Nuclear is Green

One of the problems with people who write about energy and electricity is that almost all of them, with at least one exception, don't have the slightest idea what they are talking about. There is no better example than this doozy of sophistry by Nicolas Kristof.

Its called Nukes are Green.

I had mentioned in Nuclear Synergy that there is a full court press to bring Nuclear back in this country. I say back, because no one can build one now because of their cost, the uncertainty of long term waste disposal, and also, because the fuel resource is as finite as other finite resources.

And no one will build one again unless these risks are socialized. The private sector wants only the profits on this one, not the potential of dreadful losses and corporate punishment.

Kristof writes:

But it's time for the rest of us to drop that hostility to nuclear power. It's increasingly clear that the biggest environmental threat we face is actually global warming, and that leads to a corollary:

nuclear energy is green.

Nuclear power, in contrast with other sources, produces no greenhouse gases. So President Bush's overall environmental policy gives me the shivers, but he's right to push ahead for nuclear energy. There haven't been any successful orders for new nuclear plants since 1973, but several proposals for new plants are now moving ahead - and that's good for the world we live in.

Global energy demand will rise 60 percent over the next 25 years, according to the International Energy Agency, and nuclear power is the cleanest and best bet to fill that gap.

Solar power is a disappointment, still accounting for only about one-fifth of 1 percent of the nation's electricity and costing about five times as much as other sources.

Wind is promising, for its costs have fallen 80 percent, but it suffers from one big problem: wind doesn't blow all the time. It's difficult to rely upon a source that comes and goes.

Now, where do you suppose he got this?

Did he visit with the Solar Industry before he blithely states that it is a disappointment?

Did he mention new Power Paints that are on the horizon?

Did he mention that exciting new nano based technologies are just around the corner, if we choose to take this route, that can completely revolutionize solar electricity and in some cases, before you can get a nuclear power plant permitted and built?

No.

Why?

Because he doesn't know what he is talking about.

The story was fed to him by the people who want to build these poison makers.

In fairness, why should he know what he is talking about?

I know people who regulate electric utilities who don't know the difference between a KW and KWh. I know people in DOE who couldn't tell you how may BTUs are in a gallon of gas or in a MCF of natural gas. They don't know how much nuclear fuel is available and they don't have any idea what a moronic idea nuclear power is these days, given what is happening in solid state photon to electron labs in Toronto and Boston and Berkeley.

A massive plan to start building nuclear power plants in the world right now is the equivalent of suggesting that we close off all of our bays and begin to raise whales in them so that we can harvest their blubber and refine it into oil. It is a massive and potentially tragic step backward.

Nuclear Technology is old stuff.

Its ideas are 75 years old for Christ sake.

When it was invented, we were still using radio tubes. Solid state semiconductor technology was still 30 years away. Jack Kilby wasn't even beginning to think about large scale integration.

It's of the "lets build a big fire and make some steam and create some electricity with it school of power". It's like using my Dad's old calculator with that matrix of numbers in rows and columns that was around just after the War instead of a TI calculator. It's old, it's klunky, and it is not very smart.

A power grid of many renewable energy producers and many sources integrated by an advanced smart electric grid with hydrogen fuel back up is infinitely superior and certainly more secure than this nonsense. A power grid integrated to the transportation sector through plug in multi fuel gas optional vehicles is remarkably achievable and imminently within our grasp.

Any policymaker who thinks nuclear technology is advanced, needs to look at the developments occurring in photon to electron materials. They need to think about the security force that must guard these plants. They need to consider the security force that must guard the fuel. They should think of the security force that must guard the waste. They need to consider the likelihood of mishaps.

Wind Turbines on our farms and ranches and Photon to Electron surfaces painted or applied on our roofs and walls do not need to be guarded by a police force.

Any physicist who thinks that this kind of archaic "build a big fire" nuclear technology is the answer for mankind should be spanked and sent back to school.

Kristof should just be spanked.

Yes, Nuclear is green,

and Coal is clean.

And there is plenty of Oil.


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*

The Final Slipper Falls

Earlier today, I met with a colleague who works as a wind land man. We talked about several sites and chatted about the old days when we worked together. In those days, landowners didn't quite know what to think about you when you contacted them and told them that you were quite possibly going to make them a lot of money from the wind that flowed over their lands.

I think a lot of them didn't quite believe it.

Now, with perhaps 9,000 MW of wind installed in Texas alone, that is no longer the case. Sure, most Landowners still want the money, but now, some of them also don't want to look at every hill top and ridge covered with turbines, and resistance to wind development has grown in certain circles where wind is derided much like it was in Waterworld by Dennis Hopper.

That brought me to say that folks need to understand that these turbines won't be there that long, perhaps just another 20 or 30 years. The period of giant wind turbines on every Texas hill top will last about as long as the period of wooden oil derricks covering the old oil fields.

Why?

Because, as we move to advanced photon to electron devices, third generation PVs that actually are printed using nano based semiconducting inks, everything, (and I mean everything) will be powered by these advanced materials. And all of this energy will be stored in a vast fleet of plug-in cars and in a new generation of advanced storage devices.

And with these advanced solid state storage devices, all of our energy, whether from the sun, the wind, or from the sea will be stored by the electric utility for use when it is needed. The storage may be in the form of distributed devices much like the transformers we see on most electric poles today, or they may be centralized around substations .

