Recommended Reading

Things for you to ponder:

1. States are cutting back on the number of non-violent offenders and parole violaters they lock up, not out of a sense of fairness and justice, but in an effort to save money. The juvenile justice system however, is a completely different story.

2. Texas, already a leader in wind power, aims to dominate the solar energy market as well. Two things we have in abundance are sun and open spaces, so this makes perfect sense.

3. The presiding judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, Sharon Keller, says it ain't her fault that the clerk's office closed before attorneys for Michael Richard could file a last-minute plea hoping to delay the convicted murderer's execution. Clearly, somebody isn't being exactly honest.

4. Obama and the "state secrets" privilege: the song has changed, but the lyrics remain the same. Though as far as I'm concerned blaming the White House for asserting "state secrets" to hide wrongdoing is like blaming a dog for chasing a car. The real culprit is the Supreme Court and host of federal court decisions wherein the judiciary has repeatedly abdicated it's role of oversight.

5. Iraq: In Baghdad, ethnic cleansing brought peace. In northern Iraq, Sunni Arabs and the Kurds may be gearing up for some ethnic cleansing of their own.

Solar power update

Well, solar power has been a long time coming and many detractors still don't consider it even a realistic potential source. New technology, however, may make it possible for solar power to replace existing fossil-fuel based energy. Sci-fi authors have been talking about beamed solar power for a long time, but only recently has it become a possibility.

A proposal is being vetted by U.S. military space strategists that 10 percent of the U.S. baseload of energy by 2050, perhaps sooner, could be produced by space based solar power (SBSP). Furthermore, a demonstration of the concept is being eyed to occur within the next five to seven years.

Less sci-fi, but perhaps more practical, are new types of ground-based solar energy collectors, which, with new technologies, are expected to be able to take over enery production for a large part of the US grid.

If those claims stand up, however, solar-thermal plants could provide a significant chunk of the Southwest's—and potentially the nation's—electricity. "The maximum you can get into the grid is about 25 percent from solar," including photovoltaics, Mills says. But "once you have storage, it changes from this niche thing to something that could be the big gorilla on the grid equivalent to coal."

Furthermore,

Assuming that their storage system works, Mills and his colleagues calculated in a paper presented today at the Solar Energy Society World Congress in Beijing that such solar-thermal power plants could match the electricity needs of both California and Texas. And, by combining a system that would meet the needs of California and Texas, solar-thermal plants could supply 96 percent of the national electricity demand. "The entire energy use of 2006, the current technology including storage would use a patch of land 92 miles by 92 miles," O'Donnell says. "Ten percent of the [Bureau of Land Management] land in Nevada is enough."

It's not sci-fi anymore. The sooner we adopt this technology and cut free from fossil-fuels, the better.

Most hopeful story of the week- Solar Power

I was waiting for Xanthippas to put something up about this, but I guess I'll go ahead and do it. No need for analysis though; just read what it has to say.

Within five years, solar power will be cheap enough to compete with carbon-generated electricity, even in Britain, Scandinavia or upper Siberia. In a decade, the cost may have fallen so dramatically that solar cells could undercut oil, gas, coal and nuclear power by up to half. Technology is leaping ahead of a stale political debate about fossil fuels.

Anil Sethi, the chief executive of the Swiss start-up company Flisom, says he looks forward to the day - not so far off - when entire cities in America and Europe generate their heating, lighting and air-conditioning needs from solar films on buildings with enough left over to feed a surplus back into the grid.

The secret? Mr Sethi lovingly cradles a piece of dark polymer foil, as thin a sheet of paper. It is 200 times lighter than the normal glass-based solar materials, which require expensive substrates and roof support. Indeed, it is so light it can be stuck to the sides of buildings.

advertisement
Rather than being manufactured laboriously piece by piece, it can be mass-produced in cheap rolls like packaging - in any colour.

The "tipping point" will arrive when the capital cost of solar power falls below $1 (51p) per watt, roughly the cost of carbon power. We are not there yet. The best options today vary from $3 to $4 per watt - down from $100 in the late 1970s.

Mr Sethi believes his product will cut the cost to 80 cents per watt within five years, and 50 cents in a decade.

It would be nice if good new technology could save us from bad old technology. But still, this doesn't mean we're off the hook for our excessive energy consumption. We still need to invest in green technologies and cut down on overall energy usage. But it'll be nice not to owe the electric company $400 ever again!

The Wave of the Future...

...Is solar power:

The sun pumps out more energy in one hour--4.3 x 1020 Joules of it hit the Earth--than all of the energy consumed by all of human endeavor in one year--4.1 x 1020 in 2001. That energy is largely wasted despite falling on some of the most efficient chemical converters of light energy--photosynthetic plants. Green plants and, more importantly, green algae and plankton only store up 0.5 percent of the sun's bounty, according to Steven Chu, the director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. And the U.S. isn't helping. "We haven't even stepped up to the plate to where we should be," he said recently, noting Japan and Europe's long head start in research.

I have a feeling that someday our descendants will look back and wonder why we were so eager to make fossil fuels-what is essentially the trapped sunlight from millions of years ago-the basis of all our economy and industry, when every day more sunshine falls on us than we could possibly ever use (Dyson spheres notwithstanding.)