2014 hottest year on record

Doesn't matter how cheap they get, there ain't enough juice available from solar panels to make baby solar panels. Go do Doc's math.
write-stuff said:
The 10 to 1 example was nothing more than a metaphor. The previous poster made this silly statement and I pulled the 10 to 1 example out to demonstrate the mistake in his logic. It could be 100 to 1 or 1000 to 1 and the message would have been unchanged.

"When will they be able to make solar panels in a plant powered by solar panels? Hint: Never. Not enough energy density. Total waste of money."

The fact is that solar PV technology is plummeting in cost and there is no reason to not expect this trend to continue.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-...r-oil-prices-this-just-happened-to-solar.html
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write-stuff said:
Here's a very new solar farm recently constructed by Georgia Power near the airport at Covington (CVC). The day I shot this photo, I flew up to Chattanooga (CHA). I didn't take a picture, but right off the end of RWY 2 was a fairly large solar array.

solar-farm.jpg
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That's real pretty(all built with gas fired energy, BTW). I'm not going to debate you anymore.

While there have been amazing advancements in reducing size and improving power output of PV, it's never going to be more than an off-grid coupled to battery system passing fancy. That whole array would power a very small semiconductor research plant for maybe an hour, maybe a bit more.

Think what you want, it's a semi-free country. Every time you post on here about energy you show how little you know, but that's ok, there's things I post on that I don't know much about - like Cessnas.
 
Ok, fair enough. Let's check back in in about 5 years and see what the growth curve in solar is. Then maybe again in another 5 years. I don't think anyone is suggesting that PV technology will be supplying 100% of our energy needs. But there is a curve suggesting that it will probably be significant in the future.

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/12/08/future-growth-of-solar-energy-will-shock-you.aspx

http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/researc...lar-industry-continues-record-breaking-growth

BTW, in a former life I was a senior systems analyst doing econometrics modeling at one of the largest utility companies in the US. I don't know squat about creating crystals, but I do know a bit about the energy industry.
 
Nope all these solar farms are going to be a wasteland joke, monuments to our idiocy. Modern day fallout shelters. Only worse. We could be raising bacon in those fields.
 
ClimbnSink said:
Nope all these solar farms are going to be a wasteland joke, monuments to our idiocy. Modern day fallout shelters. Only worse. We could be raising bacon in those fields.
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If you put the panels up on poles a bit you can make electricity and bacon, but I agree PV needs a major advance in energy density. However, as they get cheaper, we have millions of hectares of sun blasted wasteland that is useful for little else. Combine that with wind, current and tidal generators, and we start making a significant percentage of our energy needs. There is also thermal solar electric production that doesn't use PV panels. It's coming along a bit better.

Output isn't actually the main detraction from environmental energy sources though, it is the inability to store the electricity produced. If the electricity isn't needed when nature is producing it, it goes to waste, cant afford that with with lower production sources. Between thermal losses at generating stations, transmission and distribution losses, and unsold off peak electricity, I doubt our electrical energy system is more than 15% thermally efficient. We get away with this level of waste because we don't really care about waste and pollution, plus it's cheaper to not build new infrastructure and we do care about money regardless what it costs the future.

We treat the environment as a society like we treat money, constantly increasing deficit spending and getting everything on credit. Problem is, the 'interest' that nature charges is life, nature doesn't give a crap about money, we don't give a crap about life. When man competes against nature, man always loses.
 
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write-stuff said:
Ok, fair enough. Let's check back in in about 5 years and see what the growth curve in solar is. Then maybe again in another 5 years. I don't think anyone is suggesting that PV technology will be supplying 100% of our energy needs. But there is a curve suggesting that it will probably be significant in the future.

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/12/08/future-growth-of-solar-energy-will-shock-you.aspx

http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/researc...lar-industry-continues-record-breaking-growth

BTW, in a former life I was a senior systems analyst doing econometrics modeling at one of the largest utility companies in the US. I don't know squat about creating crystals, but I do know a bit about the energy industry.
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Take away carbon credits and subsidies and it blows up rapidly. It's not viable on its own....
 
