keithfeather

Climate Change, Energy and Manufacturing

Don't mean to be picky, but to avoid confusion, your conversion is off by 1000. A megawatt is 1000 kilowatts a gigawatt is 1000 megawatts, and a terawatt (TW) is 1000 gigawatts. So a 16 terawatt is 16,000,000 megawatts. :)


On Oct 06 01:56 PM Mad Hedge Fund Trader wrote:

> isc Solar is about to become a big part of our lives, as it careens
> toward long sought profitability, and it will suit you to learn more
> about it. To get a good introduction to the industry, both through
> some good engineering statistics and some great pictures, then check
> out the September edition of National Geographic magazine by clicking
> here . Total world electricity demand today is 16 terawatts (16,000
> megawatts), and that is expected to grow to 20 terawatts by 2020.
> Solar comes in two flavors, thermal and photovoltaic (seekingalpha.com/symbo...).
> Thermal is the old dinosaur technology, with thousands of convex
> mirrors arrayed to heat piped oil, which is then used to power a
> conventional steam power plan, converting about 24% of the sun’s
> energy into electricity. The future is with photovoltaic solar, which
> uses the semiconducting ability of silicon to grab electrons directly
> from sunlight. PV is less efficient at a 10% conversion rate, more
> expensive, but is making great leaps forward. It would only take
> 100 square miles of PV panels placed on rooftops to meet all of the
> electricity demands of the US. The final goal is to develop silicon
> paint which you then apply to your house to generate power, all for
> the cost of a bucket of regular paint. PV chips in the lab are already
> achieving efficiencies of 40%. First Solar (seekingalpha.com/symbo...)
> now owns the cutting edge with its thin film panels, a company I
> have written about extensively (click here for the report ). It is
> also a great trading vehicle, with plenty of volatility, and the
> recent silicon panel price war with China has knocked the stock down
> into “buy” territory. The additional of FSLR to the S&P 500,
> the first alternative stock to do so, is the writing on the wall.
> I regularly mine this magazine for long term technology and environmental
> trends, and my kids love cutting up the pictures. After all, it was
> founded by one of the original venture capitalists, Alexander Graham
> Bell, the inventor of the telephone.

Climate Change, Energy and Manufacturing

The 40,000 foot view. The world wants/needs manufactured things. Which country is most likely to possess the technology and flexibility to produce those things with the lowest pollution? I believe that would be the US. And as Mittal reported, it is in every manufacturer's best interest to lower their cost of manufacturing by reducing energy consumption. So why would it make even the slightest sense to the health of the world to purposely discourage manufacturing in the US by imposing unilateral constraints? Any activity that encourages manufacturing to leave the borders of the US also increases the pollution of the world.

The alternative would be to suggest that America no longer has the talent to be a first tier manufacturer, an idea I cannot accept.