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A mountaintop greenhouse grows in coal country

How long has it been since you were in the industry? Relatively recent development of photovoltaic carbon (read artificial diamonds) based cells by joint research between Stamford and Yeshiva Universities, produce 40 times as much electricity as silicon based photovoltaic cells, are already in production at 1/50 the of the cost of as silicon based cells, with the resulting solar panels having a life expectancy greater than 100 years. Contained production systems segregated and recycle all potential pollutants. The new Apple, Inc. "spaceship" campus has been built with these panels installed, it is completely power self sufficient, selling excess power on the grid below the costs of any other electricity costs. Technology marches on. I read all about this in Wired magazine online, Gizmodo, Scientific American and the NYT online. Not necessarily the best scientific sources, but understandable for a layman like myself.

Read some similar publications from 30 years ago...it's all conjecture and the great majority of these new findings never come to fruition.
 
What part of the fossil fuel industry has not been subsidized for the past 100+ years, and still is? Hydropower? Nuclear power? If not for the tax payer no electric consumption of any kind would have been made possible. And while fossil fuel systems last a long period of times the maintenance necessary more the makes up for the life span of a solar panel. And then there is the annual cleanup necessary from burning fossil fuels especially coal.

There are pros and cons to any form of energy production. To forget the one to castigate the other makes no sense. And the cost of solar, and wind, has consistently been decreasing.

Giving a business tax breaks is not the same as almost fully funding one. The fossil fuel industry pay billions of dollars in taxes, not including the tax paid by the end user. Renewable energy isn't taxed at any level...if they were, these products would be far too expensive to even consider.
 
So, in your opinion no job is better then a low paying job. And I bet you complain about welfare too. Or even minimum wage.

I'm pretty left-wing overall. I support single payer healthcare, an increase in the minimum wage, and I am strongly pro-union. I have two issues with the topic of this thread. The first is that we have farmer's markets and they are starting to really gain steam. There is a non-profit market in my town that only accepts products from local producers, and it returns 90 cents on the dollar back to these local producers. If this guy comes into the area and sets up a multi-million dollar green house do you really think that won't displace producers in our local food market? The second problem is that creating a bunch of tomato picking jobs is not innovative and shouldn't be treated like some sort of brilliant idea. If people want to help us poor Appalachians they should lobby to expand the social safety net, increase the minimum wage, and promote things that are already working here even if they are small. Instead of giant greenhouses, why not put that money towards the farmers here that already have a small business going and are on the cusp of expanding? Why not heavily invest in these non-profit markets so in every town people have an option to support their local farmers?
 
Read some similar publications from 30 years ago...it's all conjecture and the great majority of these new findings never come to fruition.

How's your comprehension skills working these days? They are in production and being installed. Said it again so you can't miss it this time.
 
How long has it been since you were in the industry? Relatively recent development of photovoltaic carbon (read artificial diamonds) based cells by joint research between Stamford and Yeshiva Universities, produce 40 times as much electricity as silicon based photovoltaic cells, are already in production at 1/50 the of the cost of as silicon based cells, with the resulting solar panels having a life expectancy greater than 100 years. Contained production systems segregated and recycle all potential pollutants. The new Apple, Inc. "spaceship" campus has been built with these panels installed, it is completely power self sufficient, selling excess power on the grid below the costs of any other electricity costs. Technology marches on. I read all about this in Wired magazine online, Gizmodo, Scientific American and the NYT online. Not necessarily the best scientific sources, but understandable for a layman like myself.

'However, carbon nanomaterials still face issues with manufacturing expenses. Making structures at the nanometer scale can be labor-intensive, and laboratories have made these carbon solar cells only in small, bench-scale batches. "In order to determine the cost of the material, you have to produce them at scale," Strano said.
Another issue is the device's efficiency. The Stanford researchers reported a maximum power conversion efficiency of 0.46 percent. By comparison, organic solar cells peak just below 10 percent efficiency, and some of the most advanced crystal silicon cells can top 25 percent, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.'

Source...Scientific America, By Umair Irfan, ClimateWire on November 16, 2012
 
This is a topic near and dear to my heart. As I'm currently trying to develop a hydroponic factory in an extremely cold climate. And am in a legal battle on zoning atm. It's a rural area that produces Canola, and farmers control the board. What I'm doing is seen as a threat to that and their hefty subsidies. Because, I won't need subsidies to beat their prices, and I can produce more than them, more frequently.

Hydroponic factories are more efficient than open farm land. Takes less resources to manage. Produces higher quality produce. And produces more per square foot than open farming.

