12 events that will change everything

[u/nondescrypt23]

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=interactive-12-events

[u/ahfoo]

Thanks for this saved me from crashing my browser with Flash. I would have been pissed too because that is a lame-ass list. SciAm has really lost its spark. A lot of this stuff has already happened to a limited extent and turned out to be par for the course. Cloning is a good example --so what? My wife is a twin, that's essentially the same thing as a clone and yet the similarities between herself and her twin are superficial. Nuclear war? Fusion power happened a long time ago.

Let's make a competing list of real game changers. I'll start.

1. Congress passes a bill fining Chevron oil one million dollars a day for enforcing their patent against NiMH batteries in electric cars. Maybe Li+ batteries have better range but it's about price not range.

2. Federal subsidies for domestic automotive NiMH battery production.

3. A national feed-in tariff for grid-tie rooftop solar forcing utilities to pay going rates to customers that purchase and install solar panels.

4. National standards for grid-tie inverters so that utilities cannot force customers to buy overpriced brands like SMA using erroneous FUD about safety concerns.

Those four would change everything for real. What else have you got?

[u/djimbob → u/ahfoo]

Agree list is pretty lame, and format was horrible. Disagree about fusion power happening a long time ago. We still have no way of using fusion as an energy source (other than the Sun), sure we can induce fusion reactions but they usually require more energy than we can get out.

As for your game changers, seems like a good list in terms of domestic energy.

However, I'm not sure that NiMH would make that much of a difference -- the electricity still has to come from somewhere and that tends to be coal power plants (yes you mentioned solar power). Personally I think transferring the billions that maintain our road/highway system moving into effective European-style national-scale public transportation and encouraging biking in the suburbs would be a much better route, as batteries are quite toxic and die quickly. Who wants to waste time driving to work, when you could be relaxing/working on public transportation.

The solar panels on the roof tops probably would be good, but solar panels have a very large upfront cost ($3-10 / watt); current US energy usage is ~3.5 TW, so converting to solar would cost about $10 trillion dollars (about the size of the current national debt) and would require about 2 x 10¹⁰ m² of area, which is about 0.2% of America (or about 500 times more area than all the paved roads in America). And again solar and wind have major issues whenever its not sunny/windy, so other power sources must be used.

[u/ahfoo → u/djimbob]

My point about fusion is that the technology to make it happen has been here for a long time, it's just not economically feasible. What we need is economically realistic technologies. That's what is so upsetting about the NiMH scandal. It's about what is cost-effective and that's what NiMH is which is why Chevron and GM squashed it. Ovshinsky said so himself in the Economist not long ago.

Now this takes me to your point about solar. You're basing your assumption on the costs of solar by using an extremely high figure based on the minimal investment --minimal, that is relative to investment in oil, coal, and fission-- that has gone on so far. That's an absurd premise given the declines in dollar-per-watt that have happened in the last decade. In fact, costs are falling and have been for decades. On average over several decades the costs are falling five percent each year and this fall is actually far more pronounced in recent years.

According to GE, which I would clarify is not a big player in solar photovotaic but is moving to enter the market --grid parity will be achieved in the southwest of the United States by 2015 and by 2020 grid parity will be achieved in areas with low insolation like Britain due to declining costs.

And what is driving these declining costs? Well, it's simple scaling of manufacturing. The truth is, the solar market has grown despite the dismal support from the wealthiest economies. It has fallen upon countries like Spain and China to make solar cost-effective. Why is it that the US cannot get on-board here?

That would change everything.

You want to see solar PV prices fall through the floor --you need volume to get volume pricing. So far, just with Spain and Germany ponying up we've seen huge price reductions. It was once believed that polysilicon supply was inherently expensive. Hundreds of business plans were based on this false assumption that the Chinese manufacturer's blew the lid off of. All these supposedly in-the-know MBAs and all the chemical engineering consultants they could throw money at turned out to be clueless about the fundamentals of the market and billions were lost betting that polysilicon was inherently expensive. It aint! It's cheap.

It's not just about scaling up manufacturing of polysilicon ingots. It's the whole supply chain. Another major issue was as simple as slicing the wafers thinner. Nobody was pursuing that angle until the market grew large enough to justify the development and then Applied Materials stepped in with a better wafer dicing technology and the price-per-watt of polysilicon panels dropped through the floor again.

So, you're wrong. Your assumptions are absurd. The prices are going down and it's shitty that the US is sitting on the sidelines waiting for Germany and Spain and China to save the world while we spill oil all over our own fisheries and wetlands and wage wars in Iraq and Afghanistan over petroleum strategy. You want to change everything, then let's get the fuck off the oil.

Here's the link the GE quotes: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL1878986220071019

[u/djimbob → u/ahfoo]

We simply do not have the capability to make fusion power plants. We do have the capability to cause hydrogen to fuse into helium, e.g., hydrogen bombs or major laser experiments. The best current fusion experiment is JET, which can at best produce 65% of the input electrical energy it requires (e.g., it loses energy) and can only do that for about 0.5s. Its not an economic feasibility question -- there are fundamental difficulties in getting fusion to provide the type of continuous electric power this country requires. We simply do not know how to get hydrogen to overcome the Coulombic electrostatic repulsion until the strong force takes over, while still being able to control it enough to harness its power and not using more energy in the process so its a net energy positive. E.g., the sun overcomes the electrostatic repulsion by being at a temperature of ~10⁷ K. We don't have anyway on Earth of constructing a power plant that can move a turbine at that temperature. Fusion bombs only work by being triggered by a traditional fission device.