Problem is, advanced electric storage systems are still in development. And even though Lockheed-Martin, Kleiner-Perkins, and an electric car company called Zenn have all invested in the game changing ceramic technology of EESTOR, no working models have yet to be demonstrated. (however recent announcements from EESTOR are encouraging)

After the meeting,I went to the office and reviewed my e mail where I found this new announcement:

Breakthrough In Energy Storage:
New Carbon Material Shows Promise Of Storing
Large Quantities Of Renewable Electrical Energy

ScienceDaily
Sep. 17, 2008

Engineers and scientists at The University of Texas at Austin have achieved a breakthrough in the use of a one-atom thick structure called "graphene" as a new carbon-based material for storing electrical charge in ultracapacitor devices, perhaps paving the way for the massive installation of renewable energies such as wind and solar power.

University of Texas at Austin researchers said today recent data suggest a one-atom thick carbon-based material shows remarkable promise for storing electrical charge in ultracapacitor devices.

The researchers believe their breakthrough shows promise that graphene (a form of carbon) could eventually double the capacity of existing ultracapacitors, which are manufactured using an entirely different form of carbon.

"Through such a device, electrical charge can be rapidly stored on the graphene sheets, and released from them as well for the delivery of electrical current and, thus, electrical power," says Rod Ruoff, a mechanical engineering professor and a physical chemist.

"There are reasons to think that the ability to store electrical charge can be about double that of current commercially used materials. We are working to see if that prediction will be borne out in the laboratory." more

And there are other exciting solid state storage technologies on the horizon.

Advanced third generation printable photon to electron materials and inks coupled with advanced solid state storage devices can lead to an advanced world where energy moves from the outside of our walls to the inside of our computers, from our bodies to our lamps, from the the roof to your car, from your car to your utility, from the utility to your office.

But perhaps before we can move boldly towards a new world where energy moves through our own creations much as it does in the creation itself, we must watch the old world of oil and fiat money cave in on itself in the financial meltdown we are presently witnessing.

And now that the People's Republic of the United States owns Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac , AIG, and surely soon enough the car manufacturers, and the airlines, the final slipper falls.

The Communists turn into Capitalists, and the Capitalists become Neo-Communists as they are forced to socialize their losses.

It's a good time to reinvent ourselves, the world, and the way we view it.

It's doing it anyway.

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Natural Solar

If humankind is going to meet the challenges that lay ahead, we will do well to copy nature not only in its intricate complexity but also in its graceful simplicity.

Here is a very encouraging development for photon to electron devices:

Synthetic Molecules Capture Solar Energy
Green Building Press
September 5, 2006

A leaf is a highly efficient solar cell and researchers in Sydney have created molecules that mimic those in plants. Like the cells in plants, they harvest light and create power. According to the research team, led by Dr Deanna D'Alessandro, the best leaves can harvest 30 to 40 per cent of the light falling on them. The latest state of the art solar cells are only 15 to 20 per cent efficient, and expensive to make. But the researchers say they have recreated some of the key systems that plants use in photosynthesis.

Bacteria and green plants use photosynthesis to convert light energy into usable chemical energy. Wheel-shaped arrays of molecules called porphyrins, collect light and transfer it to the hub where chemical reactions use the light energy to convert carbon dioxide into energy-rich sugar and oxygen.

This process, which occurs in about 40 trillionths of a second, is fundamental to photosynthesis and is at the base of the food chain for almost all life on Earth.

More than 100 of the newly constructed synthetic porphyrins can be assembled around a tree-like core called a dendrimer to mimic the wheel-shaped arrangement in natural photosynthetic systems. The molecules designed by the team are about one trillionth the size of a soccer ball.

But the large number of porphyrins in a single molecule means that a significant amount of light can be captured and converted to electrical energy – just like in nature. Since they are so efficient at storing energy, D'Alessandro believes they could also be used as batteries – replacing the metal-based batteries that high technology devices depend on.

The team say their preliminary results are very promising, although they are still in the early stages of building practical solar energy devices using the molecules.

Now they’ve made the molecules, the team along with their Japanese collaborators at Osaka University are working to combine them in the equivalent of a plant cell.

Over the next five years they will attempt to scale the technology up to commercial scale solar panels. "

And here is another announcement that may reduce the costs of present PV systems by reducing the cost of the silicon:

Dow Corning Introduces New Solar Grade Silicon Material
Clean Edge
September 4, 2006

MIDLAND, MI -- Dow Corning (Nachrichten) Corp. today announced that it has achieved a milestone in solar energy technology: a solar-grade (SoG) silicon derived from metallurgical silicon that exhibits good solar cell performance characteristics when blended with traditional polysilicon feedstock.

This new silicon feedstock material, Dow Corning(R) PV 1101 SoG Silicon, is the first commercially available feedstock produced from such technology using large scale manufacturing processes. For several years, the primary obstacle to the growth of solar energy has been the constrained availability of silicon, the key raw material used in the production of solar cells.

Until now, Dow Corning says, the solar industry has relied on the supply of polycrystalline silicon, a high-grade purity product, originally developed for the semiconductor industry. This has meant that the solar industry has in turn been subject to resource restraint.

The launch of PV 1101, produced from a very different route, will alleviate that restraint and offer a new source of supply as well as new technical and business options for the solar industry.

