EEstor have never produced supercapacitors before. They have discovered a material with high capacitance yet not allowed for the dielectric saturation of this material in their calculations. So either they have found a way around that fundamental problem (which they don’t even mention as a problem), or they used the wrong equation in their patent. They are putting up a production facility before a prototype has been produced. So what do you think? As a competitor I should be impartial. I predict more “production delays” though :-).

Like you, I think this is the next boom. There will be a great deal of hype and a lot of poor ideas will fall away eventually after losing millions. I also think that isn’t too important for investors, who are likely looking for a short term pump-and-dump boost in shareprices. It’ll be the internet boom all over again. For transport it seems investors though are more interested in batteries than hydrogen systems, so hybrids, plug-ins and range extenders will be the kings. Hydrogen is looking like a dead duck unless a miracle happens.

Thanks for the link. I hope solar does succeed but there are still the intermittency and scale problems to overcome. There is huge potential though. I wrote a degree report on solar power in 1980. Nothing much changed though due to the combined effect of the low oil price and the strong nuclear lobby but in the last few years the progress has been incredible.

Jeff
Landfill is already a massive problem and it’s not cheap either, so something has to be done. There is just too much garbage. Burying useful stuff is really dumb anyway. The throwaway society cannot survive a resource crisis. I could imagine a rather easy process whereby plastics are color coded so they can be automatically separated by machinery.

I’ve long thought that all freight should go by rail anyway. Just imagine those acres of roads without trucks. Pick-ups and RV’s are fine for people who need them but they need to use a chassis that doesn’t kill people. Like minivans for example; it’s not difficult. As a fashion item, they aren’t even pretty and are doomed to lose out to the next fashion anyway.

I agree about the CO2. The oil price isn’t listening though. I’d use up that extra urban heat with heat pumps and Stirling engines. Otherwise it’s just another waste. As you know though the urban heat islands don’t affect the planet. Agriculture has much more effect. I’d welcome experiments though.

If this all works there’ll be cheaper bills and no wars about oil. If you don’t believe some sacrifices are worth it for a clean, healthy environment then I despair. My father tells me that everyone used to run out and collect the horse crap on the road so they could put it on their roses. What the heck happened to our generation?

Also FWIW, that solar thin film PV company Nanosolar that Stan mentioned just announced a big deal with some French company (I don’t remember the name) to provide large amounts of panels. It sounds like their production lines are now booked solid through 2010. On a more traditional (silicon-based) solar PV vein, this new start-up sounds very interesting. But again, until they start pushing product it’s hard to tell.

Solar thermal (aka as concentrated solar power, or CSP) is also taking off like crazy out here in the southwest. According to another article I read, over 100 applications for new utility scale CSP power plants were filed in various municipalities in 2007 alone. Considering their very favorable grid load following characteristics I’d say we’ll probably see CSP grid generation capacity double, maybe even triple every year for the next several years.

There are so many different alternative energy alternatives getting ever closer to the magic “cheaper than coal” benchmark that it’s getting hard to believe it won’t be reached in a few short years — provided governmental policy starts doing more to help than hinder. No matter who ends up president next year, I’d say that’s likely to happen. And that’s why I truly believe the debate over the significance of climate change as a determining factor in energy policy is a bit overblown. With the appropriate combination of cost-effective (i.e., cheap as coal) wind, solar, geothermal, batteries, and whatever else comes along, concerns about CO2 mitigation becomes largely irrelevant, because it will happen anyway — well, assuming the declining costs of renewable energy sources will keep pace with the decline they are likely to instigate in the costs of fossil fuels. It’s an interesting conundrum, eh?

Quoting Maurice F. Strong, one of the world’s leading environmentalists and senior advisor to various U.N. Secretaries-General:

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring about?”

Plastics are infinitely recyclable (really? Infinitely? There’s no loss in the process at all?), as long as they are infinitely recycled. That would mean forcing each and every person on the planet to recycle only the right plastics. And it would also mean that the recycling process doesn’t cause more pollution and cost than landfilling (which, incidentally, all the world’s garbage could fit in a relatively small area for centuries to come).

The problem with reducing the weight of passenger cars is that cargo carriers still have to be heavy. And it would pretty much do away with many freedoms, such as owning a pickup truck and an RV.

As for total urban area being so small, well, CO2 in the atmosphere is even smaller, so we shouldn’t worry about it, right? We already know of climate issues created by land use changes. Making cities even hotter with solar panels isn’t the way to go.

Not familiar with Aluminum air batteries. Better than Lithium ion? If so, why are all the manufacturers still using them?

I think the characterization of environmentalists is not just. What they want is for us to stop fouling our planet, not a socialist state. A lot of the Greenpeace site is devoted to sustainable energy. Some of it pie in the sky but a lot of it very useful. Sure some of them are lunatics but most are sincere people who care.

If the Yellowstone supervolcano is as bad as they say we’re all screwed anyway. You might read about China Lake (still in Western US). Apparently it has the potential to power a huge area.

For cars we already know that they can be made to do 100mpg if you reduce the weight. Check out the Loremo 157mpg car. And don’t mention safety because the increase in heavier cars have actually increased the overall death toll for a variety of reasons. With SUV’s we took a huge step backwards in automotive design. For propulsion, my own favourite is Aluminum-Air batteries, which I’m actually involved with (we’ve made it feasible). Just swap them out at the service station every 1000 miles or so.

RE albedo of solar panels. The actual total urban area is tiny compared to the size of the earth. So no worries. Indeed the worlds population standing nose to nose would likely fit in New Jersey.

