Black Silicon Could revolutionize the solar industry

Newly discovered technology could revolutionalize the solar industry as we know it today. The sensitivity of the new black silicon technology to light is 100 to 500 more sensitive than traditional silicon wafer solar panels. 

Now all we need is the leadership to put money into this new technology and make it a real product. 
We need the mentality that we have when our country is being attacked by a foreign power. 
If we can put a man on the moon in less than a decade surely we can make this and other new ideas a reality and get off of the oil economy in a decade or less.

The material was discovered when a team of Harvard University scientists shone an ultra-powerful laser (briefly producing the same amount of energy as the sun falling on the entire surface of the Earth) on a silicon wafer, before adding sulphur hexafluoride. The result was a silicon wafer that looked black to the naked eye, but when examined under an electron microscope turned out to be covered with a massive amount of ultra-tiny spikes.

This kind of sounds like the 3D solar but it looks like it could be easier to produce.  The key to all these new designs is the cost per watt.  Ideally we want to see $1 or less per watt.  The next thing we would like to see is higher efficiencies which equates to more watts in less space.  If we could get efficiency 60 and 80 percent than installing solar on our cars makes sense.  Imagine a car running all day powered by the light of day.

New Solar Company Is On the Horizon – Konarka Technologies

I am excited about the future of solar power.  Just recently I was made aware of a company that is hoping to be able to produce solar power under a $1 a watt.  Most of their focus seems to be in the portable market, and I am not seeing any immediate move to produce roof top solar panels.  

Because direct sunlight is not a requirement it appears that the flexile power plastic panels will mount on any surface.  The uses for this porduct extends from clothing, tents, roof tiles, awnings, light poles and the list goes on.  Have not seen any voltage or current outputs of the product but I get the feeling that the units will be used to power batteries and any inverters will be run from the battery power.  As I find out more I will up date this article.

The Renewable Energy We Throw Away

 

   Recycling is necessary in order for us to be good stewards of our planet but it is also expensive to process. .After the recyclables get to the recycling station they need to be sorted manually.

 

   What if all we had to do was to separate out our paper and we could leave everything else go with the regular garbage.

 

   There is a relatively new way to produce power called a Plasma Converter that will take all garbage, toxins, wet or dry and molecularly dissociate everything and the results is power, a metal slag, a process gas and hydrogen and a solid harmless stone material that can be used for roads. The best part of this process is there are zero emissions,

 

    Places that have a garbage crisis like Japan, any island country, Hawaii or large city are starting to embrace this relatively new technology.  Funny thing is we rarely hear about it as a solution to our power and oil crisis.

 

    All we hear about is building new nuclear power plants which will just produce even more problems for our planet in the future.  See with nuclear we are never reminded the cost of cleaning up a power plant after it is decommissioned.  What do you do with all the equipment exposed to the radioactive uranium, spent fuel and the radioactive waste?

 

    It is clear that the problem with solar and wind is that it is not there when you need it.  The plasma converter could be used instead of nuclear power and coal fired fossil fuel power plants and we will always have fuel because we will always have garbage.

 

     The challenge is the people that collect and store and process the garbage know nothing about making power and the people or utility companies know nothing about processing garbage.  Unless we can regulate and legislate  the 2 entities into getting together it may never happen.

 

     Until we can get the word out and tell people there is a solution that not only give us an endless supply of power, the uses a fuel that is free and renewable but also solves our problem of covering the world in our garbage and contaminating our water supplies.

 

      Plasma converters use high current that runs through electrodes and the plasma and produces temperatures as hot as the sun.    There are costs for this process.  It takes one forth of its power to run the process but the process cleans up the environment and produces products that are useful and the fuel is renewable and it is free.

 

       Until more people hear about this process and politicians embrace it we will continue down the road with the status quo and special interests who support nuclear and coal fired plants.  What we need is that every one that reads this article to pass the link to their friends and people in high places, Al Gore and both candaidates.  There are several companies that are producing this product and I have zero interest in any one of them  at this time but I am more interested in making a difference.      

Untapped and Free Renewable Energy Just Under Our Feet

    The most expensive parts of our cost of living is our mortgage, food/health and our utility bill all monthly drains on our income.  In  a recent Ezine article ‘Is a risk free investment a fantasy’ I showed how to make your house a true investment and how to get rid of a mortgage quickly and increase your net worth dramatically in 7 to 12 years.  

      Now I am going to show you how to use energy that is just under your feet to decrease your heating and cooling bill.  This energy is free for your use and renewable.  The biggest reason I can think of that you may have not heard of it is that other methods worked just fine until our present concerns of the cost of oil, the environment and global warming and our national concern for how we are sending billions of dollars overseas to our enemies who control the oil and thus potentially our county’s future and security. 

       Understanding how to get to this energy is our next challenge.  Many parts of the country have already embraced this technology because of the lack of availability of fuel.    The cost of putting in a new system should not be a concern because there is approximately a 6 to 8 year return on your investment and this could be even less depending on the rising cost of fuel. 

     The temperature of the earth 6 feet down is 50 to 55 degrees Fahrenheit all year long and consistently almost anywhere in the world.  The concept for most non-technical people is the understanding the difference between temperature and heat energy and how heat pumps are able to transfer heat energy from one place to another and that the accumulation of the heat energy will produce a desired temperature.

      In the traditional furnace heater a high percent of the heat produced goes out the chimney along with CO2 and air pollution.  In a heat pump no fuel is burned so there are no emissions into the atmosphere and the heat pump produces as much heat as required. Because of how this system is designed the heat pump can be installed inside the home and because the heat pump is not exposed to the extremes of winter and summer the heat pump will last a lot longer.

