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Comment by Jay on November 16, 2008 at 2:29pm

By watching home improvement shows I have learned of new building techniques such as radiant floor heating,soy based spray insulation,on demand water heaters and low voltage lighting,pex water piping and flexible gas lines. I have also seen the trend toward modular housing or factory built houses. I have been a long time advocate of solar and wind energy and also become interested in geothermal heat pumps and newtechnologies that make it possible to create electricity from geothermal waters at half the temperature previously required to justify such installations. Like the slow transition from strictly gas consuming cars to hybrides we are
moving towards soluions in our use of energy and through high pricing we have all come to consurve what we can (by force of change) we have consumed less out of necessity. We can embrace politrical change as shown by the popular vote of the nations newly elected leaders. We have a great oppertunity to fund innovations that will effect our life styles. We all didn't need a cell phone and lap top to comunicate just a few years ago but our lives have changed and we are being changed by our ability to comunicate and voice our opinions. I encourage you to voice your concerms read about and impliment changes you can. Last year I suggested a way to do so was to buy small solar products battery maintainers $12 and solar back pack /cell phone chargers ect. This year I suggest staying home watching movies and spending time with family put aside chores and other time consuming distractions and actually spend time with people give them each an hour or two of your personal time and rotate so you each have time for each other and take some me time to just get some sleep one of the things we all neglect is re-charging our own batteries.

Comment by Jay on November 16, 2008 at 2:07pm

In addition to a National egery policy we need to build new forms of housing that are effecient
utilize factory built construction techniques and we need to eliminate older inefficient house. Natural disasters eliminate thousands of houses a year the recent floods in the south and wild fires in Calicornia and elsewhere provide a perfect oppertunity to start producing our housing using these methodes. An example was recently posted on "you tube" a house built of recycled materials mostly construction cut offs and waste lumber from fiberboard manufacturing. while I personally detest wafer board as a building construction material I do feel substitutes could be found. I have looked into the necessay techniques for building panels and a good substitute would be the fibers of Industrial Hemp a sustainable plant fiber that could be grown on marginal lands with out depleating the forsets or the soils of our global enviroment. If 40% of the imported fossil fuels goes towards heating and cooling our buildings in this country,we should be making our housing and Industrial building with better over all energy effeciency. Domes made using the Canadian Wooden Dome technique could be easily
produced in factories and deployed worldwide to relieve the effects of global diasters and replace the current use of tents to house refugees in countries where wars have devistated housing infrastructure. No matter where these houses where built over time the techniques to build and deploy them could be improved. For instance they could be built to be (98%)recycable
utilizing such items as soy based foam insulation,hemp fibers,plaster interiors and low voltage lighting,heated by multi fuel electric generators or strictly by off the grid cheap solar arrays as I mentioned in my other articles. Once a houses shell is constructed in less than a weeks time the displaced family could move back in. This is assuming the foundation of the old house still exists and has been uneffected by the disaster like where tordados wipe clean a slad foundation leaving only the foundations and buried utility lines. In the cooperative of community we have seen on shows like extreme home makeover that houses can be torn out and rebuilt in weeks if a large cooperative construction crew is available. The CWD dome is a system that can be erected by unskilled labor. I don't condone homeowners doing their own electrical wiring and plumbing but this assumes the utilities are in or the need for utilities are minimum
I have spoken to the effect of propane fired Voller fuel cells and i belive in the future we will see these units used as temporary power supplies in diasters like hurricanes fires and floods.
Unlike conventional electric generators these fuel cells produce no noise or harmfull emissions only clean energy and pure drinking water. I lived in a cabin in the woods with candel light wood cook stove and outhouse and no running water so i know what it would be like to start. Once you have electricity even if its batteries you can utilize low voltage lighting,refridgeration and water pumps to get the hot and cold running water you need for personal hygiene. No everyone can camp out and use wood for heat on a sustainable basis but in electric power outages we all get a sense of what it might be like. With the problems this country is facing don't be susprised when the electric company goes under or your pension is no longer there for you we have to re-invent ourselves from time to time why not embrase it and build sustainable while you still have your money in the bank.

