2009-01-04 (Sunday) by Gregory Tucker.

New photos from a photo shoot at Sears. The old saying applies: you get what you pay for.

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2008-12-26 (Friday) by Gregory Tucker.

Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) currently has the upper hand in solar energy production. In September 2008 the Texas Comptroller estimated there are 419 megawatts of production using CSP, and many new CSP plants are scheduled to come online.

But CSP is not without its problems. For one, it only works in medium and large scale installations, because it relies on heated fluids to drive a turbine. Moreover, it only works when there is direct sunlight. The corollary is CSP continues to produce energy even when there is no direct sunlight, because the fluids continue to hold heat which drives the turbines. In general CSP installations are low tech, and the major costs are in the concrete, the mirrors, and the turbines, which are not expected to decrease significantly in cost in the future. On the contrary, the costs of these basic commodities may inflate in the future.

The VC communities are more interested in PV, for a variety of reasons. They operate in diffuse sunlight. They operate in smaller scale, rooftop installations. Their high cost components, the thin-film or crystalline silicon PV components are expected to drop in the future. If these components follow Moore’s law, their costs will be very competitive in a few years. At some point in the next few years, the limiting factors will become, depending on the application, battery storage.

In 2009  we may already begin to see significant reductions in PV costs, as more production capacity comes onto the market. Silicon spot prices are expected to drop from $165/kg to to $113/kg, resulting in module price drops of 12% from $1.52/watt in 2008. Meanwhile, thin-film PV prices are approaching $1/watt, and New Energy Finance estimates production of thin-film PV modules will quadruple in 2009. NEF estimates unsubsidized costs of production will drop precipitously by 2010.

http://www.window.state.tx.us/comptrol/fnotes/fn0809/mirrors.html

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/story?id=54380&src=rss

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2008-12-25 (Thursday) by Gregory Tucker.

I recently ran across a couple articles on Renewable Energy World that are both sobering and hopeful.

This article discusses the failure of Thin-film PV projects. While PV is gaining popularity among small scale installers, to date there are only two successful instances of Thin-film PV among larger generation projects, among hundreds of attempts. In general successful solar power projects involve Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) which use parabolic dishes or troughs to heat a fluid.  However, shortly after this article was published, PG&E announced a 10MW thin-film PV project in Nevada.

This article discusses the use of geothermic energy to provide 2,000MW of power using minor differences in the temperature of the earth from 10-ft diameter tunnels as deep as 12 miles.

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2008-09-21 (Sunday) by Gregory Tucker.

I found this here. Open Disk Utility and use the New Image from Folder menu item to create an image. Ensure it is uncompressed and use the CD/DVD master option. In my experience this creates HFS+ masters which are no good in Windows. Open the Terminal. Assuming your new image is called Master.cdr type:

hdiutil makehybrid -iso -joliet -o Master.iso Master.cdr     

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2008-07-20 (Sunday) by Gregory Tucker.

This introduction by Thomas Friedman gave me a good chuckle this morning:

I am reliably told by a Bush administration official that there is an old saying in Texas that goes like this: “If all you ever do is all you’ve ever done, then all you’ll ever get is all you ever got.” Could anyone possibly come up with a better description of President Bush’s energy policy?

Friedman’s article chastices the Bush/Cheney administration for failing to use its political capital to begin to solve the multi-generational, multi-faceted issues surrounding energy. Freidman describes the administration’s incompetence, without discussing why.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to view the PickensPlan on his new website. Boone Pickens has been advertising his plan heavily on CNN, and lest you think his purposes are altruistic, he is heavily invested in the plan he is proposing. Without knowing his reasoning for coming forward so publicly with the plan, we can assume it is to obtain public subsidies or at least public tolerance of the project. Pickens will require new transmissions lines that may require right-of-way permission from regulators, which may be opposed by local landowners affected by the lines.

The PickensPlan is a bit simplistic. He proposes to replace natural gas used for electricity production with wind power. The natural gas could be used to replace or offfset liquid oil. Besides his own wind project in the Texas panhandle, he doesn’t address how to scale up wind power throughout the rest of the midwest. Nor does he address how to increase demand for LNG fuel in automobile transportation, or whether the owners of natural gas turbines will simply roll over and die in the face of public pressure (unlikely). Finally,the PickensPlan doesn’t address the issue of greenhouse gas emissions.

I have come to see that the issues of energy production, global climate change, and foreign oil dependency are solvable in my lifetime. Over at the E.N. Thompsan Forum at the University of Nebraska Lincoln podcast, Amory Lovins gives a very enjoyable and inspring talk on automobile design and its impact on oil usage. Over at the Woods Energy Seminar podcast from Stanford iTunes U, Elton Sherwin presents a broad array of solutions from a public policy perspective.

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2008-03-21 (Friday) by Gregory Tucker.

