Interesting things from treehugger.com

[unixronin]

Found by cymrullewes, Treehugger posts teasers on:

• Multipurpose broad-spectrum OLED panels -- It's a window!  It's a light panel!  It's a HD TV!  The article -- or the USC researcher quoted in the article -- tosses around a claim of "100 percent efficiency out of a single, broad spectrum light source."  I'll believe THAT when I see it.
• "Zero footprint energy" in Ontario -- or, lease-to-own your own ground-source heating/cooling plant.  US power utilities would probably hate it enough to buy a Congressman or six to pass a law making it illegal.

Comments

[smandal.livejournal.com]

Yet, the statement "Centralized energy production is actually supremely efficient for dense distributions grids," is a red herring, the whole point to distributed generation systems is to make use of methods that ARE efficient on a small scale in a distributed manner to lessen distribution losses and increase reliability.

Distributed generation is more fault-tolerant (which contributes to cost efficiency), but certainly isn't more fuel/thermodynamically efficient or environmentally friendly. I agree that low-impact technologies (waste steam cogen, solar) that work well to small scales can be complementary. However, high-impact technologies (nuclear, fossil) are much more efficient in large, centralized plants.

Performing better is... a very dangerous ground to tread. [...]

There are a few key measures: availability, $/kilowatt hour at the door, and environmental and strategic impact, i.e. externalities not necessarily factored into the cost.

Nuclear and fossil rock on the first two when deployed at large scales, and at these large scales externalities are mitigated through scale-efficiency. It's worth the trouble because nuclear and fossil fuel are so energy rich, and can easily be transported to the central generation facility.

At the other extreme, solar power is not as available (requiring storage technology we don't have yet), more expensive (land and solar panel costs must be ammortized, and the energy density of sunshine is low), and while less polluting is more demanding industrially (consider all the semiconductor plants and their impacts).

Don't get me wrong -- I love the idea of sticking a solar panel on my roof and having all my needs met. I could be hooked up in a grid with my neighbors or have batteries for when I need to run the hair dryer. However, this isn't feasible. Solar energy rains on us at only 1 kW/m^2 in bright, sunny weather -- it would take several for each household, plus batteries that actually work. Furthermore, a 2 m^2 solar panel (panels run at ~50% efficiency) costs $4000. To ammortize its cost compared to grid electricity at $0.01/kW-hr would take 400,000 hours of operation or 45 years running non-stop. Do they even last that long? And, you must not forget the environmental impact of producing and disposing of the solar cells and batteries.

Things to work on:

* Improve storage tech so we can do away with inefficient, small power plants like car engines in favor or efficient large power plants. Everyone is holding out for fuel cells, and if they are mass produced hoping their environmental impact is much less than fossil-burning emissions.

* Find new resources that are energy rich but not as risky as nuclear and fossil. To me, fusion is the only game in town. Solar and window would require enormous tracts of land, and tidal generators might affect watershed ecosystems. Many environmentalists are getting over their prejudices and are returning to fission nuclear as a lesser of evils -- perhaps the dream of electricity too cheap to meter is still in our grasp.

* Work on clean resources that scale down cheaply. I don't think anything is close right now -- micromachines?