Re: National Hydrogen Pipeline

On May 31, 3:46 am, Bill Ward <b...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Thu, 31 May 2007 05:58:07 +0000, Dan Bloomquist wrote:
Bill Ward wrote:

On Wed, 30 May 2007 06:47:24 -0700, Willie.Mookie wrote:

On May 30, 1:38 am, Bill Ward <b...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Tue, 29 May 2007 09:04:23 -0700, Williamknowsbest wrote:

On May 29, 10:12 am, Eeyore <rabbitsfriendsandrelati...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Williamknowsbest wrote:

Low cost solar panels

No such thing..........

<shrug> Whatever! haha..

Fact is they do. Despite your claims.

http://www.freshpatents.com/Solar-panels-with-liquid-superconcentrato...

http://www.delphion.com/details?pn=US07081584__

I make ultra-low-cost solar panels out of PET, EPS, water and PV dies
of a unique design.

I take six sheets of molded PET bond them together in a water bath to
form three separate arrays of liquid filled lenses.

These lenses are sandwiched into molded EPS to form a an array of
fisheye lenses that focus light onto a proprietary holographic foil
located at the lens image plane - so tracking is unecessary and ground
orientation may be arbitrary and still maintain high intensity.

Light reflects from the foil and is focused onto tiny PV cells each
3/4 mm across mounted on the back side of the second lens in the
stack. Each PV cell contains 40 PV junctions in series, covered by a
dichroic mirror that has a bandpass filter on it to restrict light
from 1,100 nm to 650 nm. So the PV cells, cooled by water and shaded
by a bandpass filter on the front and operating at 28 V each, operate
efficiently at 1,100x solar intensity with very little parasitic
heating.

A 4' x 8' x 3/4inch panel, contains 4,608 discrete lenses that produce
a total of 540 watts under full illumination at 1.3 kV and 400 mA.

The panels are fabricated on rotary molds 8 ft wide, continuously.
They are wired together automatically into strings of 2,544 panels -
each nearly 2 miles long and 8 ft wide. The strings produce 1.0 to
1.3 MW when fully illuminated. There are two connections on each
string to attach a DC powered device - the best value is obtained when
variable load electrolyzers are attached to convert solar power to
hydrogen. Also there is a DC powered multi-stage flash evaporator
available to produce salt and fresh water from seawater.

40,000 liters of fresh water and 1.4 metric tons of salt are produced
for every MWh intercepted by the system. Water is worth $25 and salt
is worth $25

20 kg of hydrogen and 160 kg of oxygen are produced from 180 kg of
fresh water for every MWh intercepted by the system. The hydrogen is
worth about $100 considering its heat value and the heat value of
petrol.

If you're using salt water as a feed for hydrogen, you'll need 1
string of desalanators for every 220 strings of hydrogen producers. If
you're irrigating land and so forth, this can vary.

For best results, 1320 strings are ganged together to form a 2 mile by
2 mile square that produces 1.32 GW to 1.75 GW when the sun shines.
Each square costs about $93 million installed.

For best value you have a mixed mode system. Producing DC electricity
to run the facilities, hydrogen gas for sale to a (formerly) coal
fired plant, hydrogen for hydrogenating the unburned coal into petrol.

You cannot buy the squares, but you can pay for them and their
operation however, and that gets you 65% of the water, salt, and
hydrogen and petrol produced. I build own and operate the plants.
They are financed through project financing. Most investors get their
project partners get their seed capital back in less than a year, and
get most of their profits back in less than 3 years by monetizing
future production.

http://www.mitrais.com/mining/miningNews060818.asp

The PET films, EPS foam and DI water are all very inexpensive. PV
cells are not. But they are used efficiently. A 100 mm diameter
wafer yields 10,000 high intensity dies - more than enough for two
panels. Total cost per panel for PV dies? $6.50 - 300 mm wafers
yield 90,000 dies - enough for 130 panels. We are currently using
equipment that processes 100 mm dies at 60 wph - but are moving toward
equipment that uses 300 mm dies operates at 250 wph.

I am building a facility that will produce 1 string every half hour
using the larger faster PV equipment to feed it. I then will increase
rates of production so that the equipment will produce 10 strings per
hour - supported by 5 back end and front end production cells to keep
pace with the wafers.

When will you have first production quantities?- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

I'm acquiring an 83,000 sf property now - a former pharmaceutical
warehouse - with cleanrooms - so, I'm bringing stuff I've outsourced in
the past in-house. I'm buying a 60 wph 100 mm wafer fab for front end
and backend process for my high-intensity dies and special lead frames
that connect with the optics and moving my design team to the new
facility - along with the injection mold equipment, machine shop and so
forth - which was in a 10,000 sf building in Newark Ohio which I'm
selling now. I'm putting together a new rotary mold right now that will
run off miles of panels instead of pressing parts for a 1 ft square then
change tools, another set of parts, change tools.. etc. - good for pilot
production and testing new designs - bad for production.

