[PLUG-TALK] U.S. manufactured motherboards ... and growth

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

Interesting article across my feed today:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43246-024-00705-y

"...Recently, BaZrS3, a chalcogenide perovskite has received attention due to its optimal band gap, non-toxicity, and superior stability...."

"...The models by Nishigaki et al.5 suggests that a 2000 nm thick absorber layer is needed to reach a maximum efficiency of 35%, however with as little as 5% Ti-alloying, the c-Si tandem efficiency can reach 38.7% at a thickness of only 550 nm..."

We still have plenty of efficiency gains to be made in PV solar cells.   38.7%!  Fascinating!

Ted

-----Original Message-----
From: PLUG-talk <plug-talk-bounces at lists.pdxlinux.org> On Behalf Of Ted Mittelstaedt
Sent: Saturday, February 15, 2025 8:40 AM
To: 'Keith Lofstrom' <keithl at keithl.com>
Cc: 'Off-topic and potentially flammable discussion' <plug-talk at lists.pdxlinux.org>
Subject: Re: [PLUG-TALK] U.S. manufactured motherboards ... and growth



-----Original Message-----
From: Keith Lofstrom <keithl at keithl.com> 

>I'm sorry you dislike traffic cameras, but I'm the pedestrian who dodges speeding cars on the increasingly rare days when I go east to Portland.

Actually I don't dislike them as much as you think - I know right where they are, they don't move, and I can apply the brakes right outside of their radar range, drop to the artificially low speed, then apply accelerator after getting past them.  I dislike the moral implications of using them since the people who get picked up by them are usually the poor, and often don't drive that much.

You will note the high prevalence of the traffic cams in the poorer neighborhoods.  The most expensive neighborhoods (around Intel for example) don't have cams on THEIR feeder arterials.  It's the poor neighborhoods that do.  Oh I forgot, "poor" isn't a socially acceptable term anymore.

Unlike you, I care about what affects the entire society not my own little personal space.  I also walk - and run - on city streets - probably much more than you in fact (I'll stack up my yearly running miles on city streets against your walking miles any day)  I have learned to look both ways before crossing and I do not have this inflated ego that believes I have the moral right to cause all traffic to stop on the street just because I can't wait a minute for an open spot in the traffic.   Causing traffic to stop burns up fuel on brakes, increasing carbon pollution which then affects me.  Most peds are too short-sighted to see beyond their own nose and will happily cause many additional pounds of pollution to be dumped into the atmosphere for them to save 30 seconds not waiting for an open spot to cross the street.

>I know many PV researchers; they are solid state engineers like me.  Crystalline silicon efficiency is close to practical maximum, increasing from 15% to >16% over two decades.  Cost has plummeted, but that is mostly GIGANTIC factories in China.  Concentrator system efficiency has more than doubled, >but the watts per hectare has not.  

I think your PV researchers sound like retired old farts who haven't done any research in the last 20 years, or even bothered to look on Amazon where you can buy 25% efficient panels at consumer prices:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DMT2WTC8?th=1

And of course, the actual -certified- efficiency cells are not far behind:

https://scitechdaily.com/new-world-record-breakthrough-cigs-perovskite-tandem-solar-cell-achieves-24-6-efficiency/

There is also intriguing research such as the following

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abe4206

Where the claim is

"In addition, the photoresponse from SBC222 is 1000 times higher than that from BTO,"

I think we will see much MUCH higher efficiencies in the next decades.  The simple reality is that the smartest and best researchers go where the money is, and cheap fossil fuel energy has made the money go far away from solar cells.  That has changed and no amount of drilling is going to bring down fossil fuel energy prices in any significant manner.

Regardless of how you conservationists want it, where everyone is huddled around under blankets with their thermostats set to 65 - we simply cannot continue to use fossil fuels to run the society at the previously cheap prices they were at.  Trump's minions will push coal but by the time that any coal projects get out of the planning stage, he will be gone and the next Democratic President will shut all of that down.

There IS still plenty of oil out there - but it's NOT as easy to get at.  Thus, it will be more and more expensive.  That doesn't mean gasoline is going to disappear.  What it means is that gasoline prices will rise until alternative fuels - which are more expensive - start to compete.  Then gas prices will stop rising because further price rising makes alternative fuels cheaper and cheaper and stimulates their production and thus decreases fossil fuel market share.   This is how the laws of economics work.  Trump is stupid he does not understand this.  He does NOT understand that the ONLY thing that keeps oil prices under control is that further rises in oil price means less market share because the alternative energy sources - wind, PV, wave, etc. - now become economically possible.