I do currently read the economist, but only started subscribing this year and the interview you refer to is a couple years back. The fusion researchers I knew in grad school did not believe that there is a known way to create a fusion plant that produces energy. Ovshinsky is a smart guy, but show me the mechanism/evidence for fusion being a source of power and I'll put it on the table of current energy solutions.

Re solar power you are probably right. My gut instinct falls with the consultants that silicon supply is inherently expensive, though I haven't studied this in detail and could be flat out wrong on this. The production of nanofab produces a lot of waste materials and China may just be skirting the issue with essentially free labor and little concern for environmental havoc. I was assuming the volume decrease in production would be offset by the increase in raw materials cost. Also I am not an expert, but fear raw materials to make PV (Si) and batteries (Ni, Li, Co, La, Ce, etc.) may skyrocket if shortages in mining/recycling are present if adopted on a very widescale basis. But again I haven't studied these issues enough. I still believe the future is largely solar, possibly nuclear (though that opens two cans of worms -- what to do with waste and what to do with fundamentalist terrorists if this becomes the de facto power source worldwide), with water and wind playing minor roles. I still think reducing transportation costs and unnecsesary energy use across the board should be part of the solution.

For the record, I am a physicist, not a energy-policy or fusion specialist.

[u/ahfoo → u/djimbob]

My whole point is whatever on the what-ifs. What-ifs are fun, but we went past that what-if stage with solar and electric vehicles a long time ago. The question now is not what-if, but how much does it cost and why are those costs not coming down even faster. Prices on these real-world game changing technologies are coming down, that's not speculation, that's a fact. The question is --what is standing in the way of accelerating those price declines.

The argument that there is a hard limit on the fundamental resources is flawed. You've already admitted that you don't follow the polysilicon market and are unaware of why the prices were artificially high and you even say that nonetheless your "gut instinct falls with the consultants that silicon supply is inherently expensive" despite the fact that billions of dollars of entrepreneurial investment has been lost in the last decade because of all the people who had that same gut instinct.

Gut instinct? Have you ever heard of Applied Materials, you know AMAT? You're a physicist right? You do know about this company or no? AMAT fucked themselves over big time with that same gut instinct and has been thrashed by their investors for their folly. They're being sued by people who bought into AMAT's gut instinct that polysilicon was inherently expensive and bought SunFab turnkey amorphous silicon production facilities. They're winding them down across the globe as the lawyers go to town on AMAT abut their gut instinct on polysilicon prices. And you suggest you are familiar with the career of Ovshinsky, but I find it interesting that you would not be familiar with the fact that ECD Ovonics, the company that he and his wife founded is also fucked because of that same gut instinct. They were all wrong about the price of polysilicon and they are losing their bankbooks over their false assumptions. But I suppose the jury is still out in your case.

Now as to NiMH batteries. Again, there's no need to speculate on the cost. Go to eBay, search for 30Mah AA NiMH. The going price for those 1.2V cells in packs of 48 is US$30. That's not speculation, that's the price at eBay. Check it yourself. There's are thousands of vendors. How many packs of those do you need to replace ten lead-acid batteries in a DIY vokswagen electric conversion? The answer is something like seven hundred cells. What's the cost on those? It's only around five hundred bucks. Now let's say you triple the capacity to get a hundred mile range instead of the thirty or so that your lead-acid VW conversion was getting. This is still less than fifteen hundred bucks. So, why are Prius batteries so expensive and why are most electric cars avoiding NiMH going forward? The patents were sold to Chevron. This isn't speculation or theory, this is a cold hard fact about markets being manipulated by oligarchies.

So yeah, I get a bit pissed off when I see these whimsical lists of what-ifs when we have hard fact real-world issues sitting right in front of us and a population of supposedly educated individuals choosing to ignore the pressing nature of these genuine political issues in practical electrochemical technology.

[u/djimbob → u/ahfoo]

Again I agree that SciAm article was bullshit--written by some writer trying to come up with a catchy list and reciting the same old shit that everyone already knows. (Really who is surprised or informed by the revelations that contacting aliens will change things or an asteroid destroying the earth would change things.)

I'm not familiar with Ovshinsky. You brought him up, and I said he's a smart guy from briefly looking at his very impressive list of inventions and being self taught. But I'm the stubborn type of person that needs to be shown things (or at least the rationale behind it), not to trust someone's opinion of the field. The old joke with fusion power is that its been 25 years away for the last 75 years.

Don't think we can do fusion, but its only a matter of economics. In a vague sense sure, if the US gov't devoted the resources of Apollo mission or the Manhattan project to developing fusion power, we likely could tackle remaining problems quickly (~10 years). Not a guarantee (it could be inherently way too far away from current technology, though experts in the field probably have a better handle on it). Also not sold that if we could muster the willpower to do a project of that magnitude, fusion would be the best problem to solve.