"PV 1101 is certainly one of the most innovative technologies to come along in the solar energy industry since the manufacture of the first silicon solar cells," said Gaetan Borgers, director of Dow Corning Solar Solutions.

"For years now, the solar industry has hoped to be supplied by new sources of silicon designed and dedicated to them.

PV 1101 is a major step in that direction.

It is a step that will provide a means of growth for the solar industry."

We need inexpensive photon to electon strategies,

and advanced ultra caps to store it.

We need to accelerate the installation of advanced wind turbines,

We need smart, efficient homes and smart pedestrian oriented communities.

We need sporty motor in-wheel plug-in hybrids.

We need to act as if Climate Change and Peak Oil,

are coming to eat our children

and lay waste to our lives.

Cause they are.


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photo courtesy of Trek Lens

Green PVs

Here is an oldie from the second year of EFA.

Natural Solar

If humankind is going to meet the challenges that lay ahead, we will do well to copy nature not only in its intricate complexity but also in its graceful simplicity.

Here is a very encouraging development for photon to electron devices:

Synthetic Molecules Capture Solar Energy
Green Building Press
September 5, 2006

A leaf is a highly efficient solar cell and researchers in Sydney have created molecules that mimic those in plants. Like the cells in plants, they harvest light and create power. According to the research team, led by Dr Deanna D'Alessandro, the best leaves can harvest 30 to 40 per cent of the light falling on them. The latest state of the art solar cells are only 15 to 20 per cent efficient, and expensive to make. But the researchers say they have recreated some of the key systems that plants use in photosynthesis.

Bacteria and green plants use photosynthesis to convert light energy into usable chemical energy. Wheel-shaped arrays of molecules called porphyrins, collect light and transfer it to the hub where chemical reactions use the light energy to convert carbon dioxide into energy-rich sugar and oxygen.

This process, which occurs in about 40 trillionths of a second, is fundamental to photosynthesis and is at the base of the food chain for almost all life on Earth.

More than 100 of the newly constructed synthetic porphyrins can be assembled around a tree-like core called a dendrimer to mimic the wheel-shaped arrangement in natural photosynthetic systems. The molecules designed by the team are about one trillionth the size of a soccer ball.

But the large number of porphyrins in a single molecule means that a significant amount of light can be captured and converted to electrical energy – just like in nature. Since they are so efficient at storing energy, D'Alessandro believes they could also be used as batteries – replacing the metal-based batteries that high technology devices depend on.

The team say their preliminary results are very promising, although they are still in the early stages of building practical solar energy devices using the molecules.

Now they’ve made the molecules, the team along with their Japanese collaborators at Osaka University are working to combine them in the equivalent of a plant cell.

Over the next five years they will attempt to scale the technology up to commercial scale solar panels. "

And here is another announcement that may reduce the costs of present PV systems by reducing the cost of the silicon:

Dow Corning Introduces New Solar Grade Silicon Material
Clean Edge
September 4, 2006

MIDLAND, MI -- Dow Corning (Nachrichten) Corp. today announced that it has achieved a milestone in solar energy technology: a solar-grade (SoG) silicon derived from metallurgical silicon that exhibits good solar cell performance characteristics when blended with traditional polysilicon feedstock.

This new silicon feedstock material, Dow Corning(R) PV 1101 SoG Silicon, is the first commercially available feedstock produced from such technology using large scale manufacturing processes. For several years, the primary obstacle to the growth of solar energy has been the constrained availability of silicon, the key raw material used in the production of solar cells.

Until now, Dow Corning says, the solar industry has relied on the supply of polycrystalline silicon, a high-grade purity product, originally developed for the semiconductor industry. This has meant that the solar industry has in turn been subject to resource restraint.

The launch of PV 1101, produced from a very different route, will alleviate that restraint and offer a new source of supply as well as new technical and business options for the solar industry.

"PV 1101 is certainly one of the most innovative technologies to come along in the solar energy industry since the manufacture of the first silicon solar cells," said Gaetan Borgers, director of Dow Corning Solar Solutions.

"For years now, the solar industry has hoped to be supplied by new sources of silicon designed and dedicated to them.

PV 1101 is a major step in that direction.

It is a step that will provide a means of growth for the solar industry."

We need inexpensive photon to electon strategies,

and advanced ultra caps to store it.

We need to accelerate the installation of advanced wind turbines,

We need smart, efficient homes and smart pedestrian oriented communities.

We need sporty motor in-wheel plug-in hybrids.

We need to act as if Climate Change and Peak Oil,

are coming to eat our children

and lay waste to our lives.

Cause they are.


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My 80th Birthday

*


Diary Entry September 20, 2029

It's my 80th birthday, and I'm glad to be able to  once again post a blog.  Twenty five years ago,  I started blogging right after George Bush won against Kerry.  It was a terrible thing to imagine.  Four more years of W pretty much took me into a Tea Party mode...not the T Party that was started by the billionaires when President Obama was elected, but the real Tea Party.

I started blogging everyday and did so until Obama was elected. I wrote something like 1200 posts in those four years.  After Obama was elected, my mania subsided substantially.  Still, in these less crazy years, I think my total blog posts number around  2000.