Comment by Jay on November 16, 2008 at 1:29pm

I've been advocating for a change in the way we use electricity. We should generate our own electricity. We should do so using green solar energy these photovoltaic panels would be created on machines based on several new technologies. The roll to roll photovoltaic process whitch lays down several layers of similar and dissimilar semi conductor material on a substrate in a continious process. New technology would allow these processes to include a printing step that makes cells by the mile. There are also technologies that have put photovoltaic
cells on a plastic substrate and they are less effecient organtic compounds yet mass producable. The scale of economics could be acheived through mass production techniques.
The goal of the project would be mass produced cheap solar arrays that could be deployed by comsumers in their front yards on their garage roofs and for the purpose of recharging their plug in electric car or to feed to the grid to recharge others electric cars. The grid tied solar
would allow other fossil fuels to be used in other manners or reserved for future use. If the fuel that was saved could be more effeciently utilized in the following way. The urgent open source development of a hydrogen electrolyzer. current versions are considered speculative in nature because they are considered "prototypes" or "associated with scams" because of the claims of drastic gas milage increases several have been spoofed as scams. The claims are realistic however the expected results are based on the fact hydrogen mixed with fossil fuels in an internal combustion engine has these positive effects. the fuels are burned hotter and more effeciently whitch increases gas milage and reduces emission by 90%. The electrolyzer has a mass production cost of under one hundred dollars. When hybrid technology gets together with cheap solar are cars will sport laminates of flexible solar arrays fitted to the cars roof,hood and trunk and possibly imbedded in all its window glass as well. The electric drive motors will be fourty volt electric drive motors made to have 50 horsepower torque at a light weight and about the size of a five gallon bucket and in standardized configuration among all car manufactures. So as to create a new aftermarket for used and reclcled car parts. The cars themselves will be 100% recycable and have a ten year live at whitch time they are collected and recycled along with older cars whitch can be accredited towards the purchase of newer cars cleaning up the old vehicles would serve two purposes it creates cheap abundant resources to manufacture components for the newer cars and takes the old cars out of service. There is no reason why this should not work on a large scale with several programs trying to find the solutions that work best.

Comment by Jay on November 16, 2008 at 1:00pm

T.Boone Pickins announced today his project to build the worlds largest windfarm is on hold as he was unable to obtain financing for the deby portion of his project. The project was to be funded 30% equity and 70% debt. Citing the global economic crisis as the factor for his decision to put the plans on hold. He did also say this country will need to shift the fuel we are using for heavy over the road trucking from diesel to natural gas because we can not sustain the use of imported fossil fuels past 75% imports we currently import 70% of our fossil fuels.

Comment by Jay on November 16, 2008 at 12:54pm

T.Boone Pickins said today on Meet the Press that his plan to put in "The Worlds Largest "windfarm in Texas is "on hold" he could not secure the financing necessary to go forward with the project whitch was susposed to be funded by 30$Equity and 70% Debt.

Comment by Jay on October 18, 2008 at 5:53pm

I read about a new consentrated solar array GE is developing. It is for the warehouse roof installations. It is a combination of consentrated photovoltaics and a tracking system. The tracking system is a frame that stears the panels so the suns light is in the most direct path
this can increase effeciencies over having the array fixed in one position on the roof. The CPV concentrated photovoltaics use a lens system to consentrate the photons of light to upwards of 300 suns and like a magnifying glass produce heat as well. To disapate the heat aluminum fins are used to cool the silicon material the photovoltaic wafers are made from. The wafers themselves are made from germaniun and gallium aresinide two semiconductors that are highly effecient at converting photons of light into electrical potential. These new arrays are up to 50% more effecient in that innovations in materials science has made their production more cost effective. The GA and G cells used to be used only in space application because of production costs. Given time small innovations made years before are starting to pay off.

Comment by Jay on October 18, 2008 at 5:42pm

I see that the goverment has passed the new alternative energy tax credits. To the tune of $30
Billion dollars these funds will spur growth in alternative sources of energy currently only %5
comes from all alternative sources. When I see waste in goverment i cringe like the advertising for the election billions wasted in addes not one should even listen to what was susposed to help inform the voters of their choices has ended up being smear attack ads. Then there is the
morgage bail out $70 billion to a Trillion dollars. For what to buy up morgages no bank would even want to own ineffecient houses that will just go back onto the market for more realistic prices. These houses are likely the ones that are impracticle too expensive to heat big energy wasting houses. Wouldn't it be better to start over and build Trillion dollars worth of new energy effecient houses and sell these to the people who have lost theirs to forclosure. A
modest energy effecient house would use far less resource and create new jobs in the process. Let those junk houses sit untill someone makes enough to buy them for what they are distressed realestate. Why should we eat the difference between a big bad morgage and the fair market value of a home. We simply should not be expected to. I imagine a Trillion dollar wind farm generating cheap domestic power for the next thirty years or a hugh solar farm producing many mega watts of clean energy for the next generation. instead we get waste and junk mail and thousands of ads confusing and distorting the election process. If these politicians in either party were going to make a change they should have ignore the polls and gone solar i'd voted for who ever got the biggest array or farm built. Words are easily spoken it's deeds that count
money gone story over outcome zilch! squandered resources during a recession soon back to the same old same old.

Comment by DubleDeuce on September 20, 2008 at 12:23am

Hello Jay,

<<IF YOU KNEW HOW MANY TONS OF EACH YOU COULD FIND THE CHEAPEST SOURCE AND SAVE MILLIONS>>

The TERM/Concept that you are looking for is "The American Free Enterprise System" . Fortunately it has ALREADY been invented. You are working in it RIGHT NOW.