I gave my guys six months - they said they could do it- if I didn't
change the design up on them. haha.. So,we froze the design and we'll
have our first 2 mile strip in a few months.

Once that's done the strip will be hauled out West and tested. This
will likely take a few spins to get right. I've got some land out West
to test it on, and each of those spins will take about 3 and maybe up to
6 weeks - another six months of tweaking - I have a budget to build 100
strings each 2 miles long produced over this testing period.

Then I'll focus on increasing rates of production - and get the project
trustees - who are watching the money for all of this - to release more
money for higher speed and bigger wafer fab - to be installed in the
unused clean room. 300 mm wafers and 250 wph - mean I can do 2 strings
an HOUR - which is all I need for the project.

1320 strings form a 'square' 2x2 miles and 9 squares are needed for each
of the projects in Indoneisa to make hydrogen from water on a scale
sufficient to fire the solar assisted Bergius reactor to make 200,000
b/d of blended liquid fuels (dieself fuel, jet fuel, gasoline blend no
bottoms).

Another project is underway in Australia that makes fresh water and salt
from seawater - since one of the trustees lives there and they've got a
crisis

This whole production schedule will take 18 months - including
installation at the remote facility. This in addition to 18 months at
the outset - the period we're in now.

So it sounds like you expect to have the first production prototypes in
6 or 8 months, with full production in 18 months.

Christ Bill. This is the same idiot that has been posting for years
here......

Yeah, I know. But he's never given a production date before. The product
kept changing, but now he says he's frozen the design. Some of his ideas
are innovative and plausible, but getting to a production prototype that
can actually be built for his estimated cost will not be easy.

If he actually has a demonstrable, producible prototype in 8 months,
I'll be impressed. He'll have to hire some experienced, practical
designers to get there. Highly creative people usually can't stop trying
to improve the product, and have schedule problems.

That may raise issues when the VC folks start monitoring progress. They
often worry quite vocally when schedules slip. I have no idea how much
background in the area Mook has, but since he doesn't seem to have the
cockiness knocked out of him yet, I'd guess not much.

I do hope he can at least get some inexpensive solar panels on the market.

Wish him luck. He's going to need it.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

I've been thinking about solar energy since 1996 - and building
prototypes since 1999. I have a handful and have learned quite a bit
about things. Sometimes when you do something totally different than
others it does appear idiotic. But those are just barriers to entry.
I learned that when I convinced folks at NREL that parastic heating
could be controlled. Haha.. the scientist I convinced organized a
first ever conference on CPV and I wasn't invited! haha.. Scratch
trying to convince government scientists of anything. lol. But the
process was rather simple. You need to reduce the cost of solar
panels. How to do it?

Well, some folks want to make things thinner. Others want to develop
methods of extruding or coating semiconductors to reduce costs. Still
others want to change up the technology and materials. Making steam
from sunlight for example.

The first thing I thought was that if I focused light to a tiny point
I could use a tiny die to convert that energy to electricity. Who
hasn't played with a magnifying glass in the sun? Could this make a
difference? It sure could. The relay that turns your refrigerator
motor on and off costs only pennies, its only a few millimeters in
size, and handles about 10 kW. So, a tiny cheap device can handle the
power for pennies a kilowatt. So, why can't solar cells?

Well, that takes you into heating. You have convection loss, and
radiation loss and conduction loss. Thats how things lose heat. The
sun applies heat. And heat kills semiconductor action - making
semiconductors more like conductors - and well, destroys solar cell
activity. The big killer is parastici heating. That is, current
flowing through the solar cell increases power disappated by
resistance by the square of the current. i-squared r losses it is
called. And that's a fundamental problem. There are two ways to
handle it though. One is to reduce R - resistance - and this was
first achieved by Bob Swanson ad Sunpower - by putting both junctions
on the back of the cell where they wouldn't block the sun and could be
made thick and well connected. Another approach is to reduce i - well
i is a function of the bandgap energy in the cell, and the only way to
do that for a given cell type is to put the cells in series. This was
done by Bernie Sater at NASA. He made 40 junction vertical multi-
junction PV cells - VMJ - and these reduce i to 1/40th the level for a
given illumination - and reduced heating by 1,600- Well, I put
together some wafers that had dies with 40 'power channels' in series
- connected at the back - combining both ideas with a few others.

