SOLAR POWER (Part 2)

This photograph shows part of the photovoltaic solar array at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, the largest solar array in the US. It occupies 140 acres and has 70,000 panels. It was constructed by the SunPower Corporation, and produces a maximum rated 14 MW which is approximately 25 % of the power requirements for Nellis AFB.

Click on the photo for a larger image in a new window.

This photograph was taken by Senior Airman Larry E Reid Jr. as part of his official duties and is in the public domain.

Before we actually start with this I would like to point out that the cost of producing electricity using Solar energy is four to five times that of conventional coal. There are people who still scoff at this even after it has been explained to them because the perception is that sunlight is free, and because of that so should any power generated by using the light and heat of the Sun.
To offer a point of comparison, I’d like again to explain the cost of a large 2000MW baseload nuclear power plant. After planning and approvals, the day one cost as the first sod is turned might be around four and a half billion dollars, but the plant does not produce power for at least seven years, so at the going interest rate for the loan, the cost escalates by a further 225 million a year, hence by the time it comes on line feeding power into the grid and actually earning money, that original cost has blown out to almost six and a half billion dollars, so the expense is not due to the plant itself but because of the cost of money.
The same applies for solar power. There is a huge up front cost, again exacerbated by the cost of money.

So, the complexity and vagaries of each method of producing electrical power differ in ways not actually related to the process itself.

So even though you can lay on the beach, and be warmed (and even burned) by the Sun for no cost, it is entirely different when it comes to producing power from that same warming Sun.

Photovoltaic Solar Power.

I mentioned in the previous post about the solar panels on the roof of a house. This is the photovoltaic method of power production.
The light of the Sun shines on small cells. The cells are made typically of Silicon because of the number of free electrons in that atoms outer shell. The light makes those electrons move around faster thus generating electricity, and believe me, this is the simplified version for ease of understanding. Selenium is also used, as is Boron and Phosphorous. The atoms of each of these elements share electrons thus generating the electrical power. Small plates made from each of the elements are sandwiched together, with minute electrical wiring connections joining the plates. Hundreds and sometimes thousands of these cells are then connected together to form solar panels. The panels are encased to hold them together and covered with toughened glass on the front. When you look at the photograph of the house with the panels on the roof, you’ll see there are thirty of those panels typically sized approximately six feet by four feet.

Now you have some idea of the cost, taken up completely in the intricacy of their construction, and the time it takes to complete that construction and the materials involved and their conversion into the cells and then the panels.
That large household version in the photograph costs around $45,000 or so. It might supply your household power, but when the Sun goes down, the house needs to draw its electricity from the grid, as there is no way to store the Solar power generated in this manner.
The advantage of a large system like this is that during the day while the family is away at work and school and the Sun is shining, the generated power is being fed back into the grid, and as incentive, Governments offer attractive rebates for this, sometimes three times the cost BACK TO you as a consumer.
So, you use power during the day, some is fed to the grid, and you use power from the grid at night. Typical savings might amount to half your power bill, and with the rebate, that again takes some off the total. Assuming that you’re saving half, and getting the rebate, then the return might be as high as 80% of your yearly power bill. A typical household bill here in Australia might be $2500 per annum, averaged. I know that you in the US have typically higher charges for your power. The savings for that Australian family might be in the vicinity of $2000 per year. So, to recover the cost of the System $45,000, you’ll need to live at that house for 20 or so years, because you can’t take it with you if you move house.
Selling the house might attract a higher price because it has the system, but there is conjecture on that point, even though the system might make up as much as 10% of the cost of the house and land for the seller, but if he actually achieves the return for the system, it is again a matter unrelated to environmental concerns.

