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Strategies & Market Trends : Fascist Oligarchs Attack Cute Cuddly Canadians -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: marcos who wrote (964)	3/2/2003 7:31:45 PM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1293

Silicon on iron is all they are. It's really a big sort-of contact transistor. Transistors are optically sensitive in the same way, and that is what the principle of the photo-diode - Contact of differently charged regions that allows current flow when photon electron displacement occurs at the contact region. It is demand and scale that would make them cheap. NObody wants to specify them as a cost saving solution when they are on the bleeding edge of the scale curve. Right now amorphous silicon cells are getting cheaper. Second cost is the secondary storage and splitting to AC tech that is needed.. but let's say we go to DC lights and some DC equipment as they used to on farms and do on yachts.. Right now THAT is more expensive.. and it is not just scale.. So we could do lights and a lot of electrical equipment with DC power, and not have wasteful splitters. If I had a rural location I would consider wind and solar as a way of self sufficiency. In the 1920's the US had more windmills than Holland ever did. The TVA, Roosevelt and growth of the grid changed all that. Farmer's home generation could not compete with the low maintenance, low rates and plentifulness of the grid power. It is an engineering fact that central power, even with the attendant transmission losses and step-down costs is cheaper, at least theoretically. Unit costs soar when you have to maintenance generations equipment and batteries. And it is hard to balance generation cycles, batteries and needs. The fact that it is now cheaper to install your own coal-fired boiler or "do wind" than buy off Alberta or many SW states is a sobering take on trusting the regulators. Unplanned growth that was allowed to take the place of good engineering. Carbon costs and supplies right now in the world, what with the short sighted weak political thinking we have been doing in the past 20 years, are just too variable for industry to depend on. This is not new either. In the 1960's my father sold power to industry in Northern Ontario. The geniuses in the south could not see the customers in the north, either real or developing. He drove the executives up and down Hwy 11 pointing to side roads and talking horsepower/kilowatts. A thousand people could not consume what one small sawmill did. After one hundred side roads and mines had been passed the execs finally got the picture. When the Sherman Mine went into production, they told the province they would buy gas and provide their own power. On paper at first it looked cheaper. But Hydro promised them lines, maintenance and a fixed rate for ten years. And they showed that the cost of gas would not stay even for ten years. They could not beat that. Hydro was right then. The Sherman, the Adams, the Griffiths, Texas Gulf and all the other mines went all electric. A mere 30,000 dollars an hour for just those named operations - and that was in the 1960's. It kept the Abitibi Canyon at full capacity for two decades. Texas Gulf today is called Kidd Creek and it is Ontario's single largest power customer. You know why Hydro has such a large floating debt right now? Because of lack of consumption in the province. Liberals, New Democrats, Conservatives and Federal liberals have dealt the best customer of power, the mining industry, a quadruple whammy -- and the decline has led to excess capacity. In addition they killed the Hearne, the most efficient thermal boiler in the Continent. This meant that any major maintenance at the nukes would have them buying power stateside, for the first time in 75 years. It happened. Major cost overruns in badly managed glow in the dark factories, and dwinding customer base has led to soaring costs. This war time will lead to even higher prices. And Alberta, pumping out a miniscule 8 billion dollars in oil sands product and heavy crude, has seven times the reserves of Saudi Arabia. Do we need to worry about oil supply? Only if we continues to elect not very wise stewards of our own resources. EC<:-}