You use several terms in your post that belie a misunderstanding certain things in this world of business.

You speak of "cost savings on large purchases". This is the ESSENCE of what a successful business does when they are doing business in a free economy. But you appear to think that economy of scale goes on ad infinitum. it does NOT. There is ONE great limiting factor and that is MONEY.

Using the Pickens Wind Turbine purchase as a mode;

Imagine if you had enough money to contract for and buy all of the output of a single large steel mill for a year. Of course you would be able to demand their best price (assuming they would want to do business with you-turning over all of your company's output to one buy is in itself a risky thing to do) and get the BEST economy of scale.

WHERE would you PUT all that steel? And once you took delivery of it you would be required to PAY for it. Unless you had an IMMEDIATE place to store it, a place to work it (large fab building) and a crew large enough to work it, you must admit that alarge amount of capital (money) would be laying around in material and transport charges unused. Is THAT the best use of capital?

And that was only the steel part of the equation.

Suppose you take ALL of the other component pieces you described as being needed in the generator portion of the project. Would you go fo maximum purchasing power and buy ALL of the vendors output and store it for future use? NO. Because you, as a wind turbine manufacturer, have a built in delay in the system it is collectively called thruput (the amount of work or product that can be passed through a processing system in a given amount of time) This total process is called "Value Added" and value takes SOME time to produce. There is a BIG difference between a 5000 lb coil of copper going into a factory and a precision crafted armature or stator winding coil of a 1.2Mw wind generator.

As an example, if you were to stand at the end of a car assembly line, you would see a newly minted car come off the line every minute (that's the way it was in the mid 60's when I worked at the Chrysler Corporation) 60 and hour. But the THRUPUT was NOT 1 a minute. Rather, to find out the thruput, you had to go to the beginning of the assembly process where the floor pan of the car was first laid down. Get on the gondola and ride it to the END of the assembly line. That amount of time at Chrysler took about 47 WORKING hours. The limiting factor in this manufacturing of cars was essentially tied up into two parts, people and customer demand. The ABSOLUTE maximum number of cars that could be put thru that system was 60(#per hr) X10 (# of hrs worked per day) X6 (number of days in a week) or 21,600 cars a week.

The fact of having to take raw material IN and process it with labor makes the production of cars (or anything subject to the skill of labor) subject to a thruput bottleneck. The production of 21,600 cars a week at that plant was (not including housekeeping) as efficient as it could get. Ergo, no further economies of scale could be achieved by further increase in raw material purchase. The plant was designed to run on a 5 day supply of parts IN THE BUILDING. Stockpiling more parts, EVEN if it meant SOME savings in the per part price, would have been eaten up in carrying cost (cost of capital) storage space, and shipping.

<<HE AND HIS HELPERS ARE PROBABLY OBLIGATED TO MAKE A PROFIT AT THE PROJECTS THEY DO TAKE ON>>

It may be an unwritten law that you are OBLIGATED to make a profit, but the obligation you carry has NOTHING to do with the reality of the situation. Once a wine turbine is UP T. Boone has done ALL that he can do and the risk is now all in the going forward. But fear not, T. Boone does NOT have a deal "Penned" as you put it. He don't need one. In the State of Texas, and many other states as well, there are LAWS called "Net Pricing Laws" They are put in place LONG before T. Boone discovered the Texas wind. In effect these laws state that ANYONE (including you Jay, CAN install any electrical generating system on your property, plug it into the grid, and the local power company is OBLIGATED to pay you for ANY NET electrical energy you produce into the grid.


T. Boone has a lot of money but he does NOT know how to build wind turbines. GE and others have taken on that job. It would be financial suicidal and a waste of time for him to attempt to use his money to "figure out how to build wind turbines" in pursuit of his idea of a West Texas wind farm. He would have to replicate ALL of the expertise that GE has learned over the years, all of the tooling, all of the engineering, and all of the things that people "forget" in time about their craft to reproduce what he can get by just writing a check and say put it in that field right over there.

Remember the old adage, TIME IS MONEY. This exercise is a PRIME lesson in that adage. As it now stands, it will take GE until 2010 to get half of theses wind turbines to their destination. That JUST might coincide with the congress getting a fat Tax Incentive bill on the books.

Imagine that, the timing (money) is quite propitious.

The Deuceman

Comment by Jay on August 26, 2008 at 7:52pm

WHEN WE LOOK AT ALTERNATIVE ENERGY SOLUTIONS I WONDER IF WE WERE TO BREAK DOWN THE MATERIALS INTO WHAT THEY ARE MADE OUT OF ARE WE GETTING THE BEST BANG FOR OUR BUCK. CERTAINTLY NOT! AN EXAMPLE MIGHT BE T BOONE PICKENS PROPOSED NEW WINDFARM HERE ARE SOME BASICS LARGE WINDFARM 4,000 MW ESTIMATED TO COST $10 BILLION.

