I work for the world’s largest solar panel manufacturer, and the second oldest, and our engineers are field testing transparent thin film over our TOPCon solar cells to increase efficiency to ~32-35% efficiency. Perovskite holds some promise but, it still degrades too quickly to be market worthy.
@@peteh8077I agree. I watched a few episodes before giving up and moving to other channels that were more fact based and less speculation and entertainment.
One thing about sewage treatment. The treated water is basically non-toxic and bacterial levels are under control, with solids and numerous known contaminants removed. Not all, but most. That's about the best we can do but... plants actually do pretty well finishing the job (Lake Tahoe's water system pumps the treated sewage into a reserved watershed and by the time it reaches the other side you can't tell that it started life as treated sewage, for example). In anycase, this is massively different than what would happen if you pumped untreated sewage into the ocean or into a watershed or river.
That is if all your settling and separating tanks and equipment are working well; when a storm comes and floods the low ground almost all of these facilities are built on, the raw waste, including sludges from earlier treatments waiting to be hauled off elsewhere- all of that becomes part of the flood. Ask people in New Orleans after Katrina, or from any of Houston's three floods in the last decade or so. So, even if they work perfectly, the can and will do a Fukushima when they get flooded. Signed, a retired professional plumber and contractor.
@@fredericrike5974 Yes, absolutely so. No sewage treatment plant can handle a flood. Having a separate storm-drain system helps for strong regular storms but a flood can overwhelm everything. I'm sure people noticed that officials were declaring nearly ALL the flood waters in NC as being super-contaminated. And in fact many of the reports from people thinking they were smelling the dead.... what they were actually smelling was raw sewage. Of course up in that part of the country, every single muck pool and lagoon for chicken and pig farms is also going to super-contaminate everything when it gets flooded out. Never mind anything else! The contamination can last for weeks or longer... basically until it biodegrades naturally. -Matt
In most of the country, municipal water treatment is upset by relatively common storm events. Upsets that result in discharge of untreated or incompletely treatment water that is not in compliance with discharge concentration limits. Not just 1:50 year hurricanes. Even multiple storms per year.
The best you can do is to release water that is drinkable! That's done in places like Singapore where the output is literally used as drinking water. There are still solid etc extracted and it's not an economic or necessary level of treatment in most places though.
I read awhile back that if you moor your boat in the Avalon harbor on Catalina Island you cannot discharge your sewage overboard but the city of Avalon discharges their sewage into the harbor! Not sure how well it's treated before they discharge it, but I thought it was an interesting example of seeming government hypocrisy
Unfortunately, in 2024 we're still seeing sewage pollution issues. A local town is paying huge fines because they didn't keep up with the maintenance and expansion of their treatment plant. Several times over the last few years, there have been uncontrolled discharge events into the local river.
I like the conversation about solar panels on the roof of solar panel making companies. I chuckled when Matt said to at least put them on a 18 wheeler roof next to the building. I was thinking that would maybe power their break room and nothing on the factory floor. They can humble brag that their break room is carbon neutral.
A note on the "Solution to pollution is dilution" comment, this is a vast simplification of what happens in wastewater treatment. I just took an undergrad environmental engineering course where my professor repeated the same slogan, but we also spent the whole semester designing wastewater treatment systems where bacteria remove toxic chemicals in bio-reactors before chlorine disinfection and the water is released back into natural streams or bodies of water. Water released from wastewater treatment plants (even ones that are 30 years old) is often clean enough to be picked up by a municipal water facility downstream and be used as potable water with a small amount of additional filtration and treatment. Now if this same slogan were being repeated by somebody at a chemical or manufacturing plant, then you'd have a problem!
Boom! Shack a lacka! Your abso freaking lutely perfect water treatment plant was just flooded by 6" of rainfall in an hour nearby. All your "stuff" is being flushed out of your concrete pits and disinfecting ponds, your retention ponds are disgorging collected sludges for days, and it is all running down Main Street toward your house. How good is your system now? Because all of them I have ever seen are a series of open air tanks that batch process the water, one to another, settling and separating what are called the sludges, the more solid parts of bio waste. All in open, above ground tanks located on relatively low ground- because that is where the major sewers run too- lower ground. Your sewage lines are now full of storm water and all the live sewage has been washed out into the street as well Boom! Shack a lacka! Another 6" of rain falls; what do you do now? Ask the citizens of New Orleans after Katrina or those of Houston after any of the floods of the last dozen years- all flooded the local water treatment facilities and added infection and disease to the already terrible situations in those communities.
Silver mining used to be the primary metal for many mining sites. Right up until copper became more important and silver less so. Then, silver became the byproduct of many copper mining operations. Sane thing for gasoline. It was a by-product of kerosene production until it flipped as fuel for vehicles became more important.
NASA Goddard in Greenbelt MD was studying sewage treatment in the 70's went I went on a field trip there. They were using it to heat pipes and figuring composting solutions. I don't know for sure but I too am hopeful we are at or close to closing the loop on sewage treatment...