On the larger scale, you see the huge initial outlay for the panels, the infrastructure just to connect all those panels, together, to have them articulated so they track with the Sun for best effect. By their nature, they are exposed to the elements, hence rain and dust. If it rains then dust adheres to the glass. The glass covered panels have to be perfectly clean to operate at their optimum, so someone has to constantly clean the panels, sometimes up to 70,000 for a large array, adding to the ongoing cost for the manhours element. The power generated is DC so it all has to converted to AC for feeding into the grid, hence large inverters are needed with step up transformers as well.
Now you can see the cost mounting.
The huge initial outlay, and the resultant cost of money, the cost of the vast infrastructure, the ongoing costs now all add up, making solar power one of the most expensive forms of production.

However the big thing that scares owners of these power stations is that as soon as a cloud just scuds across the face of the Sun, production goes down by as much as 25 % immediately, and then takes time to build back up, so on cloudy days, power is minimal, and now you can see why this form of photovoltaic power cannot be used as constant, reliable set level baseload power.

This photograph is of part of the array at the Serpa Power Station in Portugal. It totals 52,000panel modules, and covers a hillside over an area of 150 acres. The panels were constructed by SunPower, Sanyo and Sharp, and track to follow the Sun. It produces a maximum of 11MW.

Click on the photo for a larger image in a new window.

This photograph was taken by Aurelio A Heckert and is a commons photograph in the public domain.

Having taken all those factors into account, there are still large power stations using this photovoltaic principle.
The US is the third largest user of this type of power on the Planet, so it’s not like the US is addicted to coal. There really are engineers out there doing this sort of work.
Germany and Japan lead the World in use of this form of power, and Spain is also a large user.

There are advances in this form of power production concentrating the voltage to heat oil which boils water to steam to drive a turbine.
In Australia, construction is underway to bring on line the largest photovoltaic power plant on Earth. It will produce a maximum of 154 MW and will supply up to 50,000 homes. It combines the solar panels in arrays, but uses heliostats also, tracking mirrors that follow the path of the Sun, and designed so that they concentrate light onto the panels vastly increasing power production from each panel. The cost is close to $450 million for a relatively small 154 MW maximum. (degraded because of the nature of its variability)

As more solar panels are constructed and then be used for arrays, the cost will become cheaper, but because of the variability of the light, then this form of power generation can really only make up a minor fraction of the overall pie chart, and if renewables can only make up 20% at best, then the Solar part of that shrinks somewhat.

If you follow some of the links, you’ll see from the maps that solar power might only be economically viable in that Sun belt, and in Southern States of the US and most probably those in the South West.

The problem however will always be the high cost of the manufacture of the panels, the infrastructure needed to connect them all, and the fact that the Sun sets every night for almost half the time that power is needed..
So, when environmentalists point to this as the way of the future, it will only ever be a small part of the solution.

The next post will detail the third part of the solar equation, that of Solar Thermal, which might be the most promising aspect of the whole Solar story.

This painting depicts the landing at Sydney Cove. Click on the image to open a larger image in a new window.

Image courtesy of The Mitchell Library, the State Library of New South Wales.

Some of you may have visited the NASA site and seen those ingenious little NASA Mars Rovers tooling around on the surface of Mars. I mentioned in the first piece how England was a World Power for so long because they led the World in virtually every facet of human endeavour.
Well those two Mars Rovers should give every American reason to be proud. They landed on Mars, each with a three month time frame to work to. They use solar panels to generate a tiny voltage to drive the wheels, operate the camera, and the small computer system and transmitter/receiver to digitise any photographs and send them back to Earth. They are radio controlled, in a manner similar to those little model cars and planes you may see.
The problem with travelling to a place as close, and yet so distant at Mars is the speed factor, so the idea is to calculate the travel when Mars is at its closest, a distance of 36 million miles, and not when it is at its most distant of 240 million miles.
Space travel is restricted by the time taken, and this can only be achieved by using the technology we have available right now. The maximum speed we can reach is around 17,000MPH which is the velocity required to escape the Earth’s gravitational pull. Once in the vacuum of space there is no way (yet) to accelerate hence that terminal speed is about the maximum. Any increase is of a minor nature. That means that the time taken to physically travel to Mars is around 85 to 90 days when Mars is at its closest.
However, any information transmitted by radio travels at the speed of light, so at it’s closest, any signal only takes two and half minutes to travel to Mars, now gradually increasing as Mars moves further away from Earth.
So, the guy actually driving those little Mars Rovers has to watch the camera out front, calculate the small speed with respect to distance travelled and anticipate how far in advance he needs to be changing direction.
This US ingenuity sees those Rovers still moving around relatively trouble free four years after they arrived on Mars for a three month main mission, hoping they might get a little more out of them. One has even racked up travel of nearly ten miles, which is incredible when you really think of it. Any maintenance has to be carried out from an incredible distance, hoping against hope that it actually works.

