need more chatter

IVB

Senior Member
I have been stuck on a train in the same spot for 45mins. considering the whole trip is usually 18mins, and we are still 15mins away from destination.
I have now read every cqc and cocoontech post again. I need more cocoon chatter cuz it sounds like it will be a while.

anyone got anything incendiary to share?
 
Incendiary? Hmm, well the heat index for Manhattan today is supposed to be 115 degrees. You might call that incendiary.

In other news, the heat apparently let me be a statistic last night, being one of the lucky 3,500 on LI without power. The annoying part is across the street and behind us had power, so that was a bit frustrating.

I suspect however that this will only serve to bump up the generator/solar on the list, especially with all the talk of outages.
 
I hear our local solar power installer (S.F. Bay Area CA) already has a six month back log for new customers after the "heat wave".

Also, according to the local news night before last your are SOL if you need a new A.C. unit (all gone).

At least Best-Buy and OfficeMax haven't run out of UPSs yet.
 
If heat waves will be the demand drivers for people going solar etc then there will be a 2 yr backlog soon. It looks like there will be a lot of heat waves to come.

Solar helps shave "peak" demand which is critical nowadays since generation capability and distribution systems are about at their limit. It also helps curb dependence on oil imports and minimizes pollution.

If only the government would offer more significant incentives it would be cost effective and have a "positive" ripple effect. If the cost to the consumer could be down to $2.50 a watt (currently $8 but with incentives down to just about $4) more people would probably find the means to take the plunge. As more people do the mass production could allow the price to drop more and the govt. could ease up a little on the incentives.
 
Didja hear the pessimistic Wall St bear yesterday in the (wsj.com?nytimes.com?) talk abouit $200/barrel oil in 2010? Mexico will be running dry/low in 15-ish years, mid-east angst. Combine that with the global warming trend, and our increasing reliance on electricity (eh, i now have 4 PCs on 24x7), and methinks the economics have shifted.
 
I have always been one of those "Technology will save us all" kinda guys, and this is definitly no exception.

The solar field has made breakthroughs that will surely change our world. I am talking specifically about printed and painted solar cells. Solar has been so expensive because it was made of silicone. They now have plastic/printed solar cells and are on the verge of creating self-aligning solar cells in paint. Soon everything exposed to the sun will be covered in cheap solar cells.

I have read enough to know some of it is here and some just around the corner, but not enough to provide good links or info. I am hoping to just pull some of you in to do research and maybe get better tracking of solar technology on CocoonTech. If I come across more of those links, I will come back and update the thread.

I was watching the Solar Decathalon on TV and one team used the sun's energy to create hydrogen then used the hydrogen instead of batteries. This seemed like the most promising storage of solar energy because the cost of the setup could also run your car, etc. So home generation of Hydrogen would be another area to keep a close eye out.

So I know you can't really get this tech now, but surely by that 2010 date, it will be widely available.

Vaughn
 
IVB said:
Didja hear the pessimistic Wall St bear yesterday in the (wsj.com?nytimes.com?) talk abouit $200/barrel oil in 2010? Mexico will be running dry/low in 15-ish years, mid-east angst. Combine that with the global warming trend, and our increasing reliance on electricity (eh, i now have 4 PCs on 24x7), and methinks the economics have shifted.
This is where I have a hard time buying into Dean's idea of using a rack of blade servers just to run touch screens. How come the HA industry keeps moving towards distributed models (i.e. lots of 24/7 PCs) when the energy outlook suggests we should be moving in the opposite direction?
 
Lack of market really. The kinds of touch panels that we are looking for don't have a wide market at this time. Even those folks who make them (like Zykronix) only sell to OEMs doing vertical markets, not to end users. Anyway, I don't recommend a blade server because it's optimal, just because it's an available solution. The UMPC devices go a long way on this front, but someone needs to do that as a wall mountable device. Well, for a high end system, the blade server might be a good solution. It allows for redundancy and load distribution and completely centralized maintenance.
 
ver0776 said:
The solar field has made breakthroughs that will surely change our world. I am talking specifically about printed and painted solar cells. Solar has been so expensive because it was made of silicone. They now have plastic/printed solar cells and are on the verge of creating self-aligning solar cells in paint. Soon everything exposed to the sun will be covered in cheap solar cells.
Eventually yes, but some of this is still far off.

We have two startup companys in the S.F. Bay Area working on thin-film solar cells. They don't use silicon and instead "print" the solar cell using photo like processing equipment. The cost is a little bit cheaper and the efficiency of these types of cells is less than half of that of a typical silicon solar cell panel, but the big advantage is in production capacity since you could print millions of these cells easily where-as current silicon solar cell capacity is constrained at only a few hundred million kilowatts a year world wide without a huge increase in fab capacity which would be VERY expensive.

The holy grail is to get so called solar roof tiles into wide use. If we had those installed on all new homes we would be in much better shape. Second step would be to convince the government to raise the minimum building code requirement for A.C. units above the current 10 SEER which is really low (not to mention the current air-handler/furnace code requirement which is only 80% efficiency right now despite the fact the 91/92% efficiency air-handlers are common).
 
Getting California to build enough power plants to match the demand would go a long way towards helping things in your area too.
 
upstatemike said:
Getting California to build enough power plants to match the demand would go a long way towards helping things in your area too.
They built 47 new power plants in the last 5 years! The problem is that we built millions of new homes over the same period so increasing demand is far out-stripping capacity.

Personally I think that this shows that the current system/model is starting to fail. Many of my friends/co-workers are from over-seas and all of the asian contries are modernizing rapidly. Soon they will want a big slice of the available oil pie too and then no number of new power plants will help us.
 
So step up power plant construction to match the new home construction pace OR pass population density laws that say an acre of land is not permitted to support more than 1 single family dwelling and outlaw multi-family structures completely. ( I prefer the second option)
 
Speaking of incindiary and HA, I got home two days ago to find my power out. Probably due to the high heat and A/C load. I noticed when i heard my 15kv generator eating up propane. The bad news was I heard my UPSs for my servers going beserk. Find that my plan of UPSs holding the servers up until the generator kicked in is a bit flawed.

doing some research, it seems UPSs don't like to run (shutdown?) when getting fed from a generator. There apparantly are a few that have sensitivity configuration that allow them to run on generator. Some of my UPSs were working fine, others not. So, FYI.
 
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