I guess, had the Donster somehow won, I would have been committed to another four more years of daily writing and writhing,  while watching the country and the World go down that black hole of hate. With all the other de-evolutionary characteristics and tactics of that notoriously dark campaign, I was relieved to see that the American mind is not as dumb and unsophisticated as Trump thought they were.  Like Bloomberg said at the convention in 2016, I'm from New York, and New Yorkers know a con when they see it.  Yes, Don the Con went down in bright orange flames that matched his hair coloring rather well

So we were spared.  And President HR Clinton turned out to be a much better president than almost anyone imagined.  She worked hard and she was smart.  And she solved some big problems.  Who would have imagined that a single payer system of health care would be adopted in her first term?

Ironic how the Rs got their way finally.  Obamacare was indeed repealed.  And Universal Health Care replaced it. It was as if the "not so near miss" with the Donster actually awoke a lot of folks up to what is really real.

And suddenly, the needle moved on climate change and concerted global action initiated at the Paris accords in 2015 was implemented with gusto.  As Chairman of the Electric Utility Commission, I went to that meeting with an Austin delegation. But it was the meeting of the Cities that gave the World the leadership it needed and  it started in Paris.

Yes, instead of responding to our lower natures as the true challenge of Climate Change became more and more apparent, a whole new pack of Mayors and Governors led the Cities and the States into sound energy policies that were not only environmentally smart, they were financially wise.  Coal lost out to solar because coal was too expensive.

The rush to wind power in the early 2000's was impressive, but the move to both large scale solar and distributed solar in the 20's was epic.  Of course it helped that power paint was developed...not to mention large scale solid state storage.  Our energy world changed in the proverbial blink of an eye.
Gone were the smoke stacks that belched out carbon and other pollutants into our air.

It's hard to imagine that we ever did it.  But when I was younger, we still smoked cigarettes on airplanes.  Yes, there used to be ash trays in airplane seats.  I even smoked in the classroom at UT when I was young. Attitudes about smoking changed in the 90's.  Attitudes about smoke changed in the 20's.

But the biggest  change in my lifetime has been in transportation.  Being involved in the development of the plug in hybrid vehicle as embodied by the Volt, I had always preached that society must move to a unified energy system where our cars, our homes, our power plants all talked to one another in one large gestalt system...that energy should move from electron to photon, and photon to electron in a solid state world of energy, movement, and information flows.

And as intelligence grew in our machines, it grew in ourselves.

We started putting "smart" in front of our machines early at the turn of the century.  We started talking about smart houses, smart grids, smart appliances, and smart phones.  But smart cars changed everything.

The last car I owned was the Tesla X.  And it was pretty smart.... A lot smarter than my ELR which would drive me to Dallas if only I would steer it.  But as Elon Musk continued to make his cars better and smarter; and as Apple, Google and the global high tech world tackled transportation, a new vision of transportation arose.  And it happened very quickly.

Once everyone with a smart phone realized they could summon a smart car in less time that it took to walk to your car, everyone somehow got it.  You don't need to build a mass transportation system on a rail.  No, with smart cars that drive themselves, every road that's built and every smart road that will be built becomes part of  this new transportation-communication paradigm. And the need for more roads was replaced by the need for smarter roads.

Car ownership is a thing of the past.  There are only a few drivers now.

I actually saw someone driving on the superway yesterday.

I took my Tesla X out just for fun.

No one saw me.

  

* Mercedes Self Driving Car

 

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PC PV's

*
There are many strategies for creating photon to electron devices which can deliver the transduced energy that surrounds us at a price we can afford, in the amounts we will need, in the time we have to deploy them.

First generation photovoltaics, although very proven and very reliable, have production cost issues. There is a lot of energy in a standard silicon solar cell. Besides the energy in the mining and the tranportation of the raw silicon, there is energy that is inputed to control the environment to grow the crystal. There is also the energy in the glass on the cover and in the metal that frames the panel. These costs can be managed, but few see one sun silicon providing more than 5 units of energy for every unit of energy that it took to produce the panel.

Providing more suns on the crystal with less imbedded energy will increase that ratio.

But the exciting field of photon to electron conversion is moving quickly now into second and third generation technologies.

Here is a story from Renewable Energy Access that tells part of the story:

Thin-film and Organic PV on the Rise
by Lawrence Gasman, Principal Analyst, NanoMarkets LC
April 17, 2006

"The combination of better materials, the evolution of thin-film transistor technology, and new production methods is establishing thin-film and organic photovoltaics as a hot area for investment. Recent market forecast and analysis carried out by my firm NanoMarkets LC, indicates that revenues from PV modules that use materials such as thin-film amorphous silicon, CIS/CIGS, cadmium telluride, small molecules, polymers or organic dyes will reach $2.3 billion by 2011.

(clip)

Why is thin-film PV taking off now? It has been around for more than a decade and until quite recently its main claim to fame has been as the key enabler for solar powered calculators. Today, however, thin-film is benefiting from a "perfect storm" of market drivers.

Solar power of all kinds is attracting considerable interest, because of high prices and dire predictions for continued reliance on fossil fuels. And thin-film PV is getting particular attention, in part, because it gets around the current shortage of silicon that the traditional PV market is currently experiencing.

(clip)

A radically new direction for creating PV is represented by printing. "Printing" in this case, may mean either traditional printing technologies that have been associated with graphics printing for decades or centuries.