Now, why I mentioned this at all with respect to the settlement of Australia, is I want you to consider a hypothetical.
Let’s pretend that those Mars Rovers found the surface was indeed able to support human life in a normal manner as on Earth, there was water freely available, and the air was okay to breathe normally. (Incidentally none of which is true, but after all it is only a hypothetical)
Excited, people back here on Earth mount an expedition. Clean out nearly a thousand people from the jails around the country, some basic tools and shoot em off to Mars with best wishes, tasking them with setting up a viable settlement.
Absolutely impossible to even consider in this day and age.

In 1788, the situation was exactly the same as the perception of settling Mars might be today.

English jails creaked under the weight of prisoners, most of whom committed misdemeanours that would hardly warrant a fine these days.
The American War of Independence was lost (depending on whose side you were on) and now the English had nowhere to exile their prisoners to.

In 1786 the English Government decided to actually send people to The Great Southern Continent discovered by Cook sixteen years previously. This was basically to serve two purposes. The first was to explore the possibility of using it as a dumping ground for prisoners, and the second to set up a colony there before any of the other countries did so, namely, the French.
The details were worked out about how to proceed. The expedition was to take enough supplies to hopefully tide them over for two years, but in the main, it was all just guesswork. The bulk of the work was to be done by the captive work force, namely the convicts themselves, with Marines to guard them, an administrative element and no private citizen settlers at all.
Two Royal Navy vessels were provided for the escort and the administrative people and nine further ships were hired by the Government for the transport of the convicts, ships specially fitted out for the task, a forerunner of the slave traders.
It’s not like going on a cruise when you turn up at the ship the day prior to leaving port.
Some of the convicts were actually on board the transports for up to seven months prior to departure. In that interim, seventeen convicts died, and some actually reached their release date or were freed
.
For a perspective as to the size of the ships, step out 40 paces, the distance of two ordinary house frontages. That was the longest of the eleven ships, roughly the size of a harbour ferry.

The man chosen to lead the fleet was a full Naval Captain the fifty year old Arthur Phillip.
This choice was somewhat out of the blue really, as others were eminently more qualified. Why Phillip was chosen is that he led a fleet of convicts from Portugal to Brazil, convict transportation not the sole province of the English. Phillip had a remarkably low death rate of convicts during that voyage, and this could be the reason behind his choice, borne out when later fleets had significantly higher death rates for the voyage.

On Sunday 13th May 1787, at three o’clock in the morning those eleven ships sailed out of Portsmouth Harbour for the journey to Botany Bay on the other side of the planet, the furthest place away from home that there was. On board those eleven ships were the Marine Guards numbering 213, 27 of them with their wives, and with 19 children. There was Phillip himself with his staff, servants, doctors, a judge, a chaplain and a surveyor. The ships themselves totalled 443 men as masters, officers and crew. Then there were the convicts themselves, 778 in all made up of 586 men and 192 women. These convicts were mostly chained between decks for the journey, excepting time they were allowed on deck to exercise.

They were chained to the side of the ship …………… FOR EIGHT MONTHS.

All up, on eleven tiny ships, there was close 1500 people.