      The Ground Source Heat Pump (GSHP) is not the only answer to solving the energy crisis but this geothermal energy is usually not thought of as a viable solution.  Other solutions are solar photovoltaic power, solar hot water, and wind power.  The equipment is not free but by combining the installation of any of the above with a risk free investment strategy the cost of the systems will be a lot less by decreasing the cost of borrowing other people’s money. Suprisingly the GSHP has the best return on your investment of all the above except may be windpower.     

      Another concern is how we build our homes.  If we would design our homes to be efficient users of energy the cost of heating and cooling a home would go way down.  In the future our homes could be designed to have a zero carbon foot print and require no outside utilities to heat, cool and power a home.  In the future we may consider living in earth sheltered homes that will take full use of the energy under our feet.

    

Understanding the Available Technology

   One of the challenges of every politician or leader is that they really have to depend on others the explain the technologies they are talking about.  When John McCain talks about embracing all of the technologies to ssolve our energy crisis he will get his information from people that have an agenda. 

    Someone interested in seeing nuclear grow will tell you all the good things about nuclear.  Well here are the bad things.  Each plant could take 15 years to complete, the cost needs to be subsidized by either the federal government and our taxes or by the rate payers.  Then there is the clean up they no one wants to taalk about.  Whose back your do you want to store the spent fuel and nuclear waste for the next several thousands of years while the uranium decays.

    Then we here about the clean coal fired power plants.  Well clean is relative.  Why not embrace a technology where there is zero emmissions.  See there is a technology that burns a fuel and it 100% renewable.  You do not here about this technology because it would make nuclear and coal power obsolete.  It is a Plasma Converter.

      Plasma Converters burn the renewable fuel garbage.  In the past when we burned garbage we had to add oil or gas to help burn up the garbage.  This is not what I am talking about   This process raises the temperature of the plasma to the temperature on the sun.  Everything that passes through this plasma is molecularly dissociated.  The results is hydrogen, process gas,metal slag, a black stone like material that could be ground up and used on our roads but no emmissions.

     The is geothermal which is an article by itself, of course solar and wind.

John McCain Nuclear power is not renewable energy.

McCain Visit to Nuclear Power Plant Signals ‘All-of-the-Above’ Approach to Energy

by Associated Press

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

John McCain, who is set to visit the Enrico Fermi Nuclear Plant outside Detroit Tuesday, is placing great stock in modern-day nuclear technology by calling for the construction of 45 nuclear power plants by 2030. The Republican argues that its carbon-free power generation is necessary to reduce the country’s reliance on oil imports and part of any realistic energy program. And he says that opposing it, as does Democratic rival Barack Obama, shows naivete.>>Read More

Contraire John McCain Nuclear Power is not the answer.  I am sure you have only talked to proponents of nuclear power to come up with that revelation.  Nuclear power is costly to build and costly to decommission and guess who ends up paying for all of that.  As an engineer  I started designing Ft Calhoun II for Omaha Public Power District in 1976.  In 1977 it was cancelled and it was probably the best thing that OPPD ever did.  They had experienced the over runs in cost for Fort Calhoun I and decided they had enough. 

Since then I have worked for 2 clean up programs.  The first was in Richland, WA where GE was studying how to get rid of nuclear waste being stored from the work of refining Uranium during the forties and fifties and what it would take to move it to concrete tombs.  Instead of maintaining the pumps it was decided to bury the radioactive pumps with the waste being entombed in the concrete.  Just the cost of maintenance and the number of people needed to limit the exposure to the radiactivity for each person it was determined that they would need a work force of 1500 people that under normal conditions might take 20 people to maintain.

The second project investigated and modeled the transfer of low grade nuclear waste (gloves, clothing and tools) and designed containers that would be used to transfer the waste and then store it in salt mines in Carlsbad, NM.  I am telling you there is no easy solution for nuclear waste.  The deposing of high grade radio reactive waste and spent Uranium is entirely a whole different problem.

In a nuclear reactor there is a primary system and a secondary system.  All the equipment and water used in the primary system eventually becomes nuclear(radioactive) waste along with the nuclear materials (rods and spent uranium).  The primary system transfers heat to the secondary system where the steam is produced and used to produce electrical generation as in any coal or fossil fuel power plant.  The problem is the temperature of the steam is lower so that quality of the power is less.  This creates other challenges.  The quantity of water used as in any power plant is mind boggling.

Nuclear is not the answer.  It would be a temporary fix anyway but create an even bigger environmental problem.  Now John McCain who is naivete.

Who will lead us from our dependence on foreigh oil?

Inaugural address Januar 20th 1961 John F. Keneddy: My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man. 

On May 25, 1961 before a joint session of Congress. In this speech, JFK stated that the United States should set as a goal the “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth” by the end of the decade.  And we accomplished it using archaic vacuum tube computer technology and hydraulic controls.

In 1961 the threat to our country was the Soviet Union and nuclear proliferation and now it is our dependence on foreign oil and the Middle East. In 1961 we feared nuclear annihilation.  Today the threat is not as in your face scary but just as real.  Today we are slowly and methodically being brought to our knees economically.  It is not too late to bring this economic annihilation to a hault and make our country great again but what we need is leadership.  Which one Obama or McCain will give us a new charge and lead us through the next decade and away from our dependence on foreign oil?  I believe we have the technology but what we need is the will and the leadership.
     John F. Kennedy was yougest President and Bill Clinton had zero Senate experience and Henry Ford had a third grade education.  The question is what takes a leader with vision?