That being said, as for the powering them. Solar is not the way to go atm. Sugar is.

Ethanol as it's produced in the US currently is inefficient. By design. We are using Corn to make. And burning more fuel to grow the corn, than the corn produces. Which means we subsidize corn. That is wrong. But good for dirt farmers. It's also what's destabilizing Mexico's Ag based market that is heavily invested in corn. And driving immigrants across the border for work.

Sugar Beets. That's the answer. You can grow a lot of them, in a hydroponic factory with ease. The process that extracts the sugar also yields byproducts we can use for ethanol. And they produce more ethanol than corn does.

In short, we can employ more people than farms doing less labor intensive work in a conditioned environment. Produce the fuel we need to power ourselves. Produce more food, at higher quality. Cost the government less money. And keep Mexican farmers in Mexico, working on their own farms because they don't have to compete with corn that is being sold for cheaper than what it cost to produce.

It's also logistically better than transporting food from the country to population centers, if you just have food production in those population centers.

Imagine what we can do with all that farmland as well. Yeah it will suck for the farmers when they go out of business and lose that land. But that's capitalism. That land is capital, we can use it for better things.
 
I don't think so.

You are wrong. They have been installed on the new Apple campus, and not only there. Both Google and Amazon are installing them on the buildings housing their server farms, the Saudis are installing them on the new Israeli water desalinization plants, there's more. There will be many more as production ramps up.
 
'However, carbon nanomaterials still face issues with manufacturing expenses. Making structures at the nanometer scale can be labor-intensive, and laboratories have made these carbon solar cells only in small, bench-scale batches. "In order to determine the cost of the material, you have to produce them at scale," Strano said.
Another issue is the device's efficiency. The Stanford researchers reported a maximum power conversion efficiency of 0.46 percent. By comparison, organic solar cells peak just below 10 percent efficiency, and some of the most advanced crystal silicon cells can top 25 percent, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.'

Source...Scientific America, By Umair Irfan, ClimateWire on November 16, 2012

Confusing the issue. Industrial diamonds are not nano materials. You can buy all the zirconium you can afford off late night TV ads. Carbon crystals are one of the most common materials found on this earth.

I own a Grundig Shortwave radio, 70 years old. One carbon crystal. Plug it in for an hour, unplug, and the crystal keeps it powered for months of use. Same radios the Germans installed in their u-boats with two crystals. We forget, WWII subs, German, Japanese and American used solar cells to augment diesel engines for battery charging, and crystal use for augmenting batteries for low power use electric appliances, for use when submerged. This stuff has been around along time, but there was little incentive to pursue it all when fossil fuels were cheap and few cared about pollution. Now as the technology improves monumental strides are being taken. And the costs lower, as the production meets new scales, and new methods of clean production enter the arena.

During the early 1970's I bought a small abandoned farm near Rhinebeck NY, actually a 5 minute walk from the town. It had been taken by the county 70 years previously in rem. Unsold and unwanted all that time. My intent was a vacation home for the family. After making the house habitable, but far from finished, I worked on rebuilding the collapsed barn. I installed more than 90 cup windmills (purchased through the Whole Earth Catalog), each about 8" high along the perimeter of the bard roof, providing power through an electric turbine engine made by GE in 1926, for the barn and the house. The slightest breeze got the mills going. Two years later I removed more than 80 of the mills. The noise was just too annoying. The few left, with reasonable maintenance, still power the barn lights and winter heater. The company that made them is long gone, and I've replaced the bearings twice. I haven't seen them yet, but I understand a Chinese company is manufacturing a more advanced low noise similar product, installing them on new housing construction in China as part of their antipollution and fuel conservation efforts.

Cup windmills were first used in Britain during the late 14th century to power water turbines that ran their first textile mills, before they moved on to much more powerful water wheels to run those water turbines. Don't think of the their turbines as our turbine engines today, two very different technologies and purposes.
 
This is a topic near and dear to my heart. As I'm currently trying to develop a hydroponic factory in an extremely cold climate. And am in a legal battle on zoning atm. It's a rural area that produces Canola, and farmers control the board. What I'm doing is seen as a threat to that and their hefty subsidies. Because, I won't need subsidies to beat their prices, and I can produce more than them, more frequently.

Hydroponic factories are more efficient than open farm land. Takes less resources to manage. Produces higher quality produce. And produces more per square foot than open farming.

That being said, as for the powering them. Solar is not the way to go atm. Sugar is.