Or it may mean ink-jet printing. Not all materials lend themselves to this approach, though. It is particularly associated with organic materials. However, at least one firm is pursuing the goal of a silicon ink. Printing will supposedly bring down the cost of PV in a radical new way, ultimately resulting in orders of magnitude and improvements in cost per watt."

Imagine every ink-jet printer becoming a photovoltaic manufacturing device?

Imagine every computer and printer combined with a special cartridge

and a special plastic carbon substrate being capable of making a PV?

This marriage of the PC and the PV would be truly revolutionary.

And it would be a classic disruptive technology,

just like the Cell phone was to the land line.

It would allow buyers of PC's to manufacture the energy device

they will need to run the PC that they have just purchased,

and their lights, or their PDA.

What if you could download the program with your PDA/cell phone,

and even order the printing cartridge for your the ink jet printer,

from almost anywhere?

What if the plastic sheets were ubiquitous?

Then, the energy that is invested in the manufacturing process,

is greatly reduced.

The PV panel is not just assembled locally, it is manufactured locally.

Not that long ago,

I imagined that someday we would see power paints, and rectennas,

and carbon based thin film technologies that will completely replace

our present very old archaic ways of deriving our energy from the

carcasses

of the dead.

And honestly now,

it should come as no surprise to the brujo in us all,

that this "derived energy" from the dead,

would have just a little more than a just a little karma attached to it.

A PC PV disruption to that inglorious final act might be the kind of

disruption we need.

Besides, I've seen that opera.

It sucks.


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*art courtesy of Mara McWilliams

Rocketman

As the euphoria of last week gives way into the day to day running and returning of the government to the people, for the people, and by the people, it's good to wake up each morning to the daily announcements of reversals and outright abrogations of previous administration policy.

And even though the so called stimulus bill doesn't have a massive high speed rail project or some other truly bold move towards real change, it's appropriate for us to appreciate what is in the bill.

Thanks to the Huffington Post, here's the executive summary section on renewables and science:

"Clean, Efficient, American Energy:

To put people back to work today and reduce our dependence on foreign oil tomorrow, we will strengthen efforts directed at doubling renewable energy production and renovate public buildings to make them more energy efficient.

· $32 billion to transform the nation's energy transmission, distribution, and production systems by allowing for a smarter and better grid and focusing investment in renewable technology.

· $16 billion to repair public housing and make key energy efficiency retrofits.

· $6 billion to weatherize modest-income homes.

Transform our Economy with Science and Technology:

We need to put scientists to work looking for the next great discovery, creating jobs in cutting-edge-technologies, and making smart investments that will help businesses in every community succeed in a global economy. For every dollar invested in broadband the economy sees a ten-fold return on that investment.

· $10 billion for science facilities, research, and instrumentation.

.
· $6 billion to expand broadband internet access so businesses in rural and other underserved areas can link up to the global economy." more

In my judgment, That "next great discovery" needs to be really inexpensive photon to electron inks and processes, and a really good supercapacitor. Fortunately, these kind of cutting edge technologies are way beyond discovery, they are in development.

Here's one from the AP last week:

Piloting Silicon-Ink Solar Cell Production
Associated Press
January 23, 2009

HOHENSTEIN-ERNSTTHAL, GERMANY - The installation of a 10 MW silicon-ink based solar cell pilot production line has been completed by Roth & Rau AG and Innovalight.

The pilot line combines the qualities and cost benefits of crystal silicon wafer technology with silicon-ink processing technology to produce low cost, high performance solar cells.

“The potential to lower costs by combining Innovalight’s silicon-ink platform and conventional silicon solar cell technology is very impressive”, says Dr. Dietmar Roth, Chief Executive Officer at Roth & Rau AG. “Combining the strength of Roth & Rau’s manufacturing expertise and Innovalight’s silicon nanotechnology has enormous potential in the marketplace.” more

And here's a continuation of MIT's work on nanotube supercapacitor storage from Technology Review:

Nanotube Superbatteries
Dense films of carbon nanotubes store large amounts of energy.
By Katherine Bourzac

Researchers at MIT have made pure, dense, thin films of carbon nanotubes that show promise as electrodes for higher-capacity batteries and supercapacitors. Dispensing with the additives previously used to hold such films together improved their electrical properties, including the ability to carry and store a large amount of charge.

Carbon nanotubes can carry and store more charge than other forms of carbon, in part because their nanoscale structure gives them a very large surface area. But conventional methods for making them into films leave significant gaps between individual nanotubes or require binding materials to hold them together. Both approaches reduce the films' conductivity--the ability to convey charge--and capacitance--the ability to store it.

The MIT group, led by chemical-engineering professor Paula Hammond and mechanical-engineering professor Yang Shao-Horn, made the new nanotube films using a technique called layer-by-layer assembly. " more

Like the President said yesterday, We can solve these problems, because we created them. But as Einstein said, "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."

That goes for our problems with the economy, with our energy supplies, with climate change, and in our need to foster world community and peace.

Each step we take towards a Unified Global Photonic Energy Web with large scale capacitance leads us all to that giant leap of humankind that we must make.

For we cannot make it across this precipice in tiny steps.
.
Like a Rocketman

We must learn to fly.

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Heliohydrogen

Earlier in my solar career, I was the publisher and editor of a solar magazine called Spectra.

