Chemical agency ties under review – Los Angeles Times

Apparently, my political prognostication skills are good. Coal state shills senators want to give coal to liquid fuel a $10 billion dollar subsidy loan.

Democrats Propose Loan Plan for Coal Plants – New York Times

As the Senate began debate today on a sprawling bill to reduce oil consumption, top Democrats were circulating a proposal to provide $10 billion in loans for plants that make diesel fuel from coal.

The proposal highlights the horse-trading involving powerful industry groups as Democratic leaders push for legislation that would require higher mileage in cars and a huge increase in the production of renewable fuels made from plants like switchgrass.

Yes, one of the lesser known provisions of these bills would expand renewable energy subsidies to coal.

As mentioned before, U.S lawmakers are losing their collective mind in exchange for lots of money. This is corruption too, you know, at a level that is unfathomable to your average two-bit third world dictator!

Meanwhile, how much money is spent on solar related research? You know, that big ball of wholesome renewable energy. This post on the reality based community blog explains why silicon production for photovoltaic cells is stuck.

The problem for the PV customers for silicon is that they are a fast grower sandwiched between two mature sectors growing roughly in line with the economy. Bulk silicon is used in old-economy alloys and sealants; and while demand for semiconductors grows rapidly in value, their extra capability is crammed onto roughly the same physical volume of raw material. Unfortunately there is no appropriate process for making PV-grade feedstock. Metallurgical-grade silicon, smelted by simple Victorian technology, largely in China, is cheap but too impure to work in solar cells. So you have to use semiconductor grade, which is absurdly over-specified for the purpose and priced to match.

For a long time the PV companies could go to refiners’ back doors like hobos and buy at a discount the seconds, the ingots rated substandard for the real semiconductor customers, but now the demand has shot up so PV has to pay full whack. This is by far the biggest constraint on the future of PV. Making the panels is straightforward : the industry cry – just Google it – is “silicon feedstock”.

People are of course working on finding a specific route to medium-grade silicon at $20 or so a kilo. Whoever gets there first will make a fortune and save the planet like Superman, so it’s an attractive opportunity. The problem was entirely predictable given the relative growth rates. So why didn’t it attract much effort until recently?

I think there has been an institutional market failure. The challenge is out of the technological reach of the bulk silicon people; and the semiconductor refiners have I think been fixated on keeping Intel and company happy, customers who must be insensitive to price and fanatically demanding on quality. A $100 processor might be built on a gram or less of silicon wafer, or 5 cents’ worth – hardly worth worrying about compared to cutting rejection rates for the circuits.

You would think that this geopolitically strategic problem would attract oodles of public research – a money cake like Alice’s with EAT ME “beautifully marked in currants”. Not so.

The EU put €42m into PV research in the €17.5 bn 6th Framework Programme (2002-2006), with one €2.6m programme on silicon feedstock (search for FOXY): the 7th Framework programme hasn’t been approved quite yet, but funding for renewable energy will go up.

The USA, heart of the world semiconductor industry, spends even less. The current DoE programme for PV technology offers $12.5 million over 2-3 years . Searching the DoE site with the keywords “silicon feedstock”, I found precisely one grant awarded – for a princely $99,928.

This is the order of money the US government hands out as charity to cranks. The Pentagon used to support serious gravitational physics with the blue-sky hope of finding antigravity, and apparently funded some antigravity devices – well into the crackpot zone. NASA spent $1.6M between 1996 and 2002 on a similarly starry-eyed “Breakthrough Propulsion Physics” programme, in hopes of a real warp drive. (more)

It’s market failure, and government policy’s job to predict and correct market failures by judicious injections of money and regulation. A fraction of this Hitler subsidy focused towards reducing the cost of high grade silicon production would, as the author of the above post put it, “save the world like Superman”

Meanwhile, Barack (no longer senator of coal) Obama no longer supports Coal-to-Liquid technology. That removes the one black mark (can I say that?) against his advocacy positions. Here’s hoping it is a real back tracking, and not just a reaction to pressure that will be reversed once eyes are turned.

