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News Briefs 02-10-2007

Quote of the Day:

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.

Will Durant

  1. Shocking idea
    Could Jesus have used high-voltage electricity to walk on water? I hope that idea doesn’t shock the skeptics. Although the idea of Jesus shooting electricity from his fingertips is pretty cool…

    Excellent news, Jameske, thanks. I always feel guilty for my babbling, wandering news links when reading your eloquently succinct briefs. 😉

    Cheers,

    Rick

  2. Solar Power
    What has happened to Scientific American? Can you spot the obvious falsehood in this paragraph:

    The company insists it can do this at a cost of just 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, analogous to the price of electricity from burning natural gas in California if a cost was imposed for the emission of carbon dioxide, the leading greenhouse gas (as the state’s Public Utilities Commission is considering).

    1. oh a few
      some points:

      – it doesn’t matter where you burn natural gas, in California or in Zimbawe.

      – the leading greenhouse gas is water vapour, not CO2

      – on the other hand, burning methane into CO2 reduces the greenhouse effect

      – the California PUC is a political and business organization, they know zilch about science

      —-
      For every action there is an equal and opposite government program.

        1. Venting
          Probably just getting rid of all those who know nothing else than venting their steam for anything starting from nothing would help by much.

          Oh, wait, can’t vaporise them now, can we?

    2. Why Not Solar Power?
      Since the solar power article was posted in Monday’s News Briefs, so as not to confuse anyone, here’s the link again:

      New solar technology could provide all US electricity – including a switch to electric cars feeding off the grid.

      Anonymous said:
      What has happened to Scientific American? Can you spot the obvious falsehood in this paragraph:

      The company insists it can do this at a cost of just 10 cents per kilowatt-houranalogous to the price of electricity from burning natural gas in California if a cost was imposed for the emission of carbon dioxide, the leading greenhouse gas (as the state’s Public Utilities Commission is considering).

      Anonymous, in light of the following paragraph, I can’t help but wonder if you stopped reading the article after the paragraph quoted above.

      “Ausra claims to have solved the storage problem without using molten salts or other expensive means of conserving heat. In fact, the company estimates that the price of its electricity will drop to roughly 8¢ per kilowatt hour if it can store heat for 16 hours. “Thermal storage is generally considered to be quite a bit cheaper than electrical storage,” says Nate Blair, a senior analyst at NREL. “There isn’t a lot of power generation combined with storage systems that can take advantage of that. [Concentrated solar power] has a leg up on storage in the grid or flow batteries or even ultracapacitors.””

      The caveat in the paragraph you quoted certainly isn’t the only caveat in the article. For instance, Astra’s claim of having solved the storage problem has yet to be proved on the scale they’re talking about. Nevertheless, I thought the techonological innovations of Astra and the other companies mentioned made the article worthy of inclusion in Monday’s news. For one thing, since a number of oil company analysts have recently been predicting the price of oil may well climb to $150 – $200 per barrel, the caveat you noticed regarding Astra’s projected cost of 8-10 cents per kwh could soon be a moot point.

      Or are you just opposed to solar power in general for other reasons?

      Kat

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