Comments Analyst has made

  • Buzzword Central

    Wow, quite the string of buzzwords there. "A distrbuted renewable generation and storage internet enabled smart grid." Sounds like the same old grid to me, except that in addition to nukes and fossil-fueled plants you've got some new stuff.

    "Conservation involving cogeneration and geo heat exchange heating/cooling." Hmm. So you've got one power plant fueling more than one building, and you've got ground heat pumps.

    "Maybe you haven't heard?" Uh, yeah, I've heard. I'm telling you to use the true numbers and to lay off the five-dollar words. Look, it's juice and heat. No need to dress it up in fancy clothes.On New developments in solar power make 'clean coal' look even dumber posted 1 year, 11 months ago 35 Responses

  • Solar Suckers V: Honesty, Realism Are Vital

    Yes, geothermal is going to be a key technology. Same goes for solar PV, wind, and electric vehicles. However, none of these things will get off the ground if people lie about numbers or engage in useless fantasies about doing away with the power grid.

    To me, the Achilles Heel of the alternative energy crowd is its wishful thinking. Folks, you have to embrace cold, hard fact.

    1. Solar energy is NOT cheaper than coal, and it's not going to be for quite a while, if ever. The best it will get is to be close enough to coal and/or nuclear to be worth the subsidies. We are rapidly approaching that target, and we'll almost certainly be there within 10 years on a broad scale. That's enough reason to ramp it up.

    2. If you think you're going to put the electric utilities out of business, think again. It won't happen. At some point, a percentage of single-family houses and businesses will be able to disconnect from the grid (if better batteries are invented), but office buildings and apartments are going to need the grid. In practical terms, the solar houses of the near future will also be grid-connected and will essentially use the grid as a de facto battery.

    3. I am a big believer in electric cars, but they won't happen all at once. It will take 50 years for them to be phased in.

    Again, it's utterly essential that people cut the millenialist hype and see these technologies, and the world at large, as it is, and as it can be in practical terms.On New developments in solar power make 'clean coal' look even dumber posted 1 year, 11 months ago 35 Responses

  • Hey Solar Suckers IV

    What's the deal? Attention span too short? Here's a thread featuring a preposterous claim about a hyped-up company, and what do you do? Debate whether race cars at the Bonneville Flats get a push start? It's no wonder that the alternative energy crowd inspires so little confidence outside of its own self-feeding orbit.On New developments in solar power make 'clean coal' look even dumber posted 1 year, 11 months ago 35 Responses

  • Hey Solar Suckers - III

    To everyone else: You can't just wish it to be true. Look, at a simple level there are three elements to business success:

    1. Dimensions of the problem
    2. Elegance of the solution
    3. Quality of the entrepreneurs

    We all know that the problem here is huge. But when Nanosolar is hyped as "cheaper than coal," then the elegance of the solution is being misreprented to put it mildly. Which brings into question the quality of the entrepreneurs.

    At the moment, the stocks of alternative energy companies are on a tear because of the high price of oil. Every pig is being shown as a racing thoroughbred. The same thing happened during the recent residential real estate bubble, and during the Internet bubble of 1995-2000.

    If there was ever a time to be hypervigilant about claims made by alternative energy companies and their promoters, now is the time.On New developments in solar power make 'clean coal' look even dumber posted 1 year, 11 months ago 35 Responses

  • Hey Solar Succkers! - II

    Common Sense (interesting handle, given the facts), yes I know that the thin film guys are somewhere around 10% conversion efficiency. Actually, I think it's more like high single digits, but for the hell of it I'm willing to round it up. The crystalline guys are at 16%-22% depending on the specifics.

    It's more expensive to make a crystalline cell, so the cost/watt is generally what you want to look at, although if the customer is a utility then the real estate value comes into play because you need a whole lot more ground to generate the same amount of energy if you use thin film.

    But I'll even be willing to set the cost of real estate at zero for the purpose of this little tete-a-tete. What I really want to do is get down to brass tacks and discuss the significant issues.