USUALLY WHERE COST SAVING ON LARGE PROJECTS COMES IN
IS IN THE FACT YOU ARE USING MATERIALS AND THEY CAN COME FROM SEVERAL SOURCES. AND DEPENDING ON TIMING MATERIALS COSTS CAN MAKE THE DIFFERENCE IN THE PROJECT PROFITABILITY.
MAKING HUNDREDS OF TURBINES ALLOWS YOU TO OUTSOURCE THE PRODUCTION OF SAY STEEL TOWERS TO FOREIGN SHIPYARDS WHERE THEY CAN MANUFACTURE TOWERS AND HAVE EXISTING FACILITIES FOR FABRICATING LARGE STEEL OBJECTS (SHIPS,OFF SHORE DRILLING RIG PLATFORMS,ECT) THE GENERATORS ARE BUILT FRON COMPONENTS SOURCED FROM SEVERAL SUPPLIERS BEARINGS,GEARBOXES,ELECTRICAL COMPONENTS AND SO ON
ALL THESE ITEMS ARE MADE OF FUNDEMENTAL ELEMENTS
IRON,COPPER,BAUXITE,ALLOYS,PIGNENTS,POLYMERS AND SO ON
IF YOU KNEW HOW MANY TONS OF EACH YOU COULD FIND THE CHEAPEST SOURCE AND SAVE MILLIONS. LARGER PORJECTS DEPEND ON FUNDING SOURCES AND HERE IS WHERE THE ART OF THE DEAL COMES IN. T. BOONE PICKENS HAS MADE MANY PROFITABLE DEALS BEFORE THATS HOW HE MADE HIS REPUTATION.
IN A WAY LIKE FORBES HE IS A RECOGNIZED NAME IN THE ENERGY INDUSTRY. HE REALLY CAN'T GO WRONG ON THIS DEAL BECAUSE HE IS NOT TAKING THE RISK ALONE BE ASSURED. THE ANSWER IS HE AND HIS HELPERS ARE PROBALY OBLIGATED TO MAKE A PROFIT AT THE PROJECTS THEY DO TAKE ON. SO WHAT DOES THE GENERAL PUBLIC GET FROM THIS DEAL. WE MIGHT LEARN A GOOD LESSON BY EXAMPLE JUST BY WATCHING THE PROJECT. AND WE SHOULD BE PREPARED TO REPLICATE THE PROJECT FAST AS POSSIBLE BEFORE MARKETS CHANGE AND THINGS COST MORE ALL THE SUDDEN. I CAN TELL YOU PICKINS PROBABLY HAS A DEAL PENNED TO SELL ALL HE CAN PRODUCE TO THE MARKETS IN ADVANCE AT A FAIR PROFIT.
IT MAKES IT EASY FOR UTILITIES WHO ARE REQUIRED TO PRODUCE ALTERNATIVES BY LAW FOR THEM JUST TO CONTRACT FOR THEM RATHER THAN OWN THOSE WINDFARMS THEMSELVES. SE WHEN YOU HAVE THE OPTION TO BUY YOUR POWER FROM A GREEN SOURCE JUST REMEMBER WHO PROFITED FROM IT AND HOW.

Comment by Jay on July 25, 2008 at 6:58pm

WELL I LIKE TO MAKE COMMENTS ON MY OWN WRITTING AFTER I'VE HAD TIME TO REFLECT I AM CONTRIBUTING TO THE SAGE THE GTREATER KNOWLEDGE THAT EVERYONE HAS AFTER HAVING BEEN HERE AND READ A FEW THINGS. WE TAKE THIS FOR GRANTED I HOPE YOU KNOW I ALWAYS GO AWAY FEELING I KNOW MORE THEN WHEN I ARRIVED. OTHER FORMATS NIGHTLY NEWS I NEVER FEEL THAT WAY IF IT'S HALF HOUR SHOW SIXTY MINUTE FORMAT NEWS IS BETTER AT GETTING MORE FACTS AND INTERVIEWING EXPERTS THIS SITE DOES HAVE TALANTED WRITTERS AND RESEARCHERS YOU ALL ARE CONTRIBUTING TO THE GOOD THAT WILL COME FROM BEING BETTER INFORMED. I SAT DOWN TO (BASIC) WAY BACK WHEN IT HAD FOUR MEMBERS ALOT MORE HAVE JOINED WISH THEY WE ALL NOT SO SHY AS TO WRITE DOWN WHAT THEY THINK WE ALL CAN LEARN FROM WHERE ARE THOUGHTS ARE TAKEN BY WHAT YOU HAVE TO SAY. SO DIVE UP AND IF YOU CAN'T SPELL WINGNUT IT YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN

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