They sailed to the island of Teneriffe, then on to Rio de Janeiro, and from there across to The Cape Of Good Hope, the site of modern day Capetown. The longest part of the journey lay ahead in the run across to Australia, a trip of approximately eight weeks.
Captain Arthur Phillip was aboard HMS Sirius and at the Cape, he decided to transfer to the smaller and speedier HMS Supply, hoping to make it to Botany Bay sooner than the rest of the fleet, scout out the land and find a good place to come ashore and set up.
As it turned out, the Sirius arrived on the 18th January 1788, the next three ships a day later, and the remaining ships a further day later.
Phillip was not really enamoured with Cook’s recommendation of Botany Bay, and he decided it as being unsuitable. He left the fleet at anchor in Botany Bay, and set off to find a place more suitable. Not much further to the North was the entrance to a harbour that Cook noted but did not enter. Phillip sailed through the Heads into a harbour he described as ‘one of the finest harbours in the World.’ He scouted the harbour for two days and found an excellent place to come ashore and start a settlement. He sailed back to Botany Bay, and the Fleet moved to the small cove inside the Harbour. Phillip, some marines and a small group of convicts were the first ashore. A tree was felled and shaped into a flagpole and Phillip officially raised the Ensign on the 26th January 1788, a day celebrated each year as Australia Day.
He named the place Sydney Cove in honour of the man who dreamed up this hare brained scheme. This was at Port Jackson in what is now known as Sydney Harbour, and the site was where Sydney stands today.

The most outstanding thing to come out of this voyage was that during those eight months at sea, Phillip only lost 23 convicts, an incredibly small percentage that was not approached for decades to follow, proving Phillip to be a humanitarian, as well as a truly great navigator.

Remember the Mars hypothetical at the top of the article. All those people arrive on Mars, and find that they need something to keep them going. The send a request back to the Earth which takes around three minutes to arrive. The missing piece can then be sent to Mars aboard a relief craft, and that might take a further four months to arrive at Mars.

With this first fleet at Sydney Cove, if they need something, then the return message goes back aboard the return journey of the ship taking 8 months, and after that message arrives, the return trip takes a further eight months, so basically, if they needed something from Home, it took two years to arrive.
It may just be easier to colonise Mars than it was for these people to colonise a place on the other side of our own Planet, literally sailing off into the unknown.

Thanks to Steve Plaut for more proofs of the Fallacy of “Palestinians”.

Quotes from Steven Plaut

A primer on propaganda

Over the past few years, the term nakba (also spelled naqba) has become the favorite nonsense word of the Anti-Israel Lobby. Meaning “catastrophe” in Arabic, it has been embraced by anti-Semites all over the planet to refer to Israel’s creation, which supposedly imposed a “catastrophe” upon the “disenfranchised Palestinian Arabs.”…

There are tons of Google, Yahoo & other links referring to this word and most are erroneously linking it to the current Radical Islamist’s Propaganda about Israel!

The approximate borders of the British Mandate circa 1922.
Click to enlarge in a new window

… The term was not invented in 1948 but rather in 1920. And it was coined not because of Palestinians suddenly getting nationalistic but because Arabs living in Palestine regarded themselves as Syrian and were enraged at being cut off from their Syrian homeland. …

We have been writing about this umteen times - Please Read my lips:
THERE IS NO SUCH THING (PERSON) AS A PALESTINIAN!!!!
It’s a CON JOB on the GULLIBLE PEOPLE of this World!
Did you get that??? Do I need to repeat it?

The problem was that the Palestinian Arabs saw themselves as Syrians and were seen as such by other Syrians. The Palestinian Arabs were enraged that an artificial barrier was being erected within their Syrian homeland by the infidel colonial powers - one that would divide northern Syrian Arabs from southern Syrian Arabs, the latter being those who were later misnamed “Palestinians.”

See I TOLD YA SO!!!

The bulk of the Palestinian Arabs had in fact migrated to Palestine from Syria and Lebanon during the previous two generations, largely to benefit from the improving conditions and job opportunities afforded by Zionist immigration and capital flowing into the area. In 1920, both sets of Syrian Arabs, those in Syria and those in Palestine, rioted violently and murderously.