No need to explain. I have plenty of friends in situations like yours — very smart people, but not a lot of formal education. I also have others who have lots of formal education but not a lot of common sense, or “street smarts”. Where I fall on that scale myself I don’t care to speculate. I am of the opinion that genuine stupidity, while incurable, is rare whereas ignorance, while commonplace, is curable as long as it’s not willful. At any rate, I like what Mac Rebennack (aka Dr. John) had to say about it (in a tune called, “Qualified”): Your edjumakashun ain’t no better than what you understand”. Said in another way, I tried to never allow school to get in the way of my edjumakashun, lol!

With that in mind, try going back to the link I cited and read the MIT study that is linked to at the bottom of the article. That’s the one everyone references. And if that excites you, read the rest of them too. Be prepared for your eyes to get tired. Just so you know though, if that happens before your brain starts to smoke you’re either not paying attention or you’re a better man than me, lol!

But if you don’t want to spend the time, let me summarize: an enhanced geothermal system (EGS) is one where you drill two wells (or more, if needed) deep into the earth’s crust where the rocks are really hot, create a reservoir between the two by artificially fracturing the rocks between them, then injecting water (or some other fluid) into one (the injection well), letting the water heat up as it travels to the second well (the production well) where, by virtue of convection, it comes back the surface to run a turbine before it’s injected back.

And how reliable would such power be? Old Faithful might be faithful but is everywhere that consistent? I just don’t know, and not afraid to say so.

I’m glad you asked! I love talking about this stuff. First, the up side…

The “capacity factor” (which is the percentage of time a plant is able to achieve its rated capacity) of existing utility scale geothermal plants is well over 90%. In that regard, they rival major hydroelectric plants and outperform nuclear. In other words, they run pretty much all the time, which makes them ideal as “base power” plants. Existing geothermal plants are cheaper than dirt, too — or at least cheaper than coal (even ones without any scrubbers to get rid of the most harmful “traditional” pollutants).

As far as future depoyability, the MIT study gives a very thorough estimation of that. The bottom line is: if it becomes a mature technology it can be deployed almost anywhere — in the US or elsewhere in the world. In other words, with a few exceptions, (and again, assuming the technology becomes mature) geothermal plants can be located just about anywhere they are needed (which reduces the need for long transmission lines). They are very scalable, meaning they can be built to accommodate a small community or a large city. They occupy a smaller surface footprint than just about any other power source (the size of the plant itself is about the size of a coal or gas-fired plant, but without the mining and transportation concerns associated with either), and they emit essentially nothing except heat (which can already be recaptured more readily than CO2). And since the “fuel” is supplied by the earth itself (and the water is re-injected), it’s free. And if you know where to drill, they’re cheap to build, too.

Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? And if it is true, why aren’t they everywhere already? That brings up the down side…

As far as I can tell, there is one major techological hurdle standing in the way: artificially stimulating a fracture reservoir in the necessary rock substrata. As far as I know there are no other fundamental technological hurdles. But that one’s a biggie. And as far as I know it’s only been attempted once, at a site called Habanero in Australia. And the results of that site are still pending. A second site is soon to happen in The Geysers, CA. The Australian site is the “real thing” — i.e., they’re drilling deep in a location that is not especially different than much of the rest of the world. The Geysers location, on the other hand, is an attempt to regenerate a more “traditional” geothermal location that originally had naturally occuring super-heated water but subsequently went dry. If successful, the Australian site could be game-changing — it could open up possibilities for geothermal in a good 2/3 of the global landmass over the next few decades. The outlook on the Geysers site, on the other hand, is more limited but shorter term — it could revolutionize geothermal in places where magma pockets exist closer to the surface. That includes a considerable amount of the US west of the Rockies. Either way though, the “closed circuit design”, where you have an injection well in one place and a production well in another, is the big remaining hurdle. That’s a bit of a simplification, but not that much.

As something of an aside, your question about Yellowstone, or about magma coming up the well hole in any other place, is a non-issue. We’re talking about tapping a miniscule portion of a very, very large resource. However, the possibility that artificially fracturing the rock strata could cause earthquakes of low to marginal intensity is a real concern. Then again, it’s no more of a concern than the potential consequences of sucking out millions of gallons of oil from other locations — or subterranean water, for that matter. Florida, southern Indiana, parts of Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, among others I am unaware of, are littered with examples of that. Think sinkholes.

Huge advances are being made in Solar. It’s just that much of it is off the average person’s radar. This company is working on some pretty cutting edge solar film technology.

The holy grail of renewable energy came a step closer yesterday as thousands of mass-produced wafer-thin solar cells printed on aluminium film rolled off a production line in California, heralding what British scientists called “a revolution” in generating electricity.

The solar panels produced by a Silicon Valley start-up company, Nanosolar, are radically different from the kind that European consumers are increasingly buying to generate power from their own roofs. Printed like a newspaper directly on to aluminium foil, they are flexible, light and, if you believe the company, expected to make it as cheap to produce electricity from sunlight as from coal.

I got this link from Rico a while back, but since he hasn’t noted it, I will. My guess is that weight for a roof full of these would not be a significant factor.

Sorry if this double posts - it disappeared the first time I hit “submit”.

Huge advances are being made in Solar. It’s just that much of it is off the average person’s radar. This company is working on some pretty cutting edge solar film technology.

The holy grail of renewable energy came a step closer yesterday as thousands of mass-produced wafer-thin solar cells printed on aluminium film rolled off a production line in California, heralding what British scientists called “a revolution” in generating electricity.

The solar panels produced by a Silicon Valley start-up company, Nanosolar, are radically different from the kind that European consumers are increasingly buying to generate power from their own roofs. Printed like a newspaper directly on to aluminium foil, they are flexible, light and, if you believe the company, expected to make it as cheap to produce electricity from sunlight as from coal.

I got this link from Rico a while back, but since he hasn’t noted it, I will. My guess is that weight for a roof full of these would not be a significant factor.