We thought the name was cool because spectra is plural for spectrum and somehow we thought that communicated our uniqueness. We were handling the entire spectra of solar energy, from old solar like fossil fuels, to wind, water, biomass, and recyling. The magazine was actually more like a book. It had a perfect bind on it and it was shaped like a national geographic magazine.

We ran an article called heliohydrogen in it in Volume VI..

It said,

Researchers at Texas A and M University reported recently that they have developed the basic technology to use water to make hydrogen fuel as cheap as gasoline, perhaps for as little as $1.00 for the equivalent of a gallon.

The new advance, for the first time allowing hydrogen production at a rate considered practical for commercial development, is based on the simultaneous creation by two young scientists of a photo-cathode and photo-anode to electrochemically split water molecules.

Electrochemist Dr. John Bockris, who heads the Texas A & M Hydrogen Research Center, called the events a "real breakthrough" and said the potential applications are "immense" for a pollution free fuel.

The story continues

Conventional automobiles require only a few modifications-primarily a fuel injection system, turbocharger and storage tank- in order to run on hydrogen, explained Bockris, who has carried out hydrogen research for six years. He came to Texas A & M in 1978.

Wait a minute, is that a typo?

No it's not a typo. This particular edition of Spectra magazine is almost 24 years old.

Then, last month, this story comes out.

Sandia National Laboratories
NEWS RELEASES
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 17, 2005

Tiny porphyrin tubes developed by Sandia may lead to new nanodevices
Research could result in clean, inexpensive hydrogen fuel

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - Sunlight splitting water molecules to produce hydrogen using devices too small to be seen in a standard microscope. That's a goal of a research team from the National Nuclear Security Administration's Sandia National Laboratories. The research has captured the interest of chemists around the world pursuing methods of producing hydrogen from water.

"The broad objective of the research is to design and fabricate new types of nanoscale devices," says John Shelnutt, Sandia research team leader. "

This investigation is exciting because it promises to provide fundamental scientific breakthroughs in chemical synthesis, self-assembly, electron and energy transfer processes, and photocatalysis. Controlling these processes is necessary to build nanodevices for efficient water splitting, potentially enabling a solar hydrogen-based economy."

Shelnutt says the nanodevice could efficiently use the entire visible and ultraviolet parts of the solar spectrum absorbed by the tubes to produce hydrogen, one of the Holy Grails of chemistry.

These nanotube devices could be suspended in a solution and used for photocatalytic solar hydrogen production. "Once we have functional nanodevices that operate with reasonable efficiency in solution, we will turn our attention to the development of nanodevice-based solar light-harvesting cells and the systems integration issues involved in their production," Shelnutt says. mailto:jasheln@sandia.gov

In the Solar Hydrogen Economy, we must crack water into hydrogen and oxygen using wind, hydropower, and solar power. Wind power is there. Hydropower is there. (but limited).

Solar power with photon to electron conversion materials is getting there with power paints and nanoantenaes. Using nuclear power to make hydrogen is nothing short of stupidity or some kind of cultural death wish.

But these kind of heliohydrogen techniques where hydrogen is created by the action of a submerged silicon photo-cathode and a photo-anode , or with these light harvesting nanodevices that operate in solution may, in fact, be the solution to the creation of affordable large scale production of heliohydrogen.

And, there is strong evidence that living creatures can also provide commercial hydrogen from the sun.

Here is a story from the SF Gate.com

Enzyme Lets Algae Produce Hydrogen to Use as Clean Fuel Berkeley scientist says discovery is like `striking oil' -

Glen Martin, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, January 29, 2000

Researchers have found a metabolic switch in algae that allows the primitive plants to produce hydrogen gas -- a discovery that could ultimately result in a vast source of cheap, pollution-free fuel.

Hydrogen, which can be used as a clean-burning fuel in cars and power plants, is virtually limitless in availability, because it is part of the water molecule. It is a candidate to become the world's primary fuel in coming decades.

But until now, it was obtainable in quantity only through relatively expensive extraction procedures involving the electrolysis of water or processing natural gas.

The breakthrough, by scientists at the University of California at Berkeley and the U.S. Department of Energy, would make possible the commercial production of hydrogen gas by photosynthesis in tanks, ponds or the open ocean.

``I guess it's the equivalent of striking oil,'' said Tasios Melis, a microbial biology professor at UC Berkeley. ``It was enormously exciting. It was unbelievable.''

Texas A & M, Sandia National Labs, the University of California, the US Department of Energy all seem to know how to make cheap hydrogen from water with solar energy.

And remember, hydrogen from wind power is already competitive with 2.00 gasoline.

So remind me.

Exactly why are we sending our sons and daughters to War and

Why are we spending hundreds of billions of dollars each year,

to defend our national interests in the Persian Gulf?

Especially, when if we are successful defending these remaining resources,

And we burn it in our cars and trucks,

All we do is destabilize the climate even more.

This is not Rocket Science.

It is Materials Science.

And the World is using bad material.

And the Earthfamily is suffering for it.