Very off topic but really wondered what you were talking about when you said that a "one story building" was too much for your parents. Implication was that they needed a "no story" building! Then I realised it's a quirk of our not that common language. In the UK, a one story house is a bungalow with no "upstairs." We have a two story house with a ground floor and a first floor. I have noticed that in the US, in buildings with lifts (sorry elevators), I have to get out at floor 1 to actually leave the building whereas in the UK you'd have to walk down a final flight of stairs if you got out at 1. I thought I'd Google it and here was the (helpful?) answer "In the United States, the ground floor and first floor are usually the same floor, and are at ground level. The floor above the ground floor is the second floor, and so on. The ground floor may also be called the "main floor" or "lobby" to indicate the entrance to the building. In contrast, in Europe, building floors often start with zero for the ground floor." Help!! Love the channels. Ken
CdTe PV solar panels should be limited to applications where fire risk is very low, like industrial solar, metal roofs, and maybe not for mobile vehicle applications. There should also be labeling on the back very visible to explain the special recycling requirements.
4:36 no you might block out cell phone towers, but you dont see them very often because a lot of them are on top of buildings, water towers, existing power transmission towers, old radio towers.
I nerd out on TV and radio towers to include cell towers, Monopole's, Rohn, Pie Rod Towers, panel antennas, different frequency antennas, and mounting configurations. A Company I work on a New England project the city wanted cellular but didn't want towers! Answer no tower no cellular, that area ended up not getting coverage. Deep pocket company spent like 100K for one fake pine tree tower.
Diversifying seems to be a great idea but it can often drive up costs, and in the short term your production level is often set up to maximize its efficiency at its present production so to say why can’t one geographical sourcing area make up for another is because by the time it gets up to speed in two months the other area is back up to speed and now there costs are now going to skyrocket without additional revenue.
Component vs compound toxicity does not really make sense until you look at the fate in the environment - which accounts for a combination of factors. Key factors being the compound stability, transport dynamics, and decomposition (decomposition products, toxicity of them, solubility, transport etc). Really to compare the solar technology options should be a lifecycle comparison. I don't currently have enough data on the Cd/Te compound to begin a crude qualitative lifecycle comparison...
Ever hear about the Spanish company making solar panels with cooling coils on the back that can assist with domestic heat? There are a number of "heat recovery" devices that recover the waste heat from central AC units - often used to heat swimming pools. I read too much.
Snow covered steep icy driveways are an issue. But i read an article that everyone should have multistory houses with the backup of a stairclimber. Of course no sunken livingrooms etc. But the argument was increased fitness. But steep icy driveways are a hazard. We have 17 steps. Our friends complain but we're fine.
On the wind turbines, and cell towers are ignored, I still see microwave towers on mountain tops but we don't see them either. We need to look forward to satellite to cell and elsewhere to be ubiquitous. Still there are people complaining with solar.
Solar and wind have a place - anywhere they are cost effective. This means the cost of the electricity produced must comptete with other sources on a non-subsidized basis.
Learning point: Do you know that Decimate originally meant “taking a tenth of’’? So to decimate a population, the attacking army would remove a tenth of the population.
I wonder why we do not have a substance in a spraycan or as paint to make a giant solar panel yourself. several layers and busbars in between layers. How difficult would that be?
There are cell trees all over California, and up in the mountains they are painted green and have fake tree limbs and leaves and such to try to blend-in to the scenery. Also hilarious... but that's what they had to do to overcome the people's concerns at planning meetings. But there's a problem. But there's a problem. You see, the paint kinda fades over time from all the sun, so the cell tower tree slowly becomes a lighter green than the trees around it. Ah well.
I think yearly footnotes on how the home is going would be nice. A section added to a larger video, particularly if one of the updates relates to the rest of the video. Save the hour of calculator work for the Patrion memberships.
Thank you for this video. This verifies the fact that there is NO energy source that is cheap, abundant, safe, and non-polluting. None. When my wife and I moved into a house here in Oregon we had solar panels put on the roof, a heat-pump installed, and we still have plans to put in a heat-pump water heater and washer-dryer. The truth is, however, that none of these technologies are helping much with climate change.. The resource extraction, construction, transportation, installation, replacement, recycling and disposal of these technologies negates almost all of the advantages these gadgets will offer. It would be great to get rid of the gas hookup at our home but that's not really "solving" the problem. The only real "solution" I can see is a global "power down" in which we globally reduce the amount of "power" we are "demanding." The problem is really a product of our industrial societies fed by capitalism in which everyone is bombarded daily with insidious advertisements designed to increase our "power demand." (The only real "demand" is in our indoctrinated brains.). We need to realize that sustainability will never be compatible with capitalism. Sorry. But I see no other path that will allow our species to survive.