When the electric bill charges you a 10% premium for "green power" most people are "meh"   When it gives you a 10% discount for "green power" then fossil fuel market share will drop to almost zero.  OPEC's only option to avoid bankruptcy will be to drop oil prices 10%.   Then green power finds another 10% price decrease via new discoveries and the cycle starts all over again.  Eventually OPEC's cost to produce will be too high - and that will be the end of fossil fuels.  This is how economics will take care of the problem of fossil fuels.

What this means for research is that any researcher that can do a game-changer will "be in the money"   There's no game changers left for fossil fuels because it's not a question of increasing efficiency of extracting them - we have done all the easy stuff like injecting steam into old oil wells in Texas to get the last dribs and drabs of oil.  It's a question of GETTING AT THEM because while they are there, they are just more inaccessible.  And that inaccessibility makes them more expensive.  You can convert coal into gasoline - after a long, involved process that is expensive - that merely represents that coal is a form of fossil fuel that is much more inaccessible.

But there are LOTS of game changers left for PV cells.  Your tired old "experienced' friends who are close to retirement don't really give a damn anymore - they are happy patting themselves on the back claiming "we hit the practical maximum"   Someone younger, without a name for themselves, without a string of published articles or books - they don't have those blinders on.  They will shoot for 50% efficiency conversion.  Most won't make it - but some will.  Some are working towards that now - as the links I posted illustrate.  That is how science works.

NEVER FORGET that everything you know - that you take as "fact" - was discovered by some human.  And another human can come along and throw that "fact" out the window.  Humans have been doing this for a long, LONG time now.

> In most places, those hectares feed people, or feed natural biodiversity (where your next superdrug will emerge), or convert an inadequate fraction of > greenhouse gas CO₂ back into oxygen and trees and toilet paper.

We have LOTS of unproductive land that isn't doing this.  It's remote, yes.  Maybe very cold.  Maybe very hot.  But it's there, just waiting to be used.

You sound EXACTLY like the people who claim WE MUST BUILD RACK STACK AND PACK LOW INCOME APARTMENTS BECAUSE WE ARE RUNNING OUT OF HOUSING.   People who have NEVER driven 15 miles East of Portland - where the Mt. Hood Freeway was supposed to go - and seen the hundreds if not thousands of empty acres out near Boring OR and places like that where there are NO HOUSES no farms, no nothing.  Just scrub, unproductive forest.  There's PLENTY of land out that way - lots even in the Urban Growth Boundary - unbuilt on.  Because, short sighted people are convinced the homeless need apartments overlooking the Willamette instead of single-family homes that THEY OWN out near Boring.  Homes that would give them financial security and retirement instead of being renters and dependent and beholden to the government for the rest of their lives.

> Note: I dislike many people who prattle about global warming, 

Of course - because - GW is a function of population.  To put it simply - tell everyone to STOP SCREWING EACH OTHER and producing so many babies and ...poof...GW will disappear.

This is what Trump and the MAGAoots are doing although most of them don't realize it.  Trump is pushing immigrant population back to Mexico.  Let Mexico be overpopulated and see their standard of living run into the ground because of it.  Maybe then the Catholic Church which is so strong in Mexico will stop railing against Birth Control and start pushing condoms and start advocating for SMALLER families.  Immigrant population is where US population growth has come from in recent years.

So, in the US we are short housing.  We have a homeless crisis.  We have it so that young people can't buy homes since none are available.  Very very simple solution.  Let the population fall.  Let births decline below deaths.  There will be PLENTY of homes available as the population drops.  See how that works?  And at the same time the population is declining - fuel used is declining, carbon production output is declining.  GW is solved.

It's called carrying capacity.  It's still out there.  Every time someone tries talking about it the clowns come out of the woodwork claiming "you just want to kill people"  No.  We want to STOP MAKING MORE PEOPLE.  We have enough people.  We don't need more.  The world got along JUST FINE for thousands of years with a global population of under a billion people.  We can return to that again and still get along just fine.  We can slide the idea of families with 14 kids into the history books labeled "screwy things that Bible-thumpers convinced people to do in the 1800's and 1900s"  Then no more global warming and a pollution load low enough that the Earth's natural systems can deal with it without us having to build giant production facilities that suck carbon out of the air.

