New type of Renewable Energy Invented!

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In an almost unheard-of leap of socio-economic genius, the Universal Studios Corporation has unwittingly solved the global energy crisis single-handedly. Today, March 2nd, 2012, marked the nation-wide “power-on test” of the newly created Seuss-Torque Irony-Fueled, Perpetual Motion Generator, affectionately named “LORAX” by the team’s creators.

Shown in the image above, the LORAX Generator’s mechanical layout is quite simple. It consists of a driveshaft connected to the perpetually spinning corpse of Theodor Seuss Geisel, known to the world as “Dr. Seuss.” This driveshaft is connected to a series of electric generators, similar to the way in which a hydro-electric dam works, only much, much more powerful.

Up until the concept of using a character who stood as a warning to consumerism that could devastate the environment as a mascot to peddle SUVs, disposable diapers, and a host of other green-washing products, perpetual motion was deemed “impossible” by all understandings of modern science. While it is not currently known as of the writing of this post whether the move to generate unlimited amounts of renewable energy through their marketing campaign was intentional or a fortunate accident, Universal has quickly seized the opportunity and has begun recruiting theoretical physicists from around the world toward harnessing as much power as possible from the phenomenon. While currently only in preliminary investigation stages, the new team has released the following statement:

“It is not immediately clear as to the cause for Seuss’s remains to begin such rotational movement, however, our hypothesis is that it is caused by an unbelievably intense field of localized irony. This irony-field is not only responsible for the movement, but also for the extraordinary amount of heat being released. While not visible or tangible in everyday life, under these very unique conditions, the environment was just right to set this phenomenon in motion.”

Despite a successful nation-wide debut, the LORAX Generator has also created a fair amount of public distaste and concern, citing the nausea-inducing effects being felt by many in the population. As more and more people begin to question the long-term effects of exposing ourselves to such strong levels of irony, we should keep a close eye on this as events unfold.

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Nuclear is NOT clean energy

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I’m starting to see a concerning trend from certain southern-states, such as Texas, Florida and now Georgia that make a bold claim that nuclear power is considered a “green, and sustainable energy source.” There are so many levels of wrong to this that I feel the need to point them out and provide some sort of compass to help non-industry people become aware of just how badly this attempt is meant to misinform the American people.

The most recent article I can point to is this one, by the Huffington Post. In this article, author Christine Todd Whitman states:

“With plans in place in Georgia for the construction of the next generation of nuclear energy facilities, this industry expansion will promote economic prosperity and continued development of a sustainable clean energy source.”

Mrs. Whitman is known for being a former Governor of New Jersey and is also a co-founder of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, which is a group dedicated to “spreading the word” that nuclear is a clean and safe technology.

Let’s just start off with the facts. Nuclear power is inherently not safe. Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Rancho Seco, and Fukushima are all examples of how nuclear power can cause significant threat to public safety when improperly handled or when disasters occur. Can anyone name an example of an entire city being evacuated by a coal, natural gas, wind, or solar power plant going haywire? …Ever?

Now, as for nuclear power being “sustainable,” that’s just flat out incorrect. Nuclear fuel exists in the forms of radioactive heavy metals that are only formed in the violent explosion of a supernova star. All of the radioactive material that exists on earth has been on this planet since the original formation of the solar system. With the exception of the occasional meteorite, there is no way at all to obtain more radioactive material…at all. Radioactive material is also the only fuel that is continually “burning away” and diminishing over time, whether we use it for electricity or not.

Since the definition of sustainable is the ability to maintain something at a certain rate or level, then I must point out that nuclear material in no way matches the definition of this word. If the definition of safe is to be protected from or not exposed to danger or risk, then I also must point out that nuclear power has a history of proving to also not match this definition.

What Mrs. Whitman and her organization are doing is providing misleading and incorrect information to the public for the sole gain of a few businessmen, invested in the industry of maintaining and distributing uranium at extremely high prices.