Guys, it also says something very dark about where our public education has already gone in recent decades. How much teachers are teaching from rote, without ever doing the fact checking prior to introducing them as facts to students. The price of aluminum scrap stays less than the cost to mine and process new source aluminum- and after a few big swings has resulted in a pretty stable market for that commodity. YMMV, as usual. And if CdTe takes off, there well might not be enough companies processing the input materials to cover it, so there is where short term instability comes from. Once there are several established companies, their mutual competition will help keep to a lower price.
Interesting note on those “unsightly” things like wind turbine and cell towers. Cell towers as “trees” is not uncommon (there’s one a mile or so from my house) but also since they will still function this way, inside of church steeples are also a thing. To further incentivize said churches, paying them a monthly fee (usually hundreds) seems to "convince" the church this is worth doing. Paying a city to replace streetlights with 5G towers is another incentive. For wind, I know in Texas if they are saying “we can pay you for land usage on this farmland for the wind turbine, making that field that only products crops a few months a year into year-around income” well, that’s a convincing argument - especially if you throw in free electricity or something. If wind solutions can come up with better disguises and more cash incentives I think that the ugliness of mounting things on buildings will be overcome. The secret to green tech adoption is green money. That’s why conservative old Texas is so “green”.
Comercial CdTe solar panels are 15% to 22% efficiency. A Stirling solar engine is a bit more complicated, but its upwards of 30% efficient. It need proper hardware to concentrate sunlight to produce heat, but this could also provide warmth ina combined heat and power system.
Solar panel makers don’t user their own panels because they fully understand how ludicrous solar is in most parts of the US. At best you get power half the day and that assumes bright sunshine al day. Most days in the northeast in winter, you get maybe 5% of the theoretical output. My 12.5 kW array should product 300 kWh each day at 100% output. A few days ago I got only 8 kWh which is only 2.7% of full output for a 24 hour period. How many other energy sources would be accepted if they put out only 2.7% of their theoretical output? Even my best days in the summer put out only about 80 kWh which is only 27% of array capacity. THAT is the main issue with solar.
The solution to sewage is hydrothermal carbonization facilities you can run it off sewage it destroys forever chemicals, microplastics, viruses, bacteria and creates micronutrient rich fertilizer for local farms.
I can corroborate Babarudra's comment re: industry's regard for the presumed role for the environment. In the depths of the Reagan '80's (anyone remember James Watt?) I took a course at UMass Amherst called "Environmental Economics", thinking it was meant to shine light on humanities impact on nature and subsequently the harm that does to a country's economy....an argument against polluting basically. It turned out to be the polar opposite position, promoting the term "Optimal Level of Pollution" theory (OLP) which may still get pushed around industry circles. It states that any natural system, a river, a canyon e.g., has an OLP equating to a number, one number, which describes the threshold volume of pollution that that natural system can possibly handle, beyond which it collapses, but BEFORE which industry is welcome, even encouraged, to walk right up to the line before crossing. Obviously it bears no reflection on reality; besides being morally repugnant at its core, it didn't differentiate between types of pollution nor the cascading effects of different types of pollution in combination. It was as if industry said to environmentalists: "Hey, the planet is ours to profit from, but we added your number to our math to shut you hippies up. Math is hard, what more do you want?" These were equations I couldn't morally bring myself to solve because doing so would, in my mind make me a participant in legitimizing the premise. So I willingly, and soundly, failed the course.
I just found your podcast and loved it. It's funny. Please can either of you do a video on the most advanced or potentially latest sewage treatments available now or in the future?
Thanks for sharing such valuable information! I have a quick question: My OKX wallet holds some USDT, and I have the seed phrase. (alarm fetch churn bridge exercise tape speak race clerk couch crater letter). How should I go about transferring them to Binance?
Uh... There's a lot of people that are concerned about toxicity of solar. The panel only lasts for about 10-15 years. Broken panels happen all the time, broken cadmium panels are really bad. There was a HUGE hail storm that wrecked a few hundred million panels.
The panels have warranties for 25 years typically. I use exclusively used panels,only because they were much cheaper than new, and they are still very good. The newer panels are much more productive per square foot and the price has dropped significantly. I would like to experiment with panels as a structural element instead of recycling them for materials. Reuse saves the energy investment in manufacturing. If the panels were made into a sandwich,glass turned in,with four to six inches of foam insulation in the middle,you’d have a wall with tremendous strength. Because there is an aluminum frame at regular intervals you could mount drywall on the inside and attach siding to the outside of the building. Windows and doors could easily be worked into the dimensions of panels left out. Air tight,waterproof,insect proof,well insulated,and far more resistant to high winds in tornado alley.
Concerning the strength of solar panels ,look at 35.4361599N 85.3328155W on Google Maps where I laid 16 used panels on the ground temporarily while building a pole barn. Walking by one morning, I saw tire tracks where I drove my Highlander across one corner. The panel is back in Texas now,unbroken and working fine.