PaulS said:
Take away carbon credits and subsidies and it blows up rapidly. It's not viable on its own....
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Now on this, I'll partially agree. Current subsidies go a long way toward bringing solar into parity. 30% is nothing to sneeze at. At current subsidized costs, residential breaks even in 3-10 years. But most of these subsidies are scheduled to stop in 2016. Assuming that system costs continue to plummet over the coming years, and no reason not to, solar will become a cost efficient technology.
 
write-stuff said:
Now on this, I'll partially agree. Current subsidies go a long way toward bringing solar into parity. 30% is nothing to sneeze at. At current subsidized costs, residential breaks even in 3-10 years. But most of these subsidies are scheduled to stop in 2016. Assuming that system costs continue to plummet over the coming years, and no reason not to, solar will become a cost efficient technology.
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The residential subsidies may or may not sunset, but the commercial subsidies look like they are here to stay.

Here in M*******chusetts, carbon credits are paid for by large utilities who couldn't possibly install enough solar or wind to satisfy demand. Of course, where do you suppose the large utilities get the money to pay for those credits from???

On another front, again here in Mass, during the recent cold snap we came very close to a power crisis where the utilities would have been required to implement a voltage reduction (brown out) which is the last step before rolling blackouts. It didn't make the news, but it still happened. The problem was with hydro Quebec and whole sale power cost soared to about .70 per kwh during the period. The problem? our outgoing governor has forced the coal plants to shut down, there is still one or two more that need to close within about a year and they can't build new gas plants fast enough, plus, if they could build the plants, there is not enough gas supply to NE to fuel them when they would be needed most. It's going to be an interesting couple of years around here.
 
OK, I'm going to put some shyte out here, and it'll mostly become clear. There are some modest advancements still available however the physics limits where we can go. I had to go look it up again, and the atomic radius if Si is about .111nm, or 100 picometers. The current via(line of conductance) of a semiconducting cell is 14nm. Of course, we need to put dopants in the Si to get things to conduct right, and lets not forget the gates, latches, and other devices on the cell to get things to work. We also need an isolation band(what you would call an 'insulator') adjacent to each via. So, from a physics perspective we can go maybe another 3, or possibly 5x smaller in density. Sadly, more physics, each time you reduce the size of the devices on the substrate, you come up with a problem of heat, and transconductance(electronic bleed-over). This makes reduction to single digit nm line width(via) pretty hard. more ugly physics - in order to exchange a hole(absence of electron) for an electron requires a complex formula that boils down to the current flow times a constant which works out in Si to be ~6.84(atomic radius) or around 0.8nm.

What all this crap means is that soon, very soon we are going to be working on shipping the electron across a via which approaches the physical limits of the doped Si without bleeding over into the via adjacent. Next, each time we capture a few photons one the substrate, we gather them together and ship them off to the collector. As you can imagine the via for the collector has to be some multiple in size of the individual vias, just like a freeway collects onramps from suburbs, and the freeway is many multiples of the size of the side roads.

Now, I have admitted that I was in the biz a long time ago. Hell - when I was making wafers and circuits a 16KILO byte RAM chip was pretty far out, and the 64KB chip was in it's infancy. However, the physics of energy density just don't change. We are fast approaching the limits of the molecular properties of crystalline Si and it's various dopants to conduct even a single electron and leave behind a single hole in it's place.

The PV rating agencies have recently reduced their collector efficiency ratings from something called the STC standard to the PTC ratings which reduced the specific output of the panel by about 25%. Several agencies are reviewing it again, and will result in a yet lower effective efficiency, which takes into account changes in operating temp, shading, and various physical properties of the always smaller and less heat resistant substrates and how they operate. The fact they have a negative heat coef vs power output is just the opposite of coal, oil, gas, and nuclear generation. This effect is going to be even more important as cell densities increase. At some relatively soon point, it's going to be game over, and any further reductions in size, will not be recovered in any meaningful increase in energy output.

<edited to correct to wrong terms. Sorry, it's techy>
 
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Yes, I've been following the work at NREL in CO. Some of it is pretty interesting. Even if the lab results lose some efficiency when ported to the commercial design, it's still a serious improvement, and I respect the Aussies for finding a way to improve collection efficiency. However, the physics of saturation and heat coef still hold. It will not be a game-changer, but it will be a game-extender. All of the other limitations involved with solar are still in play, and even at a 40% efficiency they are still a factor of many thousands behind lifecycle fuel energy sources.
 
write-stuff said:
Now on this, I'll partially agree. Current subsidies go a long way toward bringing solar into parity. 30% is nothing to sneeze at. At current subsidized costs, residential breaks even in 3-10 years. But most of these subsidies are scheduled to stop in 2016. Assuming that system costs continue to plummet over the coming years, and no reason not to, solar will become a cost efficient technology.
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At current in subsidized costs most residential breaks even in 15 or more years here. Closer to 20.