The Clean and Safe Energy Coalition claims that creating nuclear plants in the US will “bring jobs into Georgia,” but I really urge caution to anyone believing their rhetoric. Nuclear power plants can’t just be created by anyone. They are highly volatile and complicated structures that have thousands of moving parts involved, at temperatures and pressures far beyond anything a typical construction worker can comprehend. There will never be a single “blue collar, anyone can walk up and help out” type of job created by the installation of these plants, because all of the work must be done by specialists, and they’re already all lined up to start bidding on these projects. In reality, these “jobs” will hire specialized construction workers from around the globe to come in, build the plant, then leave.

This kind of misinformation and intentional deception under the guise of “being part of the green movement” is despicable at best, and undermines the credibility of the rest of us professionals in this field as well. We should all work to point out people and organizations such as this and alert non-industry professionals as to the dangers of “greenwashing.”

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True Artificial Photosynthesis

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I posted an article on alternative technologies for solar power a while ago, one section of which focused on an MIT researcher who was making big claims about a process he called “artificial photosynthesis.” While the researcher in that article mentioned turned out to be a self-important hack who didn’t actually contribute anything new in terms of technology, other MIT researchers stepped up to actually make a startling turn of events.

Shuguang Zhang, a principal research scientist at MIT’s Center for Biomedical Engineering, along with the work of his teammates, has released a paper detailing the process they created which uses dead plant material to be converted into photovoltaic cells.

Whittling the process down to non-jargon terminology, dead plants are ground up and the chemical that is responsible for orchestrating the energy transfers during photosynthesis (labeled PS-I by the researchers). This PS-I chemical is extracted from the dead plant material, and then chemically stabilized in order to prevent the chemical from breaking down once it’s outside of its cellular environment.

Rather than simply spreading the PS-I chemical extract across a sheet of glass (as was done in the very first experiment), another MIT researcher, Andreas Mershin, tweaked the fabrication process and found that growing nanostructures of zinc-oxide and titanium-oxide into forest-like shapes on the surface of a semiconductor chip. Much like the coniferous (pine) trees that inspired Mershin, his nano-structured chip consists of a forest of tiny pillars, each coated with the PS-I molecule, maximizing the surface area that the incoming light strikes and boosting the power output of his experimental cell by almost 10,000 fold.

The current experimental version of Zhang and Mershin’s combined efforts has only resulted in a cell that is 0.1% efficient, not nearly enough to become commercially viable (~10% efficient at least), however the MIT researchers claim that the fact that these cells can be produced much more cheaply and from the remains of almost any dead plant material, the potential for this technology to alter the course of the solar industry in the next few years is quite vast.

I look forward to seeing more developments coming out of the labs of Zhang and Mershin.

Link to Zhang’s article describing the process of PS-I chemical extraction.

Link to Mershin’s article about nanostructure growth and PV cell creation.

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My stance on the copyright and content that I place on the internet

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I’m tired of all the confusion generated by the complexities of copyright infringement that restrict the creativity of others. Part of being a human being is learning to collaborate on ideas and make something better by adding to it.

Rather than just sit on the sidelines and complain, I’m taking a side by opening up my content to others.

As long as you are NOT using my images, text, or media for personal profit, you’re free to do whatever you want. I am not alright with corporations that seek their own personal gain from the hard work of independent people, so if you’re an American company using my content, I’ll have the court system remove your earnings and donate them to charity. It’s not about the money, it’s about the honor. As for the rest of the world, I understand that to some degree, anything I post immediately becomes publicly available worldwide. If you are in a country where this kind of information isn’t as readily available and you really feel the need to steal my content, then I’m not going to stop you. My goal is to help promote and expand the audience of people getting this information, so in essence, stealing my content is still accomplishing that goal.

If you’re a single person, not affiliated with a corporate entity, you’ve pretty much got carte blanche in terms of my content. You do not have to ask my permission to copy/edit/add to/or modify my content, as long as you’re using it in a non-profit means. I would really appreciate being referenced or linked to in whatever medium that you’re using my content, but it’s not an absolute requirement.