Regarding the esthetic aspect of turbines, I was stunned by the elegance and beauty of the turbines close to Sweetwater Texas the first time I saw them. A crowd of well dressed ballet dancers turning wind into energy. Then I saw a pathetic pump jack squeezing out the stinky crude oil sitting under one struggling to maintain relevance. We are being covered up in East Texas by solar farms,a pleasing contrast to the refineries and chemical plants on the Gulf Coast.
CdTe is not new tech, it is slightly later that industrial silicon PV. It's only benefit it Cd and Te sequestration, there is nothing else good about it. CdTe is not as durable as Silicon, it can only compete with silicon in PV fields and it cannot tolerate shade. You will never see it on a home and it will always be a tiny portion of PV installed capacity. It was a huge mistake advancing First Solar so much government subsidy money. The money should have gone to making silicon PV a domestically produced product or greatly bringing down the costs of the balance of materials. CdTe will eventually disappear, it cannot keep up with silicon PV advances.
Do you think "Marc" ever bothered to do a Google search on how they treat sewage? Or that the water he's drinking right now was once pure sewage waste?
I live in BFE Texas, and used to drive a big rig OTR. I see wind turbines on the horizon here, and drove through dozens over the years. The visual impact of 50-200 towers, 30 - 100 meters tall, is HUGE compared a cell tower every mile or two in suburbia with stripmalls, parking lots, and other crap. I am a huge proponent of wind and solar, but I am very well aware of the extent of the visual impact the turbines have. I think they're neat, and cool engineering, as well as an awesome step forward for our journey away from petroleum. Solar farms cam also be huge, but since they are rarely over 10-15 feet, their visual impact on the environment is much less that the wind towers you see from miles around. I suspect a significant part of the nimby-ism would align with certain ideological/political demographics.
No, NIMBY is because when it's in your backyard it's ugly. We also know when it's dark and not windy, you still need baseload power. It's a waste of resources.
You were talking about chemicals being inexpensive cuz they're waste products. Then it was pointed out that if they become a useful commodity that the price will go up. I'm thinking about in terms of our society and capitalism. Capitalism money is a way to give something value. I would like to argue that the value of anything goes to zero if nobody's alive to use that system. Capitalism gets in the way of progress in that a really good idea might not be popular and popularity is a big component of capitalism. Something to mull on.
It’s so very stupid to put stuff up on the cell tower. It’s idiots listening to all the negative to keep blowing up this stuff. They are doing a lot better about the recycling this product.
Cell towers are a thing and wind turbines are going to be ubiquitous. Just like power pylons stretching across the countryside. Perspective is important.
Cost will determine market penetration. One must also remember that Cadmium has been used in industry for a century and only recently, have people been concerned about cadmium - is the cadmium concern over blown???.
There is no comparison between cell towers and wind turbines. Wind turbines are generally much larger, and they move and movement catches the eye much faster than a still target. The other thing is that cell towers are useful to almost everyone, whereas wind turbines are useful to no one.
You are wrong to make wild assumptions about multi story homes without doing your research. Many European homes, where elderly live, have many and difficult to navigate stairs. You may be right, they certainly do cause accidents. But you need to do a lot of number crunching before making even an observation.
Wind turbines and cellphone towers are both ugly, but wind turbines come in groups of dozens. It also could be people tuning out cellphone towers because while ubiquitous, they are MUCH more discreet than a wind turbine. In debate this is a false equivalency logical fallacy. You two are making really dumb arguments.
Solar panel makers don’t user their own panels because they fully understand how ludicrous solar is in most parts of the US. At best you get power half the day and that assumes bright sunshine al day. Most days in the northeast in winter, you get maybe 5% of the theoretical output. My 12.5 kW array should product 300 kWh each day at 100% output. A few days ago I got only 8 kWh which is only 2.7% of full output for a 24 hour period. How many other energy sources would be accepted if they put out only 2.7% of their theoretical output? Even my best days in the summer put out only about 80 kWh which is only 27% of array capacity. THAT is the main issue with solar.
I work for the world’s largest solar panel manufacturer, and the second oldest, and our engineers are field testing transparent thin film over our TOPCon solar cells to increase efficiency to ~32-35% efficiency. Perovskite holds some promise but, it still degrades too quickly to be market worthy.
Matt feral doesn't actually report on feasible tech... He's a pseudo intellectual that makes videos for pseudo intellectuals.
@@peteh8077I agree. I watched a few episodes before giving up and moving to other channels that were more fact based and less speculation and entertainment.
Well, point the way to a couple of these fact based, less speculative channels please. I prefer my YT viewing to be more efficient.
One thing about sewage treatment. The treated water is basically non-toxic and bacterial levels are under control, with solids and numerous known contaminants removed. Not all, but most. That's about the best we can do but... plants actually do pretty well finishing the job (Lake Tahoe's water system pumps the treated sewage into a reserved watershed and by the time it reaches the other side you can't tell that it started life as treated sewage, for example).
In anycase, this is massively different than what would happen if you pumped untreated sewage into the ocean or into a watershed or river.