And we have hail. Regularly. Hail big enough it's not going to bounce off.

Most people have roof damage every ten years here, per the Actuaries.

The people leasing the systems are in for some interesting fiscal problems if they didn't properly figure out how that works with their Homeowner's insurance.
 
denverpilot said:
At current in subsidized costs most residential breaks even in 15 or more years here. Closer to 20.

And we have hail. Regularly. Hail big enough it's not going to bounce off.

Most people have roof damage every ten years here, per the Actuaries.

The people leasing the systems are in for some interesting fiscal problems if they didn't properly figure out how that works with their Homeowner's insurance.
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It will work just ONCE with the insurance companies...:rolleyes::rolleyes:...

Then those shattered panels will be landfill material during all the other hail storms......

Edit.... They probably have toxic metals in them so the landfill solution is out..:redface:
 
denverpilot said:
At current in subsidized costs most residential breaks even in 15 or more years here. Closer to 20.

And we have hail. Regularly. Hail big enough it's not going to bounce off.

Most people have roof damage every ten years here, per the Actuaries.

The people leasing the systems are in for some interesting fiscal problems if they didn't properly figure out how that works with their Homeowner's insurance.
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I have solar panels that wouldn't care about hail in the least.
 
write-stuff said:
Now on this, I'll partially agree. Current subsidies go a long way toward bringing solar into parity. 30% is nothing to sneeze at. At current subsidized costs, residential breaks even in 3-10 years. But most of these subsidies are scheduled to stop in 2016. Assuming that system costs continue to plummet over the coming years, and no reason not to, solar will become a cost efficient technology.
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Which raises another question for me: What's the life of a solar panel? If it breaks even in 8-10 years, how much longer will it last before I have to pay again to replace it? (Which will not have any tax incentive, I believe.)

John
 
denverpilot said:
At current in subsidized costs most residential breaks even in 15 or more years here. Closer to 20.

And we have hail. Regularly. Hail big enough it's not going to bounce off.

Most people have roof damage every ten years here, per the Actuaries.

The people leasing the systems are in for some interesting fiscal problems if they didn't properly figure out how that works with their Homeowner's insurance.
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Old information, no longer accurate. Current subsidized costs have a much shorter break-even period by most accounts. Regarding hail, most newer panels claim to be hail proof. I can't vouch for this personally, but that is what they're saying.
 
jsstevens said:
Which raises another question for me: What's the life of a solar panel? If it breaks even in 8-10 years, how much longer will it last before I have to pay again to replace it? (Which will not have any tax incentive, I believe.)

John
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The current claim is that PV panels produce roughly 80% power for 25-40 years. The batteries last about 10 years.
 
jsstevens said:
Which raises another question for me: What's the life of a solar panel? If it breaks even in 8-10 years, how much longer will it last before I have to pay again to replace it? (Which will not have any tax incentive, I believe.)

John
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I have a couple that are reaching 30 years old that still do what they did when new and I lived off of them at anchor. They haven't been in operation the whole time so I can't attest to a TT in service.
 
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write-stuff said:
Old information, no longer accurate. Current subsidized costs have a much shorter break-even period by most accounts. Regarding hail, most newer panels claim to be hail proof. I can't vouch for this personally, but that is what they're saying.
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Even my old ones are hail proof, heck, my old ones were even 'wrench dropped from the top of the mast 35' up' proof.
 
CharlieTango said:
NOAA Reinstates July 1936 As The Hottest Month On Record

Watts’ accusation of NOAA climate data manipulation comes after reports that the agency had been lowering past temperatures to create a warming trend in the U.S. that does not exist in the raw data.

The ex-post facto data manipulation has been cataloged by climate blogger Steven Goddard and was reported by the UK Telegraph earlier this month.
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I wasn't even going to look at this thread again but my curiosity got the better of me. Unfortunately no one has rebutted this, and it needs a rebuttal because it is a perfect example of the kind of smear tactics the climate skeptic community's lunatic fringe resorts to.