Ethanol as it's produced in the US currently is inefficient. By design. We are using Corn to make. And burning more fuel to grow the corn, than the corn produces. Which means we subsidize corn. That is wrong. But good for dirt farmers. It's also what's destabilizing Mexico's Ag based market that is heavily invested in corn. And driving immigrants across the border for work.

Sugar Beets. That's the answer. You can grow a lot of them, in a hydroponic factory with ease. The process that extracts the sugar also yields byproducts we can use for ethanol. And they produce more ethanol than corn does.

In short, we can employ more people than farms doing less labor intensive work in a conditioned environment. Produce the fuel we need to power ourselves. Produce more food, at higher quality. Cost the government less money. And keep Mexican farmers in Mexico, working on their own farms because they don't have to compete with corn that is being sold for cheaper than what it cost to produce.

It's also logistically better than transporting food from the country to population centers, if you just have food production in those population centers.

Imagine what we can do with all that farmland as well. Yeah it will suck for the farmers when they go out of business and lose that land. But that's capitalism. That land is capital, we can use it for better things.

Now that is interesting. Good luck.
 
Confusing the issue. Industrial diamonds are not nano materials. You can buy all the zirconium you can afford off late night TV ads. Carbon crystals are one of the most common materials found on this earth.

I own a Grundig Shortwave radio, 70 years old. One carbon crystal. Plug it in for an hour, unplug, and the crystal keeps it powered for months of use. Same radios the Germans installed in their u-boats with two crystals. We forget, WWII subs, German, Japanese and American used solar cells to augment diesel engines for battery charging, and crystal use for augmenting batteries for low power use electric appliances, for use when submerged. This stuff has been around along time, but there was little incentive to pursue it all when fossil fuels were cheap and few cared about pollution. Now as the technology improves monumental strides are being taken. And the costs lower, as the production meets new scales, and new methods of clean production enter the arena.

During the early 1970's I bought a small abandoned farm near Rhinebeck NY, actually a 5 minute walk from the town. It had been taken by the county 70 years previously in rem. Unsold and unwanted all that time. My intent was a vacation home for the family. After making the house habitable, but far from finished, I worked on rebuilding the collapsed barn. I installed more than 90 cup windmills (purchased through the Whole Earth Catalog), each about 8" high along the perimeter of the bard roof, providing power through an electric turbine engine made by GE in 1926, for the barn and the house. The slightest breeze got the mills going. Two years later I removed more than 80 of the mills. The noise was just too annoying. The few left, with reasonable maintenance, still power the barn lights and winter heater. The company that made them is long gone, and I've replaced the bearings twice. I haven't seen them yet, but I understand a Chinese company is manufacturing a more advanced low noise similar product, installing them on new housing construction in China as part of their antipollution and fuel conservation efforts.

Cup windmills were first used in Britain during the late 14th century to power water turbines that ran their first textile mills, before they moved on to much more powerful water wheels to run those water turbines. Don't think of the their turbines as our turbine engines today, two very different technologies and purposes.

I'm not interested enough to read your ramblings.
 
Giving a business tax breaks is not the same as almost fully funding one. The fossil fuel industry pay billions of dollars in taxes, not including the tax paid by the end user. Renewable energy isn't taxed at any level...if they were, these products would be far too expensive to even consider.

When we first started using electricity around the country who paid for the power lines that now criss cross the nation? Who paid for the R/D that led to fracking of today? Who developed the oil fields, and gave oil companies cheap rent, and access to, public lands? All of you people who hate the idea of renewables in spite of all the good they all do for the country deliberately choose to ignore the history of the fossil fuel industry, and the amount of money paid to develop that beginning industry back in the late 1700's, and early 1900's.

https://cen.acs.org/articles/89/i51/Long-History-US-Energy-Subsidies.html

'In comparing current support for renewable energy with past aid for today’s traditional energy sources, the report focuses on two types of assistance: funding during the first 15 years of support and annualized expenditures over the life of the energy source.

The first 15 years, the report says, are critical to developing new technologies. It finds that oil and gas subsidies, including tax breaks and government spending, were about five times as much as aid to renewables during their first 15 years of development; nuclear received 10 times as much support.

Federal support during the first 15 years works out to $3.3 billion annually for nuclear energy and $1.8 billion annually for oil and gas, but an average of only $400 million a year in inflation-adjusted dollars for *renewables.

