Creating Photosynthesis to harness solar + tax commentary

A new development brings the idea behind photosynthesis closer to economical energy production.  The breakthrough came when the scientists decided to go back to the drawing board and utilize a catalyst that breaks down, then recreates itself.  Typical chemists try to always make a stable reaction.  By making the reaction “unstable” but functional, they invented a method that promises to be cheap.

My first thought was how amazing this sounds, but my second thought was about how wrong political policy geared toward subsidies can get it sometimes.  It is really true that you cannot predict what technologies are going to come out triumphant during a product cycle.  Throwing money at particular technologies can often be a dead end.  (like corn ethanol)  But if you instead tax things that you know are bad, you change the market for the whole sector.  So, in other words (economists have been saying this for like a million years), you tax the bad stuff to make it more expensive, then let the market pick which tecnology succeeds it.  Don’t subsidize ethanol, tax oil.  Don’t subsidize solar and wind, tax coal.

THEN, before you complain about making things more expensive for those least able to afford it, you change the tax structure to lower taxes on the poor, and create a new rich-guy tax bracket for, say, over $2,000,000 income.

The market is now adjusted, so things are priced taking into account externalities.  Poorer people that will now be paying more for basics get an income tax break.  But since the bad things are taxed, the money comes right back to the government anyway.  Oh god this would work so well.

Print Solar Like it was Money

Nanosolar, one of the various solar start-ups, has announced that they have perfected a machine that will make 1GW of solar cells per year.  Wowser, most old processes didnt get above 25MW per. They give the efficiency as “up to 14%”, so even if you expect it to be closer to 12%, it is still very good for solar technology this cheap.  The new machine uses a printing-press like method and special nano-ink, which becomes the solar panel, to make the cells fast and cheap, whereas the old chips are made from silicon and created in a process more similar to computer chips.

I’d be very interested in getting more cost numbers for this machine, especially as it would compare to nuclear.  Nuclear plants often run about 1GW, and the price numbers I see floating around are like $2 billion to $5 billion, and would take years to construct.

Solar technology has been progressing at a similar pace to computer technology in recent years–which is to say, really really fast.  This is getting exciting.  We may see solar start to poke above its nominal <1% of the total energy supply.  I’d like to see solar get to at least 15%.  A huge investment, but so is nuclear, the only “conventional” “non-polluting” option.

Coal Mining Uses More Land than Corresponding Solar

A back of the envelope calculation by Grist guest commentator Gar Lipow shows that since solar uses the same lay of land year after year, and coal has to mine new land each year, the energy per sq foot of land for a facility like Nevada Solar One is higher than a typical coal plant and eastern mountain-top removal coal mining.

Nevada Solar One will make approximately 154kWh per square foot in the next 20 years.  Coal mining will get you approximately 11.5 kWh per sq foot.  So for a comparable sized coal plant, it would take 13 times more land acreage to produce the energy, in this case 5300 acres for coal mining to 400 acres for the Nevada Solar One facility.