These adjustments have been going on for a long time. They aren't being done in secret and they aren't being done to manipulate the data to give a politically correct result. NOAA (actually NCDC I believe) has announced them and documented the reasons for the adjustments and the algorithms used. They're intended to CORRECT FOR biases in the record due to changes in equipment, reporting schedules, changes in the weather station grid, urban heat island biases, etc. In other words, WITHOUT the adjustments the trends you derive from the record will be garbage. The question isn't whether it's okay to apply adjustments, but whether they introduce more bias than they remove. That depends on the validity of the algorithms used and that, too, has been studied. For an in-depth explanation, see:

http://judithcurry.com/2014/07/07/understanding-adjustments-to-temperature-data/

(Note that Judith Curry who hosts that blog is FAR from being one of the RealClimate clique.)

For the "lite" version, see:

http://www.livescience.com/46643-climate-update-resets-heat-record.html
 
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I think we can all understand correcting for bias or errors in data gathering. Anyone whose ever seen a scatter plot, and the regression involved knows how that works, and it's a well known and respected part of data plot correction.

Now, does it concern you that all, and that is 100% of the 'errors' corrected are corrected in only one direction? There has never in the history of data massaging, or enhancement, or mean squares, or regression, or best line fit that show a temperature in the past that was higher than the recorded measurement?

Knowing what I know about data gathering and correction factors(I'm a certified metrologist), I did a rough permutation calc and the probability that all corrections for the life of the histograms are for colder history, and hotter future are about 6.5 x E-31. Presuming that data is gathered from 50 stations(one per state), on 52 weeks a year, for the past 100 years(100 sequential data points taken 52 times in 50 locations = 260,000). It's beyond impossible that this would occur, even if the planet were in fact warming, which I believe it prolly is.
 
But azure, it's so much more fun to think that a giant conspiracy is at work, comprised of tens of thousands of people working together to perpetuate a global hoax so that they can live high on the hog, cheating the taxpayers out of grant money.
 
docmirror said:
I think we can all understand correcting for bias or errors in data gathering. Anyone whose ever seen a scatter plot, and the regression involved knows how that works, and it's a well known and respected part of data plot correction.

Now, does it concern you that all, and that is 100% of the 'errors' corrected are corrected in only one direction? There has never in the history of data massaging, or enhancement, or mean squares, or regression, or best line fit that show a temperature in the past that was higher than the recorded measurement?

Knowing what I know about data gathering and correction factors(I'm a certified metrologist), I did a rough permutation calc and the probability that all corrections for the life of the histograms are for colder history, and hotter future are about 6.5 x E-31. Presuming that data is gathered from 50 stations(one per state), on 52 weeks a year, for the past 100 years(100 sequential data points taken 52 times in 50 locations = 260,000). It's beyond impossible that this would occur, even if the planet were in fact warming, which I believe it prolly is.
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Miss Azure.... Your turn....

:popcorn::popcorn::popcorn::popcorn:
 
write-stuff said:
But azure, it's so much more fun to think that a giant conspiracy is at work, comprised of tens of thousands of people working together to perpetuate a global hoax so that they can live high on the hog, cheating the taxpayers out of grant money.
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You mean like the 112,000 IRS employees and not ONE has come forward to say anything against Lois Lerner.... And now that 33,000 lost emails have been magically "found".. I can't wait to see that trainwreck...;);):rolleyes:
 
docmirror said:
I think we can all understand correcting for bias or errors in data gathering. Anyone whose ever seen a scatter plot, and the regression involved knows how that works, and it's a well known and respected part of data plot correction.

Now, does it concern you that all, and that is 100% of the 'errors' corrected are corrected in only one direction? There has never in the history of data massaging, or enhancement, or mean squares, or regression, or best line fit that show a temperature in the past that was higher than the recorded measurement?

Knowing what I know about data gathering and correction factors(I'm a certified metrologist), I did a rough permutation calc and the probability that all corrections for the life of the histograms are for colder history, and hotter future are about 6.5 x E-31. Presuming that data is gathered from 50 stations(one per state), on 52 weeks a year, for the past 100 years(100 sequential data points taken 52 times in 50 locations = 260,000). It's beyond impossible that this would occur, even if the planet were in fact warming, which I believe it prolly is.
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Al Fraanken's first election comes to mind......
 
docmirror said:
Now, does it concern you that all, and that is 100% of the 'errors' corrected are corrected in only one direction? There has never in the history of data massaging, or enhancement, or mean squares, or regression, or best line fit that show a temperature in the past that was higher than the recorded measurement?
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I worked in statistical modeling/multivariate regression/ANOVA for several years. First of all, the terms "data massaging/enhancement" don't belong in the same sentence with mean square error, least squares, or regression.