That is if all your settling and separating tanks and equipment are working well; when a storm comes and floods the low ground almost all of these facilities are built on, the raw waste, including sludges from earlier treatments waiting to be hauled off elsewhere- all of that becomes part of the flood. Ask people in New Orleans after Katrina, or from any of Houston's three floods in the last decade or so. So, even if they work perfectly, the can and will do a Fukushima when they get flooded.
Signed, a retired professional plumber and contractor.
@@fredericrike5974 Yes, absolutely so. No sewage treatment plant can handle a flood. Having a separate storm-drain system helps for strong regular storms but a flood can overwhelm everything. I'm sure people noticed that officials were declaring nearly ALL the flood waters in NC as being super-contaminated.
And in fact many of the reports from people thinking they were smelling the dead.... what they were actually smelling was raw sewage.
Of course up in that part of the country, every single muck pool and lagoon for chicken and pig farms is also going to super-contaminate everything when it gets flooded out. Never mind anything else! The contamination can last for weeks or longer... basically until it biodegrades naturally.
-Matt
In most of the country, municipal water treatment is upset by relatively common storm events. Upsets that result in discharge of untreated or incompletely treatment water that is not in compliance with discharge concentration limits.
Not just 1:50 year hurricanes.
Even multiple storms per year.
The best you can do is to release water that is drinkable! That's done in places like Singapore where the output is literally used as drinking water. There are still solid etc extracted and it's not an economic or necessary level of treatment in most places though.
I read awhile back that if you moor your boat in the Avalon harbor on Catalina Island you cannot discharge your sewage overboard but the city of Avalon discharges their sewage into the harbor! Not sure how well it's treated before they discharge it, but I thought it was an interesting example of seeming government hypocrisy
Unfortunately, in 2024 we're still seeing sewage pollution issues. A local town is paying huge fines because they didn't keep up with the maintenance and expansion of their treatment plant. Several times over the last few years, there have been uncontrolled discharge events into the local river.
I like the conversation about solar panels on the roof of solar panel making companies.
I chuckled when Matt said to at least put them on a 18 wheeler roof next to the building. I was thinking that would maybe power their break room and nothing on the factory floor.
They can humble brag that their break room is carbon neutral.
A note on the "Solution to pollution is dilution" comment, this is a vast simplification of what happens in wastewater treatment. I just took an undergrad environmental engineering course where my professor repeated the same slogan, but we also spent the whole semester designing wastewater treatment systems where bacteria remove toxic chemicals in bio-reactors before chlorine disinfection and the water is released back into natural streams or bodies of water. Water released from wastewater treatment plants (even ones that are 30 years old) is often clean enough to be picked up by a municipal water facility downstream and be used as potable water with a small amount of additional filtration and treatment.
Now if this same slogan were being repeated by somebody at a chemical or manufacturing plant, then you'd have a problem!
Boom! Shack a lacka! Your abso freaking lutely perfect water treatment plant was just flooded by 6" of rainfall in an hour nearby. All your "stuff" is being flushed out of your concrete pits and disinfecting ponds, your retention ponds are disgorging collected sludges for days, and it is all running down Main Street toward your house. How good is your system now? Because all of them I have ever seen are a series of open air tanks that batch process the water, one to another, settling and separating what are called the sludges, the more solid parts of bio waste. All in open, above ground tanks located on relatively low ground- because that is where the major sewers run too- lower ground. Your sewage lines are now full of storm water and all the live sewage has been washed out into the street as well Boom! Shack a lacka! Another 6" of rain falls; what do you do now? Ask the citizens of New Orleans after Katrina or those of Houston after any of the floods of the last dozen years- all flooded the local water treatment facilities and added infection and disease to the already terrible situations in those communities.
the nuclear industry uses this; what are they doing right now with the contaminated water at Fukushima? diluting it in the Sea...
Silver mining used to be the primary metal for many mining sites. Right up until copper became more important and silver less so. Then, silver became the byproduct of many copper mining operations.
Sane thing for gasoline. It was a by-product of kerosene production until it flipped as fuel for vehicles became more important.
NASA Goddard in Greenbelt MD was studying sewage treatment in the 70's went I went on a field trip there. They were using it to heat pipes and figuring composting solutions. I don't know for sure but I too am hopeful we are at or close to closing the loop on sewage treatment...
Very off topic but really wondered what you were talking about when you said that a "one story building" was too much for your parents. Implication was that they needed a "no story" building! Then I realised it's a quirk of our not that common language. In the UK, a one story house is a bungalow with no "upstairs." We have a two story house with a ground floor and a first floor.
I have noticed that in the US, in buildings with lifts (sorry elevators), I have to get out at floor 1 to actually leave the building whereas in the UK you'd have to walk down a final flight of stairs if you got out at 1.
I thought I'd Google it and here was the (helpful?) answer
"In the United States, the ground floor and first floor are usually the same floor, and are at ground level. The floor above the ground floor is the second floor, and so on. The ground floor may also be called the "main floor" or "lobby" to indicate the entrance to the building.