For coal, which generates half the nation’s electricity, the authors were unable to quantify government support for the first 15 years, which includes federal and state aid. Coal, Pfund notes, benefits from a host of centuries-old programs that signal a rich history of aid, which is intertwined with the development of the nation. The aid runs deep and comes in many forms—state and federal tax breaks for mining and use; technological support for mining and exploration; national resource maps to encourage exploration and development; tariffs on foreign coal; and aid to steel smelters, railroads, and other industries that burn coal to encourage greater use and develop a steady market for coal.

“It has been a long heyday for coal,” she says, describing states and workers vying for jobs and business."


How Much Do Renewables Actually Depend on Tax Breaks?

https://cleantechnica.com/2012/08/0...re-in-historical-subsidies-than-clean-energy/

"You know the line — “Renewable energy shouldn’t receive government support. If it can’t stand on its own in the free market, it doesn’t deserve to grow.” The answer — total freakin’ hogwash, horsefeathers, balderdash!

First of all, as you might have gathered from the title, fossil fuel’s historical subsidies are like skyscrapers next to single-family-renewable-energy-subsidy homes. This is, notably, without including the massive indirect subsidies the oil and gas industry receive in unchecked externalities that wreak havoc on our health, our quality of life, and the potential viability of the human species after climate change is done with us.

You can see in this chart below that historical oil and gas subsidies are over 13 times larger than renewable energy (not including biofuels) subsidies:"
 
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I'm pretty left-wing overall. I support single payer healthcare, an increase in the minimum wage, and I am strongly pro-union. I have two issues with the topic of this thread. The first is that we have farmer's markets and they are starting to really gain steam. There is a non-profit market in my town that only accepts products from local producers, and it returns 90 cents on the dollar back to these local producers. If this guy comes into the area and sets up a multi-million dollar green house do you really think that won't displace producers in our local food market?

Why should it? If the local producer can produce a good that the local community wants then they can continue to compete with the "greenhouse". On the other hand, if the guy with the "greenhouse" is smart business wise he is going to produce a good that the locals cannot do. Then the question becomes, if the locals were so concerned about it why haven't they started a Grange, and built their own greenhouse? For my garden I have 4 greenhouses, 4 raised beds, and a fenced in 30' x 70' garden that I use for crops the deer would eat, and my orchard.

The second problem is that creating a bunch of tomato picking jobs is not innovative and shouldn't be treated like some sort of brilliant idea. If people want to help us poor Appalachians they should lobby to expand the social safety net, increase the minimum wage, and promote things that are already working here even if they are small. Instead of giant greenhouses, why not put that money towards the farmers here that already have a small business going and are on the cusp of expanding? Why not heavily invest in these non-profit markets so in every town people have an option to support their local farmers?

So again with the dependency on government that could easily be avoided if one works at it. In the valley by Eugene Oregon the local small farmers have formed a grange so they can assist each other in the production of everything from apples, to other vegetables, to goats, and cattle. It can be done. People just have to learn all over again to work together.
 
Why should it? If the local producer can produce a good that the local community wants then they can continue to compete with the "greenhouse". On the other hand, if the guy with the "greenhouse" is smart business wise he is going to produce a good that the locals cannot do. Then the question becomes, if the locals were so concerned about it why haven't they started a Grange, and built their own greenhouse? For my garden I have 4 greenhouses, 4 raised beds, and a fenced in 30' x 70' garden that I use for crops the deer would eat, and my orchard.



So again with the dependency on government that could easily be avoided if one works at it. In the valley by Eugene Oregon the local small farmers have formed a grange so they can assist each other in the production of everything from apples, to other vegetables, to goats, and cattle. It can be done. People just have to learn all over again to work together.
We have greenhouses and we have local farmers. That's what I'm trying to say. This tech bro is just looking to introduce something we already have, but put millions of dollars behind it which will no doubt lead to putting some of our local farmers out of business. If he really wanted to help he could donate to the local farms, or farmer's markets, so they could expand more quickly. There is no reason to jump into an area, put locals out of business, and then make them pick your tomatoes.
 
We have greenhouses and we have local farmers. That's what I'm trying to say. This tech bro is just looking to introduce something we already have, but put millions of dollars behind it which will no doubt lead to putting some of our local farmers out of business. If he really wanted to help he could donate to the local farms, or farmer's markets, so they could expand more quickly. There is no reason to jump into an area, put locals out of business, and then make them pick your tomatoes.

It is called "competition". Is it only in your local community that you object to such, or do you also oppose the growth of Walmart, Verizon, etc.? But you would prefer a "donation"? Is there some reason why the local community could not form a Grange, and build a local market that could possibly get into the interstate market? Why is it that other areas are succeeding, and you cannot?
 
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