Wednesday 18 June 2014

Chart: Pricing of solar power

The chart below displays an amazing decline of the cost of solar energy. In about 30 years, the cost per Watt has fallen 100 times.

While it is already a viable alternative, there are further growth opportunities for the industry in the years ahead.

What will the nations go to war for once the oil has been made next to irrelevant?





Daily chart: Pricing sunshine | The Economist




Friday 13 June 2014

BBC - Capital - Is it Zen, or just the art of getting things done?

Amazing how this is one and the same. ;)



BBC - Capital - Is it Zen, or just the art of getting things done?



GTD boils down to something like this:

"1) Adopt a reliable capture method (Evernote, voice memos, a Moleskin notebook, etc) to get thoughts out of your head.
2) Distill them to actionable items and next steps (“send receipts to Finance”, “call a kick-off meeting for an office-wide re-org”) on your daily to-do list.
3) Dedicate yourself to multiple reviews in which you put these action items into the right buckets (“must be done today”, “phone calls when I’m on the train”).
4) Do the things on the list, when you have time, prioritising as you go."

Friday 6 June 2014

What is Thorium?

What is nuclear? / Thorium As Nuclear Fuel: the good and the bad: "because both the Th-U and the U-Pu fuel cycles will last us well into the tens of thousands of years, which is about as long as modern history."


Fuel Cells as energy storage

Hydrogen Fuel Finally Graduating From Lab to City Streets - Bloomberg: "The shift to hydrogen is inevitable, and it’s happening faster than we expected,"

and
Cars that run on hydrogen can typically go more than 250 miles (400 kilometers) on a tank of the gas and then must be refilled. 
Near-term  forecasts:
“In three to five years you will see that become more prevalent,” Beckman said. “Wind and solar can make hydrogen cheap when the grid doesn’t need the power.”

Will supercapacitors replace batteries?

Some links on the topic are below.

As batteries show no considerable sign of progress, the answer may lie in a different type of technology.

Storage Wars: Batteries vs. Supercapacitors | BERC

Well, after seeing this
it seems that these two have complementary roles. Ultracapacitors for quick charge/discharge (like starting a car or braking) and batteries for the long and slow charge/discharge (regular drive/overnight charge).

Europe Faces Green Power Curbs to Stop Grids Overloading

Good news or bad?!

There’s so much power available on windy and sunny days in Germany and Austria that the number of hours producers had to pay consumers to use it doubled in the first five months of 2014
Europe Faces Green Power Curbs to Stop Grids Overloading: Energy - Bloomberg