    You say Nanosolar will be "heading towards that bukc" a watt. Yeah, and that plus a couple bucks will get you a tall coffee of the day at your favorite overpriced coffee boutique. My point is that, first, it's an out-an-out fraud for anyone to write a headline, "Cheaper than coal and falling," and that second, none of the idiots who write junk like that have a ghost of a clue about what any of the numbers really are.

    You talk about bright scientists, blah blah blah. Yeah, I know. They all went to Stanford. So did a whole bunch of propellerheads who gave us, say, the DSL-based Competitive Local Exchange Carriers. They were not only Stanford grads, but they had "Cisco-powered networks." Which flat-out didn't work.

    Remember Cisco's $2+ billion writedown and restatement for, what was it, 2000 and 2001? The only reason John Chambers isn't sitting in jail next to Bernie Ebbers is that Silicon Valley has better lawyers and better p.r. agents than Worldcom ever did. So don't throw this "talented engineer" crap at me. Been there, done that.

    Now, a couple more things.

    1. The crystalline guys, and the other thin-film guys, aren't standing still. Printing solar cells on non-traditional substrates is not any sort of new idea. Nor is the pursuit of manufacturing efficiencies and economies of scale. Nanosolar is pursuing a moving target. You might not know it, but they know it.

    2. There are no secrets in the PV industry. Everyone knows how everyone else's products work. Solar PV isn't very advanced technology. I bet you didn't know, for example, that on the crystalline side of things a producer doesn't even need a clean room when they make their wafers like the electronics silicon producers do. I've been to the Chinese factories.

    Now, I'm told (but haven't verified) that Nanosolar licensed patents from someone else who doesn't think they're particularly groundbreaking. I'm also told that Nanosolar won't discuss the particulars of their process because they don't want anyone to fully realize how ho-hum this "breakthrough technology" really is. I can't tell you for sure if those put-downs are true, but it wouldn't surprise me if they are.

    If Nanosolar winds up being more real than I suspect, then I'll be overjoyed to have been wrong about them. Seriously, I'll be happy about it because I'd really like to see solar take off. Oh, and I don't have any financial dog in the fight, in the form of investments in the companies or suppliers, etc. I'm just an observer who recently happened to see some of the factories in China.

    What bugs me about this stuff is to see the same, tired hype. Did you and the other hypesters learn NOTHING from the last bubble? Are you pushing stocks, maybe fresh from having pushed interest-only mortgages until that bubble burst?On New developments in solar power make 'clean coal' look even dumber posted 1 year, 11 months ago 35 Responses

  • Hey Solar Suckers!

    You guys will believe anything, won't you?

    Hasn't it occurred to any of you that the market for IPOs of solar companies is so hot right now that anyone with a story and an apparent pedigree can raise money?

    Nanosolar's claims of a buck a watt for cells and 2 bucks a watt for panels are very carefully couched so as to allow them to wriggle off the hook for the next 20 years. No one, including (especially?) the New York Times, bothered to ask them obvious basic questions.

    1. What's the conversion efficiency today? Not next month, or next year, or next decade. Today.

    2. What's the cost per watt for a cell, and for a panel containing their cells? Not next month, or next year, or next decade. Today.

    3. Whose technology is it? Theirs, or did they buy it from a company down the street? (Literally.)

    My bet is that no one here, or at the New York Times, has a ghost of a clue about those answers. And I bet you don't know how much coal costs per watt, either. Yet that did't stop anyone from slapping a "cheaper than coal" headline on this story.

    Unlike you suckers, I actually lived through the Internet bubble. I saw all kinds of companies in Silicon Valley raise all kinds of money on lies, and watched their executives waddle off into the sunset with their share of the loot before those companies went bankrupt because they'd never had anything to begin with.

    Solar thin film is real, but Nanosolar doesn't have anything that the other guys don't have. Not anything meaningful. Just ask them to tell you in detail what their secret sauce is. They won't do it.

    The only thing cheaper than coal is words on a screen. Those of you who are wanting to do the stock hype thing will keep talking this company (and others like it) up to the sky, but that doesn't mean anything. Just wait. You'll see.On New developments in solar power make 'clean coal' look even dumber posted 1 year, 11 months ago 35 Responses