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Intelligent Conversation

Magritte

It's hard for folks to grasp the future that we face, and the need to focus on the solution. Most of us don't really understand energy and we tend to depend on experts who help us sort things out. Unfortunately, most experts these days are pretty unreliable. Thanks to the Oil Drum, here's part of Chris Nelder's Peak Oil Guide that speaks to the issue:

"Recent media coverage of peak oil, and the energy options for the future, has been fraught with misinformation. In such an environment, the average person has little chance of knowing whether oil from ANWR or the Arctic can save the day, or whether there are 1.2 or 12 trillion barrels of recoverable oil out there.

But confusion breeds apathy, and that's not something we can afford anymore. I believe that the impending energy crisis is too urgent to allow misinformation about peak oil to go unanswered. We need to bring the public up to speed on the realities of energy before we can have any sort of intelligent conversation about reforming energy policy."

Debating whether or not to open up the offshore fields is not an intelligent conversation. It is a diversion. Wondering if the high price of oil can be blamed on speculators is not an intelligent conversation, it's a witch hunt. Debating whether or not the Tar Sands will solve the problem is not intelligent conversation, it is lazy minded lunacy.

In a conversation with a former banker last week, I endeavored to get him to understand that the problems before us require us to grasp the following realization:

We have already discovered enough carbon fuel to completely do ourselves in.

You don't need to know if the tank in your car is full when you decide to commit suicide, you only need to know that there is enough to totally fill the garage with enough carbon monoxide to get the job done. And let me assure you. We have more than enough fuel to get the job done.

So the MSM will lead today with the POTUS lifting the ban on offshore drilling, and the debate will go there as environmentalists and industry supporters square off. This is not an intelligent conversation. It is classic misdirection.

We must realize as a global community that we can no longer run our world on the buried sunlight of the Permian age. We must understand deeply that we must now power the earth on the energy that surrounds us.

And we must discuss how we make this transition with the declining finite resources we presently depend on.

We must begin to unify the transportation sector with the stationary generation sector.

We must plan how to make our streets and cities safe for pedestrians and cyclists.

We must contemplate how we make our urban car matrix into a quilt of villages.

We must focus on how we build photon to electron devices in our windows, our walls, and in the deserts.

We must build a global photonic energy web.

We must rethink the capitalist ethic which postulates that the more you consume, the richer you become.

We must let go of the notion that markets can solve all problems.

We must once again value a good that is good, over a good that goes out of style or is designed to fail and lose its utility.

We must redefine our sense of national self and replace it with a new global self.

We must reward good design, good art, beautiful poetry, and thoughtful theatre.

We must transform the business of health into the art of healing.

We must convert agribusiness into a pastoral art.

We must rebirth democracy.

And we must respect ourselves, each other, and our universe.

This is intelligent conversation.

All else is party piddle paddle.



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Sleep Talking

The POTUS came out with a climate change speech today that laid out his new plan. Well, it's not really a plan, it just fluff and floozy to keep him from looking like he is. But simply setting a goal was enough to make the conservatives at National Review Online get all cranky.

Bush & Global Warming: Still A Mistake
Iain Murray

The President, as I mentioned below, stepped back from calling for a ruinous cap and trade scheme, but his speech still lays out a blueprint for slow motion economic decline. It legitimizes global warming alarmism and undermines opposition in Congress to disastrous energy-rationing policies, such as the Lieberman-Warner bill.

President Bush's global warming proposals could have been worse. Bereft of the cap and trade call, however, it became a stunningly pointless speech that was unnecessary. While the President said that the global warming debate was intensifying, the fact is that global warming alarmism is on the verge of collapse all around the world thanks to the stark lessons of reality. If anything, by delivering this speech the President has only helped to intensify the alarmist agenda.

Thanks to strong and quick conservative opposition, the President did indeed step back from some of the most damaging proposals being considered in the White House—for instance, supporting a cap-and-trade for utilities. Yet it's not clear what exactly is left. His emphasis on new technologies is encouraging, although it opens the door to massive government subsidies.

The vague principles relating to the incentives he outlined could support sensible policies, or, more likely, damaging policies.

President Bush has unfortunately moved the debate toward energy rationing policies that will raise the electricity and gasoline prices paid by consumers. But, perhaps we should be grateful that he hasn't moved the debate far enough to please the global warming alarmists. Grist, Joe Romm and the Center for American Progress are all incensed.

The best point in the speech was the strong opposition to carbon tariffs and trade wars, as favored by the French. That needed to be said. He also said raising taxes was no way to deal with the problem—meaning his "incentives" probably can't be interpreted as a carbon tax, and, in fact, expensing might meet the strictures. (But so would cap and trade.)

He also rightly outlined the regulatory nightmare caused by activist litigation; however, he has had ample warning of that—Chris Horner's paper five years ago warned exactly how this would happen.

The upshot: an unnecessary and unhelpful intervention in a debate that for all the hype, was actually progressing satisfactorily on its own."

As you might imagine, I rather like the French proposal for carbon fees and feel it is at least moving us in the right direction. Allowing carbon to be placed into the biosphere without any kind of premium for doing so, when we are 99% sure that it is dangerous to do so, is a recipe for for a calamity of species ending proportions. However, I would not characterize myself as a global alarmist, I would rather characterize the folks who have coined that phrase to be somnabulists.
.

They are sleep talkers.

I do agree with the Review that the Cap and Trade plans will fail to do the job, and I further agree that if we don't get to developing the kind of advanced photon to electron solid state economy we are capable of, we will be seeing all kinds of gasoline allotments, and other carbon constraints. And our freedoms will equally be constrained.