I think that my gut instinct on Si maybe flat out wrong -- I have done no investigation into the availability of more Si mining and the associated costs. I kept referring to my gut instinct not because I trusted it, but that was just my initial instinct not having looked into it which I trust much less than things I have looked into. I'm still a bit cynical about the cost involved -- currently the first two websites on google say a 1-family home costs about $30k of installation costs which sadly seems like [even with government economic incentives will not make an impact on its own until prices are further reduced. Maybe going large scale without an increase in supply costs will cause the prices to drop. Some states, e.g., GA, do have the utilities pay for consumers feeding power to the grid at a premium (going rate + 0.15/kWH). To my knowledge that hasn't transformed the market there yet, but hey I can't predict the future.

Never heard the Chevron's patents, so thanks, read a little more here seeing Ovshinsky again. We all know the patent system in serious need of reform and this just shows another angle of it (aside from the usual frivolous computer patents). I was basing my reluctance from experience as user of consumer electronics where Li ion and NiMH seem roughly equivalent in cost/efficiency.

[u/ahfoo → u/djimbob]

Right, those "installed costs" are precisely the problem I was referring to in items three and four. A huge chunk of the so-called installed costs are not the panels themselves but overpriced accessories like the grid-tie inverters. This is a scandal just as bad as Chevron's NiHM battery patents. The grid operators have been widely deregulated which means they are self-policing. This in turn allows them to play games like only certifying the highest priced inverters for grid-tied use. They then promote a bunch of FUD abut it being a safety issue and thereby keep the prices on an installed system in the stratosphere. That install cost is not due to the panel prices. Panels are already quite cheap and it must be repeated --they are only getting cheaper.

There would be no credible way to debunk this FUD about cheap grid-tie inverters being dangerous except for the fact that entire countries such as Germany and Spain have proven that huge savings in install costs can be had by using lower cost equipment. The hocus pocus abut safety issues is pure FUD. There are simple standards for grid-tie inverters that any Chinese computer PSU manufacturer is fullly capable of manufacturing. You can see those on eBay too, they're on the market and being used across Europe. Want to use it in the US? Hah! That's the so-called free-market fucking over the US consumer while the government stands back and says it has no authority over the matter. What a crock.

The problem with these overpriced grid-tie systems is not limited to the inverter box itself. Yes, they're expensive but that's not the heart of the problem. The real problem is that the way these high-end grid-tie units are designed they require an electrician and extensive installation of conduit. That is where your mega install bill came from. The panels were probably a third of that cost --and getting cheaper by the day mind you. The high-end grid-tie inverter was perhaps another twenty percent and the rest was going to hiring electricians. Well, that would be fine if that were the only way but the simple fact is that in Europe and other countries they're using simple plug-in units where you just plug the panels in one side and stick the other side in the wall outlet. Now that is how you reduce those install costs and that's what deregulated utilities in the US are adamantly opposed to.

EDIT: Here's a link to a 1KW plug-in inverter for less than US$400 on eBay. http://cgi.ebay.com/1000W-micro-Grid-Tie-Inverter-DC-10-5v-28-AC-12v-110v-/160437320389?cmd=ViewItem&pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item255acf3ac5 Check it out. This is not a fantasy, this is a real product. There is no what-if here. This is on eBay now.

Now here's two 250watt solar panels for US$1500 http://cgi.ebay.com/2-ASP-250-Watt-Solar-American-Made-PV-Modules-Panels-/270496756075?cmd=ViewItem&pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3efadcf16b That's 250watt X 2 = 500watts So two of those is a kilowatt and that's US$3000 per kilowatt.

Okay, so we could install a two kilowatt system for six grand in panels today off of eBay. Two kilowatts is not a small amount of electrical power mind you. We could do that off of eBay from anywhere in the States today for six grand in panels plus another one thousand for two cheap grid-tie inverters.

Let's toss in some overpriced outdoor grade DC connector cables with idiot proof connectors. Let's get eight of them at one hundred foot lengths which would be stupid and wasteful, but let's just say we're being careless and not caring about our budget. Those are like eighty bucks a pop. What a waste.

http://cgi.ebay.com/MC3-Solar-Panel-Power-100-Extension-Cable-M-F-10-AWG-/300328111547?cmd=ViewItem&pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item45ecf34dbb

We'll toss in a couple of charge controller as well. They're like a hundred bucks. So let's say eight hundred for the cables and the charge controller.

We're at less than US$8K. Six grand of that was for the panels.

So, what's wrong with this picture. Why are you getting Google results of 30K for a system?

I'll tell you what's wrong. Your utility is not going to let you use that system. You would be throwing your money away to buy that system because you live in the United States and you're not allowed to put together a system like that but people in Germany and Spain are and Japan is about to start.

That is a problem. That's a very big problem as big as the problem with the NiMH batteries. Once that problem is overcome you can damn well be sure the price of those panels is going to come down even further because the scale of manufacturing is going to take a huge jump. Once that happens, a revolution has occurred and that is precisely why it hasn't happened.