Razziel

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Posts by Razziel

• 
  89

  +$4.00 Gasoline. How does it change the Energy game

  by designs in

  1. social
  2. current

  will it put pressure on politicians to approve the keystone pipeline.. should the nation's refineries stop selling as much gasoline as exports.. how does +$4.00 gasoline affect your monthly budget, how do you adjust..

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  Razziel

  Solar is a good option in some locations for powering homes and offices, but I don't think it will see much large-scale use in powering vehicles, at least in the US. The Nissan Leaf is rated at 34kw-hr/100 miles. The average home in the US used 31.5 kW-hr/day in 2010 per the DoE. There's just too many cars, and we drive too many miles (over 3 trillion miles per year in the US) for solar to be used to provide a great percentage of that power.

  I did another quick calculation, and if we drove those 3 trillion miles in Nissan Leafs (not possible since much of that is commercial trucking) running off solar, we'd have to cover 750 square miles in solar panels. A little less land area than the State of Rhode Island. Much better to concentrate our efforts to onsite solar power generation for homes and offices, utilizing unused space on roofs like you mention, designs. I think we're going to have to use another energy generation source for transportation.
• 
  89

  +$4.00 Gasoline. How does it change the Energy game

  by designs in

  1. social
  2. current

  will it put pressure on politicians to approve the keystone pipeline.. should the nation's refineries stop selling as much gasoline as exports.. how does +$4.00 gasoline affect your monthly budget, how do you adjust..

  1. 
  2. 
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• 

  Razziel

  Well here's one such article from the WSJ that mentions it. I think my post was pretty self-explanatory about what I meant by IP. I was talking about all of the shiny steel tools used to get oil out of the ground. Those are designed and manufactured primarily by oil-service companies, but that's a distinction most people don't make. They lump them all together as "oil companies."
• 
  89

  +$4.00 Gasoline. How does it change the Energy game

  by designs in

  1. social
  2. current

  will it put pressure on politicians to approve the keystone pipeline.. should the nation's refineries stop selling as much gasoline as exports.. how does +$4.00 gasoline affect your monthly budget, how do you adjust..

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Razziel

  Something like 80% of the world's oil reserves have already been nationalized. The commercial oil producers still have a lot of clout with the rest, but it's the sovereign oil producers that call the shots. Many of the nationalized companies don't respect intellectual property or patent law either. They'll take a product from a commercial company, send it off to the local machine shop, reverse-engineer it, and start making their own (often inferior) copies, and then shut out the commercial company altogether.
• 
  89

  +$4.00 Gasoline. How does it change the Energy game

  by designs in

  1. social
  2. current

  will it put pressure on politicians to approve the keystone pipeline.. should the nation's refineries stop selling as much gasoline as exports.. how does +$4.00 gasoline affect your monthly budget, how do you adjust..

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Razziel

  The first calc is in watt-hrs. The second is in watts. Hence why one is multiplied by 24 and the other one isn't.
• 
  89

  +$4.00 Gasoline. How does it change the Energy game

  by designs in

  1. social
  2. current

  will it put pressure on politicians to approve the keystone pipeline.. should the nation's refineries stop selling as much gasoline as exports.. how does +$4.00 gasoline affect your monthly budget, how do you adjust..

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Razziel

  I think you saw the 85% and stopped reading from there. I didn't use the 85% in the estimation , I used the 25% in calculating the square footage to produce the kw-hr equivalent of 1 gallon of gas. And I also used the 240 watts/m^2 average from the article you posted, NOT 1400 or 1000 watts/m^2. I just listed that for reference.
• 
  89

  +$4.00 Gasoline. How does it change the Energy game

  by designs in

  1. social
  2. current

  will it put pressure on politicians to approve the keystone pipeline.. should the nation's refineries stop selling as much gasoline as exports.. how does +$4.00 gasoline affect your monthly budget, how do you adjust..

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Razziel

  BTS, have you ever heard of a quick back-of-the-envelope estimation? Jesus Christ. It's just a quick sanity check calculation to see if the numbers are even in the ballpark of what's possible.
• 
  89

  +$4.00 Gasoline. How does it change the Energy game

  by designs in

  1. social
  2. current

  will it put pressure on politicians to approve the keystone pipeline.. should the nation's refineries stop selling as much gasoline as exports.. how does +$4.00 gasoline affect your monthly budget, how do you adjust..

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Razziel

  That 85% came from the Shockley-Queisser limit, with infinite layers of p-n junctions. Not realistic, just idealistic.
• 
  89

  +$4.00 Gasoline. How does it change the Energy game

  by designs in

  1. social
  2. current

  will it put pressure on politicians to approve the keystone pipeline.. should the nation's refineries stop selling as much gasoline as exports.. how does +$4.00 gasoline affect your monthly budget, how do you adjust..

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Razziel

  BTS I don't believe that will be done, I was just making a generous assumption to see what we could ideally do.
• 
  89

  +$4.00 Gasoline. How does it change the Energy game

  by designs in

  1. social
  2. current

  will it put pressure on politicians to approve the keystone pipeline.. should the nation's refineries stop selling as much gasoline as exports.. how does +$4.00 gasoline affect your monthly budget, how do you adjust..

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Razziel

  From my post above, 22.3*.25 = 5.575 watts per square foot
  
  1,000,000/5.575 = 179,372 square feet to produce 1,000,000 watts
  
  43,560 square feet in 1 acre
  
  179.372/43,560 = 4 acres
  
  My math with several assumptions roughly matches design’s 3 to 5 acres for a 1MW solar plant.
• 
  89

  +$4.00 Gasoline. How does it change the Energy game

  by designs in

  1. social
  2. current

  will it put pressure on politicians to approve the keystone pipeline.. should the nation's refineries stop selling as much gasoline as exports.. how does +$4.00 gasoline affect your monthly budget, how do you adjust..

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Razziel

  Edit: I fixed a screwup.

  Oh, so let's say you do that every day. How long is the payoff.

  Year 1 $5,000/365 = $13.7/gallon

  Year 2 $5,000/730 = $6.8/gallon

  Year 3 $5,000/1095 = $4.5/gallon

  Year 4 $5,000/1460 = $3.4/gallon

  Year 5 $5,000/1825 = $2.7/gallon

  Year 6 $5,000/2190 = $2.2/gallon

  Year 7 $5,000/2555 = $1.9/gallon

  Year 8 $5,000/2920 = $1.7/gallon

  Year 9 $5,000/3285 = $1.5/gallon

  Year 10 $5,000/3650 = $1.36/gallon

  Got to today's gas prices in my area by year 4. That's actually not that bad of a break-even time.