pipeline from Greenland to the southwestern US.
Two problems solved with one action!
It’s all downhill from Greenland too (I’ve looked at a globe, aye? 
) so we could generate energy from the water flowing down from Greenland to the Great South West and eliminate a 3rd bird as well!
(ok, I know there are several logical problems with this, but work with me here! Also, no actual birds will be harmed in the making of this technology…which will hopefully alleviate any tree hugger anxiety over the plan…)
-XT
After the $500 billion Iraq debacle, “it costs too much” doesn’t cut it as an argument for me any more. That’s an estimated $420 billion spread over 39 years. We’ve pissed away that much in the desert to secure our oil supplies in 5 years, and we’re not going to have jack shit to show for it in the end. If the political will can be created, the cost won’t be an issue.
It’s not viable given current state of the art in hydrogen storage. Advances in efficient reversible hydrides or matrix storage may make it more competitive (or at least practical) for general consumer transportation, though I doubt hydrogen fuel will serve as a replacement for heavy haulage or air transportation. Save for niche applications in fleet vehicles, the current state of hydrogen fuel storage technology just isn’t suited to replacing petrofuels, and the low energy efficiency compared to direct electric is going to require substantial advances in storage capability of hydrogen over more robust electrochemical batteries.
Manufacturers and researchers are aware of the drawbacks of hydrogen (and I don’t know that anybody is pouring “billions of dollars” into it) but the appeal of a fuel that is essentially completely non-polluting is a strong draw, but personally I suspect that electric battery storage will eventually trump hydrogen for volumetric energy density, and the storage and handling problems of hydrogen, along with the inherent inefficiencies in the “hydrogen economy” will sideline molecular hydrogen as a fuel, though it may still find use in hydrocracking and synthetic fuel enhancement.
Well, I can’t disagree with that. We’ll be using fossil fuels (and trying to figure out how to make them last longer or extract more energy from them, while mitigating their effects) for a few decades to come, even if we started now with an intensive solar development program. Like I said, Kurzweil is bombastic and optimistic beyond any reasonable projection. But eventually we’ll have to transition to solar and solar-derived energy sources.
I know you are both being facetious, but you’d actually have to pump a lot of energy to get water from Greenland to a lower latitude, owing to the difference in rotational energy. And water depletion–a serious problem in the American Southwest as well as other areas–isn’t just an issue of water for drinking and agriculture, but also energy production; water is used as a general purpose working fluid and coolant in most large scale power generation cycles owing to its availability, low cost, relative nonreactivity and chemical hazard, and because of its fairly unique thermodynamic properties of transitioning between vapor and liquid at temperatures and pressures that are achievable using common steels, and being liquid at STP. Nitrogen, ammonia, halocarbons, or molten salts are other possible working fluids but they have to be processed and refined, and then contained lest they contaminate the environment in large amounts, making them less than useful for rejecting waste heat to the environment.
Stranger
I don’t disagree with either the sentiment of waste or that funding energy development programs that make the United States independent of foreign sources is smart and viable…but try getting a $420B spending package through Congress (without strawman threats of terrorists or Commies) or sustaining the requisite level of funding for a program over two decades or more without having it cut when some jingoist wants to burn money on vaporware defense programs or election-stalking tax cut “dividends”.
Creating foresighted political will is harder than squeezing oil out of desert shale, and it has an extremely high entropy factor. It’s harder to contain or control than superfluid helium, and less predictable than a cat in a box. If you could figure out how to govern political will and put it to good use, controlling the global climate would be trivial in comparison.
Stranger
:eek: You mean it’s NOT all down hill??
(and yes, I think we were both joking there…certainly my own statement was tongue in cheek)
-XT
…that produce oil as a by product. We can use the oceans as energy farms. Next: pass laws that madate working at home-then we can reduce our energy waste in commuting!
Finally: everybody buys one of those gas-savings gizmos (from the JC Whitney catalog)-presto: problem solved!
Squink, are you talking about the way it took 20 years for home computers or cellular telephones or MP3 players or DVDs to saturate the market? Because in my lifetime I’ve seen a tremendous compression in the time it takes for a consumer item to transit from early adopters to laggards. My guess is, that if viable solar cell technology becomes available, it will be ubiquitous in less than five years. Even if we have no improvements in solar technology, the increasing cost of fossil fuel is going to make the economics trend towards solar. At $150/barrel oil, you can do a lot with solar, and how long do you think it will be before we’re paying that much?
I don’t much believe what Kurzweil says about anything. The media has watched too much Gilligan’s Island - they seem to think an “inventor” is qualified to talk about anything.
Given that, a bunch of smart people in the Valley are backing this with real money. Yes breakthroughs will have to be made which we can’t foresee, but when I started in the business the silicon technology which is obsolete today was impossible with known technology. Moore’s Law, by the way, is descriptive, not prescriptive. While semiconductor companies roadmaps take it into account, things are slowing down already - not because of technology but because it is too expensive to build fabs for new process nodes.