If I start seeing my content show up in television shows, and textbooks, I might have to alter this stance, but for now, since no one has actively made a move toward stealing my content, I see no reason to punish everyone preemptively for something that might happen.

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Something doesn’t seem completely legit here

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This morning, while I was perusing through Google News, I noticed an advertisement for a solar-installation company that claimed, “Purchase our stock now, we just got more projects!” Upon closer examination of this company, I started raising more questions than answering them.

The company in question is the Onyx Energy Company, and it turned out that the “big news” Onyx was claiming was an article that their own website published. When I actually took the time to look at their website, several different elements screamed out at me “not a legitimate business.” There are actually so many, that I had to list them in bullet form:

  • There is no contact phone number. While my own website is currently in the same situation, I am not a publicly traded corporation…I am not even technically “in business” yet as of writing this article. However, the very day I will open my door to customers is the day I post a phone number on my website. To fail to do so is…shady.
  • I did a WHOIS search on their domain name, onyxservice.com, and found that their web-presence began as of May 28, 2011. This means that Onyx first appeared on the web only 8 months ago. By comparison, I’ve owned my domain since 2002.
  • There are only three projects on their entire website that they claim to have completed. While this makes sense in terms of possible progress over 8 months, it does not make sense in terms of a solar-installation company, as this is not enough experience to call yourself an “industry leader” in anything, which their web-banner boasts every few seconds.
  • There is no section on the website that discusses the products or services that the company provides. If I were a prospective customer, there is no clear way for me to buy anything. There are links to OTHER manufacturing companies, but nothing that Onyx makes.
  • There is, however, an entire page devoted to “investor relations,” that includes more information on their company’s history than the rest of the website in its entirety.
  • Most concerning of all: They make the claim that Nicola Tesla has invented a means of transferring power “wirelessly,” by “enriching” radio waves with extra electrons.

Ok. That’s as far as I need to go, because to me, that last point is the “smoking gun” piece of evidence that this company is a scam and possibly a “market bubble.” By this term, I mean a company that is created for the sole purpose of being publicly traded and then sold to another company. They never actually make or produce anything, they just look like they’re really knowledgeable and successful, in order to trick other investors into wanting a piece of their success. This process exactly matches an old con-artist’s method of duping a bunch of people into investing into a company that doesn’t actually exist, then walking away with the investment money.

How can I prove this? Well, their basis for “enriched” radio waves is complete nonsense. Electrons are a type of fermion that has mass and electric charge. A radio wave is a photon, which is also known in the quantum-physics field as a boson, a mass-less, charge-less, particle. Electrons and photons aren’t anything alike, they act entirely differently under the same conditions. It is not possible to attach a photon to an electron. Please read my guide to How Solar Modules Work, as I clearly explain how electrons and photons interact. What this company is claiming is as silly and impossible as claiming, “We figured out how to make warp-drive using duct tape and butter.” I’m not convinced.

Lastly, to me, the timeline of this entire company doesn’t add up. From only a 30-second search on Google about publicly-traded companies, this company would have to first be appraised by an outside firm as having more than $100 million dollars in corporate capital. How exactly does a company start up and then not only acquire that much capital…but then successfully apply to and be granted public-trading status in only an 8-month time-frame? It doesn’t, that’s not possible.

Most assuredly, it’s not possible to achieve that level of business growth off of only three construction projects, the largest of which just went through today, for only $84 million. Since I’ve worked my entire career in the Solar Industry, I can pretty surely gauge their profit margin to be within 10% and 20%, meaning for that $84 million project, the maximum profit they can attain is $16.8 million.

I strongly advise to stand back from this company and watch what happens. If I were to make an educated guess, I anticipate a notable spike in the stock price of this company (as more investors are duped into purchasing stock), followed immediately by rapid-onset and sudden bankruptcy (brought on by spectacular embezzlement). Recall Solyndra…I predict in the next two to three years, Onyx Energy Company will be in the exact same situation.

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