In contrast, in Europe, building floors often start with zero for the ground floor."
Help!! Love the channels.
Ken
The species of those tall evergreen trees masquerading as a disguised cell tower is called the "She'll-call-ya".
CdTe PV solar panels should be limited to applications where fire risk is very low, like industrial solar, metal roofs, and maybe not for mobile vehicle applications. There should also be labeling on the back very visible to explain the special recycling requirements.
4:36 no you might block out cell phone towers, but you dont see them very often because a lot of them are on top of buildings, water towers, existing power transmission towers, old radio towers.
I nerd out on TV and radio towers to include cell towers, Monopole's, Rohn, Pie Rod Towers, panel antennas, different frequency antennas, and mounting configurations. A Company I work on a New England project the city wanted cellular but didn't want towers! Answer no tower no cellular, that area ended up not getting coverage. Deep pocket company spent like 100K for one fake pine tree tower.
In my small town we have 2 cell towers disguised as trees and they fit in very well. If you are not looking for it, you would not notice them.
Diversifying seems to be a great idea but it can often drive up costs, and in the short term your production level is often set up to maximize its efficiency at its present production so to say why can’t one geographical sourcing area make up for another is because by the time it gets up to speed in two months the other area is back up to speed and now there costs are now going to skyrocket without additional revenue.
Component vs compound toxicity does not really make sense until you look at the fate in the environment - which accounts for a combination of factors. Key factors being the compound stability, transport dynamics, and decomposition (decomposition products, toxicity of them, solubility, transport etc).
Really to compare the solar technology options should be a lifecycle comparison.
I don't currently have enough data on the Cd/Te compound to begin a crude qualitative lifecycle comparison...
Wind turbines have moving parts, and motion naturally draws the eye. It's why you don't notice the spider sitting in the corner right away
I've been past the First Solar plant in the Toledo area and I thought they had their panels on the roof. It may have been an older picture.
Cell Towers They do that all over the place... In Cali they're all Palm Trees... Here in Vermont its a giant pine...
Until you solve the base load problem inherent in all solar designs, you are still putting lipstick on a pig!😂
The flat roof solar mounts are not 'screwed down' to the roofs... They use ballast to hold the panels...no reason not to have panels on the roof...
Ever hear about the Spanish company making solar panels with cooling coils on the back that can assist with domestic heat?
There are a number of "heat recovery" devices that recover the waste heat from central AC units - often used to heat swimming pools. I read too much.
Snow covered steep icy driveways are an issue. But i read an article that everyone should have multistory houses with the backup of a stairclimber. Of course no sunken livingrooms etc. But the argument was increased fitness. But steep icy driveways are a hazard. We have 17 steps. Our friends complain but we're fine.
"What is Going on with Shipping" - can help with understanding worldwide shipping.
On the wind turbines, and cell towers are ignored, I still see microwave towers on mountain tops but we don't see them either. We need to look forward to satellite to cell and elsewhere to be ubiquitous. Still there are people complaining with solar.
Solar and wind have a place - anywhere they are cost effective.
This means the cost of the electricity produced must comptete with other sources on a non-subsidized basis.
Learning point:
Do you know that Decimate originally meant “taking a tenth of’’?
So to decimate a population, the attacking army would remove a tenth of the population.
When the Roman Legions screwed up, they would kill 1/10th of the troops.
I wonder why we do not have a substance in a spraycan or as paint to make a giant solar panel yourself. several layers and busbars in between layers. How difficult would that be?
ref: 15:14
Many industry buildings are not constructed for mounting anything extra like solar panels.
There's a 'cell tree' near the border of NY and CT on the Hutch/Merritt parkway. It's hilarious.
There are cell trees all over California, and up in the mountains they are painted green and have fake tree limbs and leaves and such to try to blend-in to the scenery. Also hilarious... but that's what they had to do to overcome the people's concerns at planning meetings. But there's a problem.
But there's a problem. You see, the paint kinda fades over time from all the sun, so the cell tower tree slowly becomes a lighter green than the trees around it. Ah well.
I think yearly footnotes on how the home is going would be nice. A section added to a larger video, particularly if one of the updates relates to the rest of the video. Save the hour of calculator work for the Patrion memberships.
Thank you for this video. This verifies the fact that there is NO energy source that is cheap, abundant, safe, and non-polluting. None.
When my wife and I moved into a house here in Oregon we had solar panels put on the roof, a heat-pump installed, and we still have plans to put in a heat-pump water heater and washer-dryer. The truth is, however, that none of these technologies are helping much with climate change.. The resource extraction, construction, transportation, installation, replacement, recycling and disposal of these technologies negates almost all of the advantages these gadgets will offer. It would be great to get rid of the gas hookup at our home but that's not really "solving" the problem.
The only real "solution" I can see is a global "power down" in which we globally reduce the amount of "power" we are "demanding." The problem is really a product of our industrial societies fed by capitalism in which everyone is bombarded daily with insidious advertisements designed to increase our "power demand." (The only real "demand" is in our indoctrinated brains.). We need to realize that sustainability will never be compatible with capitalism. Sorry. But I see no other path that will allow our species to survive.
