Solar Energy a Tough Sell

June 9. 2008 by Dick.

The Miami Herald thinks solar power is a white elephant.

The old saying is, “If it bleeds, it leads.” I guess there wasn’t enough blood in South Florida yesterday.

Florida Power and Light, the principle utility here, has “scaled back grand plans for solar energy in Florida. Sunshine may be free, but generating energy from it is still a costly proposition,” according to a report by John Dorschner in the Miami Herald.

It surprised me to discover that “Florida gets much less direct sunlight than some other places.” The Herald continued that “What’s more, solar can be considerably more expensive than other forms of energy, experts say.”

For the record, FPL Group has desert solar plants and wind facilities throughout the western states. It is the largest U.S. producer of wind and solar power. FPL serves more than 4.4 million customer accounts across Florida.

“I haven’t seen anything yet that shows solar is right for Florida,” Jay Apt, executive director of the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center, concluded in the Herald.

Now for the real story.

“Backers of solar power insist that costs would drop quickly over time if solar gets support from utilities and politicians. But those who study energy economics are skeptical.”

I want to know where they found these experts. Consider this:

1959: “Only Jules Verne can get a man to the Moon”
1969: “That’s one small step for man …”

1975: “The American automobile industry can’t possibly double the gas mileage on cars. Double? Are you crazy?”
1985: The Corporate Average Fuel Economy for cars reached 27.5 mpg.

1992: “The sweet spot for desktop computers is $3,000″ (I paid $3,085 1992 dollars for an 80486-based Gateway 2000 in May of that year).
2002: Gateway sold Pentium 4-based desktops with Windows XP for under a grand (and some for half of that now).

2006: Google founder Larry Page and Silicon Valley venture capitalists John Doerr and Vinod Khosla lit a public fire under solar power with a California ballot issue.

Computer chips and solar cells are, at the engineering level, pretty much the same thing.

“A solar cell is just a big specialized chip, so everything we’ve learned about making chips applies,” Paul Saffo, an associate engineering professor at Stanford University and a longtime observer of Silicon Valley said in the International Herald Trib earlier this year.

That tells us we can link Moore’s Law and solar technology. Moore’s law states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every two years or so; its corollary is that prices plummet at around the same rate.

In 2006, Solaicx was one of dozens of Silicon Valley firms driving the then-$11 billion worldwide solar energy market. Applied Materials, the world’s largest manufacturer of chip-making equipment, began selling machinery that manufactures solar wafers that same year.

In 2006, SunPower founder Richard Swanson told CNN the solar industry was like the chip industry 30 years before. “It was an extremely fun and dynamic industry,” he said. “But unless you were in it, it was practically invisible until the IBM PC came out in 1981.”

That was a couple of years ago, long enough for the news to reach Florida by now.

So. Mr. Dorschner thinks solar power is a white elephant. I think the Herald and Mr. Dorschner should maybe do a little more research. And maybe, just maybe, they should report what the solar industry is doing that will change the numbers instead of looking to spill enough blood to kill it.

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Filed under Bad Journalism and Far Green Angst.Sources:
http://www.miamiherald.com/457/story/561858.html
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/17/technology/PING.php
http://money.cnn.com/2006/10/26/magazines/business2/solar_siliconvalley.biz2/index.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore’s_law

Posted in Newspaper "Science", Business, PC, Media, Dick's Dumps | 5 Comments »

Guestbook and More

May 31. 2008 by Dick.

Wow.

A friend and I were talking about names; we had a tiny question about how many peeps keep the given name their parents gave them.

One of my high school classmates changed hers from Diane to Eugenia so I googled her. A first page result was on classmates.com and, as it turns out, you have to sign up to access the info.

Signing up is free so I did. After all, I have a myspace page, right? What could it hurt.

I hate to be nickled and dimed. I dropped Verizon because they charge Vermonters by the minute for local calls. I’ll probably stop flying when the airlines start charging by the pound.

If you sign the classmates.com guestbook or send a message to a classmates.com member like me, I have to pay for it. This is worse than texting. Since I am pugnaciously parsimonious, you are far more likely to get my attention by email or phone.

I pay a flat rate for those.

dblog4495h-at-gmail-dot-com

Posted in Business, Dick's Dumps, Random Access | 1 Comment »

Bad for Baby?

March 10. 2008 by Dick.

No. Bad for Us.

Are common baby lotions bad for babies?

A small study conducted by the University of Washington and the Seattle Children’s Hospital Research Institute showed that exposure to phthalates caused reproductive problems in mice.

Lotions made for babies (and grownups) include phthalates to add the fragrance or color that separates a Johnson and Johnson shampoo from a Proctor & Gamble product.

I looked on the back of a baby shampoo bottle and found cocamidopropyl betaine, sorbitan laurate, sodium trideceth sulfate, and even the dreaded polyquaternium. Say, what? The latter would be a quater that marries several iums.

“If it’s difficult to say and it’s not commonly known, it’s probably something we should wonder about,” Dr. Lori Racha of University Pediatrics told the local Channel 3 News.

Dr. Racha says it is too early to know if those products actually harm human babies but she wants us to switch anyway. “If it smells really sweet, it’s probably not something we should be using on our babies,” she said on the news.

Hello?

This is a medical doctor–a pediatrician–who wants us to make a crucial decision based on what she doesn’t know.

I can apply that technique in all facets of my life, can’t I?

The National Institutes of Health’s DailyMed reports that nadolol is a “nonselective beta-adrenergic receptor blocking agent.” It is chemically identified as “1-(tert-butylamino)-3-[(5,6,7,8-tetrahydro-cis-6,7-dihydroxy-1-naphthyl)oxy]-2-propanol.” It even contains microcrystalline cellulose.

Anybody here have any idea what all of that means? Any at all?

Yeah, yeah, I know somebody can answer yes, but Corgard® or nadolol, its generic equivalent, has been prescribed to thousands of people who have absolutely no clue about its chemical makeup, let alone any of the scientific names it has. In those patients it successfully treats their high blood pressure or prevents the chest pain called angina. A beta blocker, nadolol slows the heart rate and relaxes the blood vessels so the heart does not work as hard as it might.

I wonder. Should people with hypertension not take nadolol or its pharmacological stable mates because they cannot pronounce the ingredients?

consumersearch.com reports that experts choose the Graco SnugRide as the best infant car seat. One of the reasons is what Graco calls its “EPS Energy Absorbing Foam Liner.” EPS is the abbreviation for Expanded Polystyrene. Polystyrene is made from an aromatic monomer styrene.

Maybe that’s scary, too. Dr. Racha thinks that chemicals that smell good are bad for our babies. We’d better ban the Graco SnugRide. But, wait. Aroma therapy is all the rage. It’s supposed to be good for us. Or maybe that’s not what the aroma in aromatic means. Who knows?

What is going on here? Does Dr. Racha honestly believe that just because she thinks something might sound bad for us it really really is? When a second grader imagines that a dog ate his homework, he honestly believes that is true. One of the tests of growing up is that we stop blaming the dog.

The problem here is not whether babies should be exposed to phthalates or polystyrene.

The problem here is whether we should be exposed to fear mongering backed up by imaginary science.

Posted in Science (real), Science (not-so-real), PC, Geekery, Big Thoughts, Dick's Dumps | 1 Comment »