The Jewish people improved the Land, worked hard to bring Prosperity to a Desolate Region. Just as they have done over the Centuries to all the Countries they have lived. They have been a Blessing to the Countries where they resided. Just like it says in the Bible. Of course this would attract neighboring Arabs or anyone seeking to better themselves.

Palestinian Arabs are no more a nation and no more entitled to their own state than are the Arabs of Detroit or of Paris.

Now will all you “Bleeeding Heart” Liberals finally understand that you have been made an ASS of by the Radical Islamists???

The following quote comes from the great-grandfather of the current Syrian dictator, Bashar Assad:

“Those good Jews brought civilization and peace to the Arab Muslims, and they dispersed gold and prosperity over Palestine without damage to anyone or taking anything by force. Despite this, the Muslims declared holy war against them and did not hesitate to massacre their children and women…. Thus a black fate awaits the Jews and other minorities in case the Mandates are cancelled and Muslim Syria is united with Muslim Palestine.”

That statement is from a letter sent to the French prime minister in June 1936 by six Syrian Alawi notables (the Alawis are the ruling class in Syria today) in support of Zionism. Bashar’s great-grandfather was one of them.

You see the MAJORITY of Muslims do NOT agree with the Radical, MURDEROUS Islamists, even then as well as today.
I’m SHOUTING these explanations so you can hear me over all the Noise & Distraction in your Life!

[Bold and Italic Emphasis are mine. ---Al]

Read the rest of this article A primer on propaganda

Read more exceptional articles at Jewish World Review

This portrait is of Captain James Cook, who, as Lieutenant, commanding the Barque Endeavour, on 19th April 1770 was the first person to make landfall on the Eastern coast of the Great Southern Land, now known as Australia.

This portrait was painted by Nathaniel Dance in 1775, and hangs in The National Maritime Museum at Greenwich in the United Kingdom.

So then, just what is the tenuous link between lawyers and the founding of Australia?

Shakespeare talked of lawyers in Henry VI written in 1591.

Back then, in England, the Law wasn’t like it is today. There was no four year course at University. There was no spending time as a gopher an articled clerk, then as a Solicitor. There was no Bar exam on the step to becoming a Barrister. No long wait then to become a Senior Counsel, (or Queens Counsel, as they are still often called in British Commonwealth Countries, the process of taking silk, if you are a fan of that English BBC TV program, Rumpole of the Bailey) There were no partners, no senior partners, no advocates, no district Attorneys, no Defence lawyers. No hundreds of bound case books along the walls of each Practice.

No the law just consisted of Magistrates schooled in Laws enacted by Parliament. Private lawyers were pretty scarce on the ground in those days, and virtually their sole work came from those in the upper class able to afford their skills. Hence the saying, one law for the rich and another for the poor. Those upper classes who (if ever) got into trouble could afford a lawyer who would get them out of that trouble. There was very little even in the way of a middle class, mostly merchants, also able to afford a lawyer schooled in the Law to also get them off. However, the vast bulk of humanity were the lower classes, and their access to the law was non existent.

If arrested, or even just accused of anything petty, then the case was that they were guilty. The job of the Magistrate was to hear the outline of the accusation, and then pass judgment as the sitting judge. They got through hundreds of cases a day. There was no such thing as a defence. You could say nothing in the Court, be it in your defence, or anything at all. The only thing the judge may have heard was if there was someone to speak on behalf of the accused, and that was a rare thing indeed, and also rare that it had any effect on the outcome or sentence. It was a case of lead in the accused, and take down the guilty person.

Petty crime was harshly dealt with, and there were jail terms for virtually everything, and not just seven days, but years for something as trivial as stealing a loaf of bread, or, as a female servant, stealing a handkerchief from her employer. The most trivial of misdemeanour’s drew harsh jail terms.