Guys, it also says something very dark about where our public education has already gone in recent decades. How much teachers are teaching from rote, without ever doing the fact checking prior to introducing them as facts to students.
The price of aluminum scrap stays less than the cost to mine and process new source aluminum- and after a few big swings has resulted in a pretty stable market for that commodity. YMMV, as usual. And if CdTe takes off, there well might not be enough companies processing the input materials to cover it, so there is where short term instability comes from. Once there are several established companies, their mutual competition will help keep to a lower price.
Interesting note on those “unsightly” things like wind turbine and cell towers. Cell towers as “trees” is not uncommon (there’s one a mile or so from my house) but also since they will still function this way, inside of church steeples are also a thing. To further incentivize said churches, paying them a monthly fee (usually hundreds) seems to "convince" the church this is worth doing. Paying a city to replace streetlights with 5G towers is another incentive. For wind, I know in Texas if they are saying “we can pay you for land usage on this farmland for the wind turbine, making that field that only products crops a few months a year into year-around income” well, that’s a convincing argument - especially if you throw in free electricity or something. If wind solutions can come up with better disguises and more cash incentives I think that the ugliness of mounting things on buildings will be overcome. The secret to green tech adoption is green money. That’s why conservative old Texas is so “green”.
Cell Towers might be somewhat less in coming years if AST Space mobile works out as a cellular provider Worldwide.
Comercial CdTe solar panels are 15% to 22% efficiency.
A Stirling solar engine is a bit more complicated, but its upwards of 30% efficient. It need proper hardware to concentrate sunlight to produce heat, but this could also provide warmth ina combined heat and power system.
=solar thermal generator, can be big
there are good acronyms and acronyms that catch everyone's attention like Actual Smart Summon. Pretty sure most people instantly thought of tesla cars
'Tesla Instant Travel System'
@@thekaxmaxnobody complains about the big ones except the person with sore lower back.
Solar panel makers don’t user their own panels because they fully understand how ludicrous solar is in most parts of the US. At best you get power half the day and that assumes bright sunshine al day. Most days in the northeast in winter, you get maybe 5% of the theoretical output. My 12.5 kW array should product 300 kWh each day at 100% output. A few days ago I got only 8 kWh which is only 2.7% of full output for a 24 hour period. How many other energy sources would be accepted if they put out only 2.7% of their theoretical output?
Even my best days in the summer put out only about 80 kWh which is only 27% of array capacity. THAT is the main issue with solar.
The solution to sewage is hydrothermal carbonization facilities you can run it off sewage it destroys forever chemicals, microplastics, viruses, bacteria and creates micronutrient rich fertilizer for local farms.
Why nobody talks about tidal wave energy generation? I think tidal waves have a lot more potential than wind and solar
I can corroborate Babarudra's comment re: industry's regard for the presumed role for the environment. In the depths of the Reagan '80's (anyone remember James Watt?) I took a course at UMass Amherst called "Environmental Economics", thinking it was meant to shine light on humanities impact on nature and subsequently the harm that does to a country's economy....an argument against polluting basically. It turned out to be the polar opposite position, promoting the term "Optimal Level of Pollution" theory (OLP) which may still get pushed around industry circles. It states that any natural system, a river, a canyon e.g., has an OLP equating to a number, one number, which describes the threshold volume of pollution that that natural system can possibly handle, beyond which it collapses, but BEFORE which industry is welcome, even encouraged, to walk right up to the line before crossing. Obviously it bears no reflection on reality; besides being morally repugnant at its core, it didn't differentiate between types of pollution nor the cascading effects of different types of pollution in combination. It was as if industry said to environmentalists: "Hey, the planet is ours to profit from, but we added your number to our math to shut you hippies up. Math is hard, what more do you want?" These were equations I couldn't morally bring myself to solve because doing so would, in my mind make me a participant in legitimizing the premise. So I willingly, and soundly, failed the course.
I just found your podcast and loved it. It's funny. Please can either of you do a video on the most advanced or potentially latest sewage treatments available now or in the future?
Actually that's an interesting topic, what IS new in sewage treatment technology, if anything is new?
Thanks for sharing such valuable information! I have a quick question: My OKX wallet holds some USDT, and I have the seed phrase. (alarm fetch churn bridge exercise tape speak race clerk couch crater letter). How should I go about transferring them to Binance?
Uh... There's a lot of people that are concerned about toxicity of solar. The panel only lasts for about 10-15 years. Broken panels happen all the time, broken cadmium panels are really bad. There was a HUGE hail storm that wrecked a few hundred million panels.
TBS
The panels have warranties for 25 years typically. I use exclusively used panels,only because they were much cheaper than new, and they are still very good. The newer panels are much more productive per square foot and the price has dropped significantly.