>Batteries are an entirely different kettle of electrons.
>That's lithium supply; continental brines in Australia, Chile, China, and Argentina.  The US extracts 1% of the world supply, though we have 4% of the >lithium brine reserves; that isn't nearly enough to provide cloudy-day storage for millions of electric vehicles.  Extracting that lithium creates a LOT of >pollution.

I got more news for you there.  Efficiency and energy density storage in batteries only matters for ONE use - mobile.   Who said we need lithium batteries for cloudy-day storge for EVs?   Who said we NEED lithium batteries for ON SITE storage?

Nobody - but stupid people.

APC by Schneider Electric has been pushing Lithium UPSes for some time now.  They are a commercial failure.  Why?  Because NOBODY gives a tinkers damn how heavy a UPS is that sits in a rack bolted to the wall all day long.  Lithium replacement battery packs for those APC UPSes are double the cost of the lead acid batteries.  So, people go to buy  a UPS and say "screw that.  I want the UPS with the cheaper batteries I don't care how heavy it is"

If you put solar cells on your roof IT DOES NOT MATTER if the batteries holding power from them are a series of Leyden jars that are the most inefficient supercapacitors you can find, occupying triple the space of even typical marine batteries - as long as your bank of them stores up all the power you collect in a day.  What matters with on-site battery systems IS NOT efficiency.  That's why the focus on lithium batteries is completely wacked for on-site solar systems.  The ONLY reason it's happening is because mostly up til now those systems were purchased by taxpayer dollars via heavy subsidies so when Ma and Pa Kettle looked at a solar system for their house - they could get a government-subsidized Lithium one for $20 or an "old-school" unsubsidized lead acid one for $20,000 - which do you think they will go for?  It doesn't matter that the Lithium one is going to cost 3 times more to replace the batteries in 10 years or that we need the Lithium in EVs not sitting in someone's garage storing the output of their solar cells.

This is why we need to get the government out of the business of subsidizing these systems.  The government's agenda was jumpstarting EV car production and Lithium batteries are currently the best option due to power-to-weight ratio, they wanted to ramp up Lithium battery production - so yes, let's subsidize lithium batteries in EVERYTHING even on-site power storage systems that do not need the light weight.

So, less-energy-dense electrical storage systems - like carbon nanotubes which are NOT chemical, can be used forever without degrading - got ignored and languished on the vine while the Lithium drums kept beating.

And you -like everyone else - fell for it.  Your "analysis" is all based on what someone else wants you to believe not what is logical.  It's NOT logical to use a scarce resource - lithium - for PV energy storage.  So WHY claim that PV energy storage is a non-starter based on the shortage of lithium?
 
> I've published journal papers about an entirely different approach to energy storage. 

Ah yes, NOW we are injecting some logic.  Your brain isn't ossified after all.

> A very large scale expansion of "maglev" kinetic energy storage combined with "interhemispheric" energy transfer; On winter nights, we use power > generated by summer day PV in Australia (at other times South America or China or Indonesia), and they use ours when we have a surplus.

> http://launchloop.com/PowerLoop

Moving electricity long distances involves transmission line losses, forget interhemispheric energy transfer.

>  Probably five or ten giant systems, for redundancy and ongoing system upgrade. 

And there's the hole.  Once more, you focus on large generation projects.  This isn't the future.  The future is millions of small generation projects scattered everywhere.  Large projects just perpetuate central control and make it easy for the government to control people.

Give someone an EV scooter, and a large solar cell to charge it.  They are free.  They can go where they want when they want they don't have to pay anyone for power.  They just need space for the solar cell.  And that is a factor of how efficient the cell is.   Which is WHY the smartest researchers - the ones who want the fame and fortune for the game changer - are focusing on cell efficiency.

You build one of your giant expensive systems and I come out with a solar cell 50% efficient - and I will put your giant system out of business by undercutting what you are selling power for.

And, if you and your giant system are owned by the government - the government will fight me tooth and nail to suppress my cell.

Why do you think China is pushing fusion - which is probably the most expensive ridiculous large central power generation system ever devised.  They want a working fusion reactor that powers the entire country - so that everyone in China is scared to death of speaking out because if they do the government cuts their power off.

"off-grid" is where it's at.  Lots of people with RV's have discovered this.

> Practically everything in the world is beyond the edge of your screen, regardless of screen pixel count.

And beyond your screen, too.  Your and my posts, here in this forum.  Precisely!!!   Doctors - invalidate thyselves!   :-)

Ted

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