Now the part where you said that the numbers were corrected "only in one direction", that is interesting. I had read several times that the older temps came from all sorts of non-standard sources and understand that some attempt at standardization was necessary. I think you are questioning whether this corrected data was falsified. If you have something to back that up I'd like to know about it. Not being facetious, I'd really like to see the source for this.
 
write-stuff said:
I worked in statistical modeling/multivariate regression/ANOVA for several years. First of all, the terms "data massaging/enhancement" don't belong in the same sentence with mean square error, least squares, or regression.

Now the part where you said that the numbers were corrected "only in one direction", that is interesting. I had read several times that the older temps came from all sorts of non-standard sources and understand that some attempt at standardization was necessary. I think you are questioning whether this corrected data was falsified. If you have something to back that up I'd like to know about it. Not being facetious, I'd really like to see the source for this.
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Well DUH.....

I am questioning it too...:yes:
 
write-stuff said:
If data was falsified, a lot of people will lose their careers over it. Science doesn't suffer fake data lightly.
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\


Guess what....

Grubber still has his professorship at MIT....

Still has 6+ million of taxpayers money...

And is not in jail....:no::no::no:..

Your turn...
 
write-stuff said:
If data was falsified, a lot of people will lose their careers over it. Science doesn't suffer fake data lightly.
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Are you kidding? Those money grubbing scientists are always trying to bilk those poor benevolent industrialists out of their babies milk money.
 
N801BH said:
\


Guess what....

Grubber still has his professorship at MIT....

Still has 6+ million of taxpayers money...

And is not in jail....:no::no::no:..

Your turn...
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I had to look him up to see who he is. Jeeze, talk about a straw man argument! Absolutely irrelevant to the discussion. I could bring up that Richard Nixon committed crimes in office and got off free and that would be just about as relevant. Bill Clinton lied under oath, too. Timothy Leary broke drug laws. Also irrelevant.
 
write-stuff said:
Now the part where you said that the numbers were corrected "only in one direction", that is interesting. I had read several times that the older temps came from all sorts of non-standard sources and understand that some attempt at standardization was necessary. I think you are questioning whether this corrected data was falsified. If you have something to back that up I'd like to know about it. Not being facetious, I'd really like to see the source for this.
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It's demonstrably, even trivially false. If it were true, the "reinstatement" of July 1936 as the hottest month couldn't possibly have happened.

The first article I linked to explains why the bias in the record that needs correction tends to be toward a warmer past. But the QC process triggers frequent adjustments to "history" from what I gather. It would indeed be astonishing if even 90% of those ongoing corrections were in one direction. I haven't studied the data, but I'll wager a case of beer that they aren't.
 
write-stuff said:
I had to look him up to see who he is. Jeeze, talk about a straw man argument! Absolutely irrelevant to the discussion. I could bring up that Richard Nixon committed crimes in office and got off free and that would be just about as relevant. Bill Clinton lied under oath, too. Timothy Leary broke drug laws. Also irrelevant.
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The shear fact you had NO idea who Gruber is, speaks volumes...

You either watch MSNBC /NBC /ABC /CNN.. or live in a cave.... or Both...:rolleyes2::rolleyes2::redface:
 
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write-stuff said:
Roger that. Just not demonstrated. I think I'll wait till I see something concrete before making that leap.
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What isn't demonstrated? Can you think of a way that a historical record high could fall relative to a modern one, and then get reinstated, that didn't involve at least one correction in the other direction, even if it involved only recent rather than historical data?

Of course the lunatic fringe will say that they were caught red-handed and tried to get their story straight, but there's no evidence for that either.

I'd like to see a solid description of the validation process for NOAA's correction algorithms. The author of the first article I linked to promised two followups that would go into more depth, but apparently they never appeared, or they were published somewhere else that I haven't been able to find yet.
 
azure said:
What isn't demonstrated? Can you think of a way that a historical record high could fall relative to a modern one, and then get reinstated, that didn't involve at least one correction in the other direction, even if it involved only recent rather than historical data?
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What wasn't demonstrated in your post was a source or two to back up your assertion.
 
write-stuff said:
Roger that. Just not demonstrated. I think I'll wait till I see something concrete before making that leap.
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That is the conundrum we face, if nobody wants to believe anybody's data, you'll wait until we are extinct waiting for something "concrete".
 
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