I would like to experiment with panels as a structural element instead of recycling them for materials. Reuse saves the energy investment in manufacturing.
If the panels were made into a sandwich,glass turned in,with four to six inches of foam insulation in the middle,you’d have a wall with tremendous strength. Because there is an aluminum frame at regular intervals you could mount drywall on the inside and attach siding to the outside of the building. Windows and doors could easily be worked into the dimensions of panels left out.
Air tight,waterproof,insect proof,well insulated,and far more resistant to high winds in tornado alley.
Concerning the strength of solar panels ,look at 35.4361599N 85.3328155W on Google Maps where I laid 16 used panels on the ground temporarily while building a pole barn.
Walking by one morning, I saw tire tracks where I drove my Highlander across one corner. The panel is back in Texas now,unbroken and working fine.
So I double checked, the title says it's about solar. I don't like bait and switch.
Regarding the esthetic aspect of turbines, I was stunned by the elegance and beauty of the turbines close to Sweetwater Texas the first time I saw them. A crowd of well dressed ballet dancers turning wind into energy.
Then I saw a pathetic pump jack squeezing out the stinky crude oil sitting under one struggling to maintain relevance.
We are being covered up in East Texas by solar farms,a pleasing contrast to the refineries and chemical plants on the Gulf Coast.
CdTe is not new tech, it is slightly later that industrial silicon PV. It's only benefit it Cd and Te sequestration, there is nothing else good about it. CdTe is not as durable as Silicon, it can only compete with silicon in PV fields and it cannot tolerate shade. You will never see it on a home and it will always be a tiny portion of PV installed capacity. It was a huge mistake advancing First Solar so much government subsidy money. The money should have gone to making silicon PV a domestically produced product or greatly bringing down the costs of the balance of materials. CdTe will eventually disappear, it cannot keep up with silicon PV advances.
Rare? Almost every metal part you buy in a hardware store is cadmium plated!
Do you think "Marc" ever bothered to do a Google search on how they treat sewage? Or that the water he's drinking right now was once pure sewage waste?
I live in BFE Texas, and used to drive a big rig OTR. I see wind turbines on the horizon here, and drove through dozens over the years. The visual impact of 50-200 towers, 30 - 100 meters tall, is HUGE compared a cell tower every mile or two in suburbia with stripmalls, parking lots, and other crap.
I am a huge proponent of wind and solar, but I am very well aware of the extent of the visual impact the turbines have. I think they're neat, and cool engineering, as well as an awesome step forward for our journey away from petroleum.
Solar farms cam also be huge, but since they are rarely over 10-15 feet, their visual impact on the environment is much less that the wind towers you see from miles around.
I suspect a significant part of the nimby-ism would align with certain ideological/political demographics.
No, NIMBY is because when it's in your backyard it's ugly. We also know when it's dark and not windy, you still need baseload power. It's a waste of resources.
You were talking about chemicals being inexpensive cuz they're waste products. Then it was pointed out that if they become a useful commodity that the price will go up. I'm thinking about in terms of our society and capitalism. Capitalism money is a way to give something value. I would like to argue that the value of anything goes to zero if nobody's alive to use that system. Capitalism gets in the way of progress in that a really good idea might not be popular and popularity is a big component of capitalism. Something to mull on.
You two seem unqualified to have reasonable opinions.
It’s so very stupid to put stuff up on the cell tower. It’s idiots listening to all the negative to keep blowing up this stuff. They are doing a lot better about the recycling this product.
Cell towers are a thing and wind turbines are going to be ubiquitous. Just like power pylons stretching across the countryside. Perspective is important.
Cost will determine market penetration.
One must also remember that Cadmium has been used in industry for a century and only recently, have people been concerned about cadmium - is the cadmium concern over blown???.
There is no comparison between cell towers and wind turbines. Wind turbines are generally much larger, and they move and movement catches the eye much faster than a still target. The other thing is that cell towers are useful to almost everyone, whereas wind turbines are useful to no one.
You are wrong to make wild assumptions about multi story homes without doing your research. Many European homes, where elderly live, have many and difficult to navigate stairs. You may be right, they certainly do cause accidents. But you need to do a lot of number crunching before making even an observation.
Wind turbines and cellphone towers are both ugly, but wind turbines come in groups of dozens. It also could be people tuning out cellphone towers because while ubiquitous, they are MUCH more discreet than a wind turbine. In debate this is a false equivalency logical fallacy. You two are making really dumb arguments.
Solar panel makers don’t user their own panels because they fully understand how ludicrous solar is in most parts of the US. At best you get power half the day and that assumes bright sunshine al day. Most days in the northeast in winter, you get maybe 5% of the theoretical output. My 12.5 kW array should product 300 kWh each day at 100% output. A few days ago I got only 8 kWh which is only 2.7% of full output for a 24 hour period. How many other energy sources would be accepted if they put out only 2.7% of their theoretical output?
Even my best days in the summer put out only about 80 kWh which is only 27% of array capacity. THAT is the main issue with solar.