When I was young, I used to sleep walk. Now that I'm older, the idea that I might get up in the middle of the night and walk around without knowing what I am doing, where I am going, or why I'm doing it, kind of horrifies me.

I wonder when the conservatives will awake from their somnabulist state,

and realize that their words and writings on climate change

is the neural equivalent of sleep talking.

And the time to wake up

and to come together

is now.




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"sleep walking well" courtesy of mihai criste

Intelligent Design

Humankind has the potential to move now towards a light based economy.

If we create an international effort, not just a national effort, to get the cost of solar energy down to below 1 dollar per watt, humankind can move toward a prosperous, sustainable, and peaceful future.

If we do not, we are very likely headed over a cliff as the nations of the world war over the oil that remains.

As I have been reporting, there are many strategies that are available now.

One, is the concept of increasing the amount of solar that hits a photovoltaic surface with materials that are significantly less costly than the solar material itself. This replacement of reflector material for the photon to electron material results in cost efficiencies.

Here is a story that came out in the last week saying exactly that.

Cost-Competitive Solar Called "Imminent"
Renewable Energy Access
Thursday 21 July 2005

Golden, Colorado - Solar concentrators using highly efficient photovoltaic solar cells will reduce the cost of electricity from sunlight to competitive levels soon, attendees were told at a recent international conference on the subject.

"Concentrating solar electric power is on the cusp of delivering on its promise of low-cost, reliable, solar-generated electricity at a cost that is competitive with mainstream electric generation systems," said Vahan Garboushian, president of Amonix, Inc. of Torrance, Calif. "With the advent of multijunction solar cells, PV concentrator power generation at $3 per watt is imminent in the coming few years."

Photovoltaic (PV) concentrator units are much different than the flat photovoltaic modules sold around the world; almost 1,200 MW of flat PV modules were sold last year. PV concentrators come in larger module sizes, typically 20 kilowatts to 35 kilowatts each, they track the sun during the day and they are more suitable for large utility installations.

Ordinary, flat-plate solar modules have their entire sun-receiving surface covered with costly silicon solar cells and are positioned at a fixed tilt to the sun. In contrast, Amonix's systems offer significant cost savings by using inexpensive flat, plastic Fresnel lenses as an intermediary between the sun and the cell. These magnifying lenses focus and concentrate sunlight approximately 250 times onto a relatively small cell area. Through concentration, the required silicon cell area needed for a given amount of electricity is reduced by an amount approximating its concentration ratio (250 times). In effect, a low-cost plastic concentrator lens is being substituted for relatively expensive silicon.

"We have seen steady progress in photovoltaic concentrator technology," said Hayden, Solar Program Coordinator at APS. "We are working with advanced multijunction PV cells that are approaching 38% efficiency, and even higher is possible over time. Our goal is to install PV concentrator systems at $3 per watt, which can happen soon at production rates of 10 megawatts per year. Once that happens, higher volumes are readily achieved."

At the conference, NREL announced a new record efficiency of 37.9 percent at 10 suns, a measure of concentrated sunlight. Soon thereafter Boeing-Spectrolab, under contract to NREL and the Department of Energy, surpassed the NREL record with 39.0 percent at 236 suns announced at the European photovoltaic conference in Barcelona, Spain. The efficiency of a solar cell is the percentage of the sun's energy the device converts to electricity.

The ultra-high efficiency solar cell technology, initially discovered at NREL and successfully developed for space satellites in the 1990s by Boeing-Spectrolab Inc., in Sylmar, Calif., proves to be enabling for low-cost terrestrial SEC systems. "Today, we are capitalizing on the major investments made by the space satellite industry and reducing the cost of the semiconductor solar cell by two to three orders of magnitude by operating the cells under high sun concentrations, typically 300 to 1000 times.

Boeing-Spectrolab and NREL have demonstrated over 37 percent efficient concentrator solar cells and field testing of Spectrolab's cells for over one year with no degradation promise a bright future. We expect concentrator solar cell performance to reach or exceed 40 percent by 2006 and anticipate continued enhancement in performance and reliability," said Dr. Nasser Karam, vice president of Advanced Technology Products at Spectrolab Inc. "We are working closely with PV concentrator manufacturers to ensure their success and expedient deployment of the multijunction PV concentrator cells" said Dr. Raed Sherif, director of PV concentrator products, at Spectrolab. "

As encouraging as this is, the costs still need to be closer to $1.00 per watt not $3.00.

In fact, we need to get to 50 cents a watt.

But with an international effort to bring these costs down,

Coupled

With a concerted effort to unify the transportation sector

with the stationary generation sector,

with the development of plug in hybrid cars;

With significant investments in wind power development,

with its already more than competitive electric power;

With the creation of an advanced efficient economy,

with offices and homes that are built for economy;

With a new understanding of the potential of our tools

which expand our ability to telework and telecommunicate;

With a new understanding of the fallacies behind full employment,

and economies that must grow to live;

We can avoid the terrible calamity of an all-out war,

and/or the potential loss of our freedoms to a fascist state

that we are facing today in an all-too-soon approaching tomorrow.

This is not hyperbole.

This is not a prediction.

This is not a guess.

This is the projection of our present course,

into the event horizon.

This is math.

This is physics.

It is intelligent design.



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