Capital punishment was prevalent, and not only just for the serious crime of murder, but for a lot lesser crimes as well. Male. Female. It mattered little. These were gruesome times with gruesome punishments, so even though England was the leading civilisation on the Planet, they were not very civilised at all.

Because of this jails bulged at the seams, literally, and because most sentences were to a term in jail, then there was no real turnover of prisoners. They just built more jails.
Still prisoner population increased. In 1718, new laws were passed and a new punishment was introduced, that of transportation, effectively exile. The reason behind this was to move the problem of housing prisoners offshore, effectively attempting to solve the problem of housing the prisoners in England, and assisting in those far off lands under the overarching authority of Mother England. Prisoners sentenced to transportation were shipped off to America, and sold as indentured servants. Over the next 58 years more than 60,000 prisoners were brought to America, mostly serving in Virginia and Maryland. Some actually returned to England but the vast majority stayed and started new lives in America following the finish of their sentence.
In 1775 at the height of your War Of Independence, with things starting to go badly for England, the writing on the wall, the transportation of prisoners ceased.
Even with transportation on a scale like this jails still bulged as the justice system concentrated more on punishment than justice.

To this end jails still creaked at the seams. Because America no longer accepted prisoners another means of housing prisoners was needed. The practice of the prison ‘Hulks’ came into being starting in 1775, old sailing ships gutted with superstructures removed, and anchored in harbours around the Country and most in the River Thames in mid London. The hulks remained in service till the mid 1850’s, and all up, there were 60 of them, housing tens of thousands of prisoners during those 70 or so years.

The only known photograph of the prison hulks on the River Thames at Woolwich shortly before their removal in 1856. The hulks were established at Woolwich and at other ports in the 1770s to accommodate the burgeoning prison population. Prisoners either served their time on the hulks or waited to be transported to Botany Bay in Australia.

Photograph courtesy of University of Greenwich and others.

In 1766, leading Astronomers in England wanted to observe the transit of Venus across the Sun in 1769, and the best place to do this was in the South Seas.
A renowned mariner James Cook was tasked with the job, departing in 1768 for the three year voyage. Incidentally, as part of this voyage, Cook rigorously tested the new version of James Harrison’s clock the H4, proving beyond doubt that this was the conclusive answer to accurate time keeping in aid of navigation, once and for all solving the problem of longitude. The planetary observations were somewhat inconclusive, but the voyage was notable in that Cook finally discovered and proved the existence of the ‘Great Southern Continent’, often guessed about but never really found. He was the first to land on, and then chart the Eastern sea board of the Continent, a task that took nearly 5 months. He claimed the Continent for England on the 22nd August 1770.

This photograph is of that K1 watch, a copy of the Harrison H4 that Cook used extensively on this voyage. It may look like a pocket watch but this was the result of 50 years of hard work by Harrison. It measures just over 5 inches across and weighs just over 3 pounds. Its cost at the time was 600 Pounds Sterling, the equivalent in today’s money of $1.8 Million. Proving conclusively that this was the answer to the problem of Longitude, Harrison was awarded the prize of 20,000 Pounds Sterling, the equivalent of $6 Million today.

The war in North America went the way of the Americans, the first major loss for the English in their history, extended in the fight by being across the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

Back in England, the loss of the War meant that America was now off the list of places to transport prisoners.
The jails bulged, as did the inhumane hulks, a place where prisoners were chained to the sides of the ship on decks where a man could not stand without having to stoop. During daylight hours prisoners worked ashore, but at night they were chained in the dark in conditions barely even imaginable.

Something was needed drastically as a place to house the increasing population of prisoners as even hardened English authorities perceived the draconian conditions of these hulks as only a stopgap means of housing the prisoners.

Eyes shifted to the other side of the planet to a place claimed on behalf of England more than a decade previously, and plans were raised to colonise this ‘Great Southern Land’.

• Yes, lawyers played a pretty big part in the colonisation of Australia, as did America itself.