While I agree that the transmission infrastructure means we’ll never get anywhere near 100%, one of the biggest advantages of solar is that there is a lot more local generation, which should relieve the stress on transmission lines. If 50% of LA’s power was locally generated, how much would that save in transmission line losses?
You may be overlooking the notion that OPEC can monkey with the price and could (and by all business logic, will) cut oil prices just as viable solar tech looks close, long enough for solar investors to panic and promising industries to crash, and then start creeping the price back up again.
To be really serious about alternate energy, one has to look further than five years ahead. Twenty, minimum, and your investment will be slip to near worthlessness before it turns into gold, if you have the guts to hang on.
I expect that lots of homeowners will wait for viable solar cell tech, v2.0 before decking their roofs. v1.0 might be viable, but early adopters run the usual risk of paying for something that contains a fatal flaw.
Heavy industry, such as the local Ford plant, would face big infrastructure changes, plus the necessity of working out new deals with power companies to assure a constant backup supply.
I think you’re underestimating the magnitude of the changes required for solar to become ubiquitous. Then again, I may be over-estimating.
Well, again going to a HVDC system for long distance electrical transmission will be a vast improvement on current HVAC. But decentralized and regional energy production is good for a number of reasons, including limiting energy cartels and favoritism for energy availability, reducing the complexity and providing redundancy in the transmission infrastructure, and so forth. I doubt that truly local solar power production via PV cells mounted on rooftops will ever provide sufficient electricity for standard residential and commercial use, but it can certainly be supplementary, reducing demand during peak energy time, and making some systems (like heating and cooling) semi-autonomous, further evening out loads. It might even be worthwhile to feed energy back into local grids (as some utilities currently allow for PV array owners), but you’re still going to need central intensive power production sources for an industrial economy.
This combined with energy conserving construction methods and increasing efficiency in appliances could conceivably maintain the present standard of living with a vastly reduced dependence on foreign oil and domestic coal, which is a lot more appealing than running around and telling the public that they must freeze in the winter, broil in the summer, and only put on one light at a time lest they make the Baby Jesus cry.
Stranger
Sure they can cut the price, the way video recorder manufacturers cut their prices to stave off DVDs, but it’s hard to sweep back the tide. In 30 years VCR’s went from a high tech curiosity purchased by innovators to quaint relics owned by a few grandparents who haven’t got with the program.Here’s an interesting historical look at the cost of computer memory over time. From 1994 to 2004 the cost of hard drive memory went from $0.95/megabyte to $8.70 a gigabyte. That’s better than two orders of magnitude in 10 years. There’s a tipping point, and when it happens, it happens fast.
Well, that’s an awfully fast dismissal of nuclear. Nuclear remains the only technology we have for generating the power we need without producing greenhouses gases for the forseeable future. We can solve the waste problem, and you’ll be surprised how fast political consensus changes when the price of energy skyrockets.
Betting our future on solar is ridiculous. We don’t really know how to get the power we need, or how much it will cost us in the end. There are political problems here as well - as soon as you try to deploy over large areas of land, you’ll run into opposition. Just ask the wind power folks. From what I hear, nanosolar is overhyped.
We need high density baseload power that’s available rain or shine, light or dark, windy or calm. Nuclear power plants take up a fraction of the space of other power sources. They emit no pollutants to the atmosphere. Their waste is already sequestered. The cost of nuclear is largely decoupled from the price of fuel, because fueling costs only make up a small amount of the cost of nuclear. This means costs will remain stable, which is good for the economy.
Against all these benefits, dismissing it out of hand because of waste handling and political problems seems overly dismissive, especially when they alternative you are suggesting is much more radical and unproven.
Why do you think solar power can track that kind of growth curve? Almost nothing does. Moore’s law exists for very specific reasons having to do with advancement in the technology of printing circuitry. I don’t see at all how this applies to advances in solar power, which more akin to the incremental improvements we see in other materials. I don’t see people arguing that glue will be two orders of magnitude stronger in 10 years, or that steel will be two orders of magnitude stronger, or composites two orders of magnitude lighter. What’s so special about solar cells that would see them tracking an exponential improvement curve akin to Moore’s law?
Although I’m a huge solar energy proponent, I think that algae-produced biodiesel might be more practical as an energy source. Of course the only way we are going to get out of this mess is by conserving and adopting a variety of RE sources. Solar won’t be able to do it alone, just like oil doesn’t today.
Even that Scientific American article, which is overly optimistic, says we could only replace 35% of energy sources with solar within the next 40 years. What they don’t mention is that our energy needs will grow by more than that amount over that period of time. So even with their grand plan and a half trillion dollars in subsidy, we’d still be pumping out the same amount of greenhouse gases.
Nuclear’s the only option I can see.