Horrible story coming out of California.
Pot farms ravaging park land / Big raid in Marin County only hints at the extent of erosive techniques by growers

The discovery of 22,740 marijuana plants growing in and around Point Reyes National Seashore last week wasn’t only the biggest pot seizure ever made in Marin County. It was an environmental mess that will take several months and tens of thousands of dollars to clean up. The crops seized on the steep hillsides overlooking Highway 1 were planted by sophisticated growers who cleared vegetation, terraced land, drew water from streams through miles of irrigation hoses and doused acres of land with hundreds of pounds of fertilizer and pesticides.

To avoid the obvious “Pot Legalization” questions and flip it, consider a world where cigarettes have been banned/regulated to the extent that black market growing became viable, would this happen with tobacco? Obviously, the nature of the growing (Tobacco – plains, easy plant to spot, Cannabis – Hill sides, easy to hide), make it an operation question in addition to an economics question. But as the above report states, the operation was obviously not hard to spot, nor was it low impact.

Something to consider as actions widely prevalent in populations are made illegal, how well does prohibition ever work?

The utilization of solar energy on a large scale requires its storage. In natural photosynthesis, energy from sunlight is used to rearrange the bonds of water to O2 and H2-equivalents. The realization of artificial systems that perform similar “water splitting” requires catalysts that produce O2 from water without the need for excessive driving potentials. Here, we report such a catalyst that forms upon the oxidative polarization of an inert indium tin oxide electrode in phosphate-buffered water containing Co2+. A variety of analytical techniques indicates the presence of phosphate in an approximate 1:2 ratio with cobalt in this material. The pH dependence of the catalytic activity also implicates HPO42– as the proton acceptor in the O2-producing reaction. This catalyst not only forms in situ from earth-abundant materials but also operates in neutral water under ambient conditions.

In Situ Formation of an Oxygen-Evolving Catalyst in Neutral Water Containing Phosphate and Co2+ — Kanan and Nocera, 10.1126/science.1162018 — Science

Don’t you just love the title of the paper? I would have titled the paper “Splitting Water for Cheap”. The author is interviewed here. This catalyst can split water into H2 and O2 using the energy from a solar cell. Then, when you need electricity, you recombine them in a fuel cell to make water and electricity. So, a closed loop with the only external input being the solar energy. Solar energy can now be stored almost painlessly.

It is so simple. I am listening to the interview and the author says this can be replicated in a chemistry lab as it only needs a phosphate buffer, cobalt electrode and a conducting glass.

Wonderful. Now, please stop building coal plants.

Tags: Environment, Solar energy

In response to a stupid “global warming sceptics”, scientists waste their precious time to prove the obvious all over again.

BBC NEWS | UK | ‘No sun link’ to climate change

Dr Lockwood initiated the study partially in response to the TV documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, broadcast on Britain’s Channel Four earlier this year, which featured the cosmic ray hypothesis.

“All the graphs they showed stopped in about 1980, and I knew why, because things diverged after that,” he told the BBC News website.

“You can’t just ignore bits of data that you don’t like,” he said.

I must have been living in a cave somewhere to not have heard of this before today.

The Gapminder World 2006, beta

Gapminder is a non-profit venture that develops information technology for provision of free statistics in new visual and animated ways. In short, it enables you to make sense of the world by having fun with statistics. Our method is to turn boring data into enjoyable interactive animations using Flash technology. Gapminder is a Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden. Funding has been mainly by grants from Swedish International Development co-operation Agency, Sida. In collaboration with United Nations Statistic Division we promote free access to searchable public data and our animations of different types of data are freely available at www.gapminder.org.

The Pros
You have to take it for a test drive to see how cool it is, especially the animations to see how parameters like life expectancy, population, etc. change over time. You can pick countries to compare, or just scatter plot everyone. Look at Botswana’s life expectancy, for instance, see it peak in 1987 at 65 years and start a steep  plummet to 35 years in 2004 as its AIDS mass murder (epidemic is a word that does do this one justice) took hold. To watch the dot for life expectancy drop that quickly as you animate it is pretty powerful, as powerful as a statistic can be. Each parameter you change also changes the URL, so you can send links easily.

The Cons
You have to plot something against something else. Not everything is a scatter plot between two variables, you use it long enough, and you start seeing correlations (=causations!) where none exist. There’s no way to extract plots to use for later, though I guess you can do a screen capture.

Regardless, very cool, and nothing beats free access to large amounts of data that previously needed specialists to visualize and make sense of.