There is no correlation between population density and energy usage that I can identify.

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2008-03-18 (Tuesday) by Gregory Tucker.

In my spare time I have started a project to “make sense” of energy consumption. I believe we are all concerned about energy consumption, energy sources, and the effect our effect our use of energy is having on our planet, especially with respect to global climate change. We hear a lot of claims about what can and cannot be done in the future. Some way solar power is our only alternative. Some say nuclear power. I admit I do not understand these claims, but I want to.

Energy is important because our way of life and standard of living depend on energy. My first challenge was to establish a connection between GDP and energy consumption. I pulled per capita GDP numbers from the CIA World FactBook. I pulled per capita energy consumption data from the Energy  Information Administration (2005). Neither source was entirely complete, but I found a sample of 197 countries with statistics from both. I ignored the small colonies or protectorates of the United States and Europe which house military bases, because these regions have very high energy consumption relative to GDP, and arguably these numbers should be rolled up into their parent countries.

With a sample of 197, the data shows a correlation coefficient (r) of 0.829 and a coefficient of determination (r-squared) of .687. The statistician would say that 68.7% of the variation in energy consumption can be explained by economic production. This is a pretty strong correlation and confirms my belief.

Next I want to investigate the correlation between energy consumption and population density.

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2007-09-28 (Friday) by Gregory Tucker.

Response to Jim Cash’s “Middle East Imperative” that has been making its way around the Internet.

Ever wondered why the French were so vehemently opposed to the US invasion of Iraq? Beyond the normal hyperbole, the answer is simple: French companies would have been the largest recipients of oil Iraqi oil rights once the sanctions were lifted. The other recipients were to be predominantly Chinese, Russian, German, and Japanese.

Fortunately, Cash’s essay confirmed something that, until recently, was politically inexpedient to say: the invasion of Iraq was about oil. Greenspan’s recent book, “The Age of Turbulence” confirmed this in so many words. Let’s forget all this nonsense about democracy and terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Let’s banish them once and for all from our public debates about Iraq.

Nevertheless, the US is not about to suddenly run out of oil, even if embargoed by Iran and Iraq. In 2005 Iraqi energy production was 1.9mbpd, or 2.23% of the world total output. (Source: Energy Information Administration). Iran’s 2005 production was 4.24mbpd, or 5.01% of world production. In contrast, US production was 8.2mbpd, and all of North America, including Canada and Mexico, produced 15.2mbpd. And very little of Iranian oil goes to the United States. These facts are public; they are produced by our own government. Why does Cash ignore them?

The invasion of Iraq was not just about securing the supply of oil–it was about securing Iraqi reserves for American oil companies. And they have done a pretty poor job of developing those reserves. Iraqi energy production peaked in 1989 at 2.9 million barrels per day (mbpd), just prior to the first invasion. It peaked again in 2001 at 2.6mbpd, just prior to the second invasion. Since then it has declined 25% in 2005–and production was much worse in 2003. Again, I gleaned all this from the EIA. By any measure of oil except one, the invasion was a failure. The one exception? The stabilization of oil production from the Kurdish province.

Cash asked: “Do you have any idea what will happen if the entire Middle East turns their support to Iran, which they will obviously do if we pull out?” Why is this obvious? The world’s largest oil producer, Saudi Arabia (13.1%), is predominantly Sunni and a major rival to Iran. It can already be seen gearing up for its post-US role in Iraq to counter Iranian influence. Iraq’s most stable region, the Kurdish province, the home of much of Iraq’s production and reserves, is opposed to both Baathist (Syrian) and Shiite (Iranian) interests. Syria’s alliance with Iran seems stable, but there are few theological or ideological bonds. Rather, theirs is a relationship of convenience, much as the US was allied with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany. And Syria has relatively little in energy reserves. It is obvious to me that Iran and Syria are isolated, and will remain isolated.

What Iran threatens, more than anything else, are the generous contracts given to US oil companies by Iraq’s US-sponsored provisional government.

Cash throws around the partisan politics like confetti. He accuses the Democratic Party of being on the extreme left. Well, it certainly is to the left of Atilla the Hun–this much is true. Pres. Bill Clinton has been accused by his enemies as both a left-wing radical and a poll chaser. Which is it? Or is that a tacit acknowledgment that the American public itself is to the left of American politics? Cash notes that modern Democrats are the most self-serving and corrupt ever. I agree. But why exclude Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield, or any of the current field of Republican candidates?

I don’t know what the truth is. I don’t pretend to have all the answers, or even any of them. I know that complete withdrawal is not an option, but I also know the status quo is not either. However, I don’t see anybody running for office–or Cash himself–offering an objective, unbiased assessment of how to get us out of the mess that Bush got us into.

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2006-08-11 (Friday) by Gregory Tucker.

Q: Is there a good energy solution for our economy or is the solution renewable resources?

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