Having defeated parastici heating, I then approached other sources of
heat. The sun is a white light source. That means it contains all
colors. Its a black body radiator with a surface temp of 5770K - and
so it has specific amounts of energy in each color -described by a
Planck Curve. A solar cell has a band gap energy - which is
associated with a specific color. In the case of silicon that's 1108
nm - about 1.1 microns. Any color of light 'redder' than 1.1 microns
does not contribute to cell operation - and so, heats it . Any color
of light 'lbluer' than 1.1 microns contributes ONLY the bandgap energy
to the operation of the cell, and the rest of the energy thermalizes
the electrons - heating the cell again. So, a 554 nm wavelength of
light - green - operates the cell, but HALF the energy shows up as
heat. 277 nm wavelength - violete - operates the cell as well, but
3/4 of its energy shows up as heat. So, by placing an optical
bandpass filter in front of the photocell reduces this sort of
heating, and even though you're throwing away some useful energy,
you're also throwing away a LOT MORE heat - and so, you can
concentrate the light to a higher intensity than you otherwise might -
and that reduces costs of electricity - which is the point.

Well, now that I got my PV costs where I wanted them, I then had to
worry about balance of system costs. Peak power matching for
example. If I don't properly load my cells when illuminated I can
destroy them as all those electrons recombine in the cell anyway
despite all my efforts. So, how to do that without destroying the
economics?

Then, I had the cost of making precise optics. How to do that for
less cost than silicon wafers?

Once I solved one problem others remained to be resolved - to meet my
ultimate goal of capturing sunlight for pennies per watt.

Haha.. and every step along the way I was vehemently opposed by those
I thought were natural allies.

I recall I had hired Accentrue to help with some strategic planning
in rolling this technology out. And they had arranged an interview
with BP Solar. lol. We signed the necessary paperwork and sent over
some preliminary stuff. And all of our patent apps - since they were
public anyway - or soon would be. We had our meeting. I mentioned
$0.07 per peak watt - which was in the paperwork. A general silence
greeted the statement. Then, one noted researcher said, you can't lay
a piece of glass on the ground and let full spectrum sunlight pass
through it and achieve $0.07 per peak watt! haha.. He hadn't read
the paper - how thick of a piece of glass sir? Plain common window
glass! Well, if you'd care to look at page 9 figure 3 - you'll see
we use no more than 210 microns of PET - a plastic quite a bit less
expensive than window glass. Oh I saw it, he said, this bubble wrap
looking thing. How does it maintain integrity. Well I happen to have
a sample panel right here if you would care to see it. And a larger
glass version that's 10 inches in size to you can see how the details
work. He looks at it for a minute and says thats all well and good in
the lab - but look at this, how big is this thing. 1 ft x 1ft x 1/2
inch. - as I pulled the layers apart - Jesus how many lenses are in
this thing? 144 - So, how many in the panel? 4,608 - on a 4ft x 8ft
panel sir. How many connections? Over 10,000 soldered connections
per panel and about 23,000,000 connections per string... Even if you
paid a penny a connection that's $230,000!! Total costs are
estimated by this engineering firm here - who specializes in large
scale production of consumer electronics products to be approximately
$71,000 - connector costs and metal costs do contribute the greatest
part of this cost. It won't work it just won't work. 23 million tiny
little connections any 1 of which will short out and burn up the whole
thing like a piece of paper. Ever boil water in a paper cup sir?
What? Eh, no, what's that got to do with anything? Well, these
lenses are water filled, they're very unlikely to burn - and cells
operate 96 in parallel, and 48 strings of 96 are joined in series - so
failures are acceptable, and 10 panels are joined in parallel, and
groups of 10 are joined in series... So, 2544 panels present two
separate outputs, one on either end, operating at 170kV. We have
modelled it in the test shown in the Appendix page ah 143 - He pushes
the document away. Son, he says, I appreciate your enthusiasm, but
there's no way in the goddamned world that you can make energy for
$0.07 per peak watt. NONE! I've worked in this business for more
than 20 years and when I got out of school I thought if I could get
solar panels down to $2 per peak watt, then that would change
everything. And I thought then, that I could do it in five years.
Give me the money and five years and I'll do it. Then, after five
years and lots of money I thought, well, maybe I could get to $2
before I retire. Well, I'm near retirement now, and I'm dreaming
maybe we'll get to $2 before I die. I don't know. But I'm dreaming
of that day. Now you come along and try to tell me you're going to
get to SEVEN CENTS! That just pisses me off. That's all that does.

My Accenture guy stares blankly at the guy. I look at him. David
says, well thank you for your time gentlemen. As I was packing up one
of the younger researchers there - no one else but the director spoke
at the meeting - asked for my card and asked a lot of smart
questions. He wished me luck and said I didn't have anything to worry
about as far as competition from BP. haha.. I said that was too bad,
because I was hoping we'd get a chance ot meet BP folks in London to
talk to them about how to use this ultra-low cost technology in a big
way.

That didn't happen.

Oh well.

Their loss.

That didn't change my focus or my intention to do what I set out to
do.

.