permaculture

[sustain_ability@123mail.org]

I'm very happy to have rediscovered one of my "original" inspirations:

http://www.ecosyn.us/Welcome/07/index.html

and a recent, long posting by its author, reproduced here:
"..
These are the facts:

One acre of PV cell surfaces (either compacted on one acre of rooftop
or more scattered) generates 12 watts per square foot @ 13% efficiency
DC measured at the panel output. There's 43,560 square feet in an
acre, so each peak sunny hour in a vast swath of 8 of the southwest US
sunbelt states can count on a reliable 522,720 watt-hours of
production, 6-hours a day 365 days of the year. Daily total production
per acre is 3.136 megawatt-hours per acre DC delivered to the bussbar.

The power required to make one acre of PV panels is 35 days. That's
the energy payback time, EPBT, you may have heard differently about.
35 days times 3.136 MWhs is 112.896 MWhs -- anybody who can't make an
acre of PV with 112 MWhs ought to leave the feild to the pros and get
out of the biz.

The term you need to internalize is H2-PV -- Hydrogen by the tons from
PV by the acres.

One acre of PV will electrolyze 12 kilograms of Hydrogen (abbreviated
as H2) per peak sunny hour. Each day that comes to 72 kilograms, and
annually 26,280 kg, or 26 metric tonnes of H2 per acre of PV. That's
figured on a conservative basis of 76% efficiency conversion of
electricity to H2.

Expressed differently, there are 54 kilowatthours of electricity
embodied in an electrolyzed kilogram of H2 but you will only get 43
kWhs when you burn it.

At retail electric rates of $0.12/kWh it costs $6.72 to electrolyze on
kg of H2. Compared to gasoline at $2.50 a gallon that does not look
very attractive, however, other factors must be considered.

It requires 9 kilograms of water (2.4 gallons) to extract 1 kilogram
of H2, (which is one-ninth by weight, but two-thirds by atom count),
also generating 8 kilograms of oxygen. Using a catalytic process that
O2 can be combined with water again to make H2O2. The same 2.4 gallons
of water with twice the O2 now weighs 17 kilograms. The value of H2O2
in the bulk market is $24 for 17 kg of H2O2 sold diluted at 50%
strength in 40,000 gallon tanker lots.

http://www.h2o2.com/intro/faq.html#14
14. How much does H2O2 cost?

$6.72 worth of retail electricity plus a couple gallons of water is
now valued at $26.50 if the H2 is valued the same as gasoline. Both H2
and H2O2 are technically rocket fuels and both have been used to power
motor vehicles.

H2-PV is not merely a substitute that permits business as usual to go
on. It is the most profound energy revolution in the history of the
human race.

With a "Model-T" Solar PV works, using all public domain technologies,
there is no possibility of monopolization.

A core technology passed from patent-protected to patent-expired last
year: the Electromagnetic Casting process (EMC). This process uses 12
kWh per kilogram of Silicon to cast multicrystalline ingots for
slicing into PV cell wafers, and can process 30 kg per hour, 720 kg on
a pro-rata basis per 24 hours, generating enough stock to make 600
square meters of PV collecting surfaces per day after sawing and
breakage allowances.

Other technologies which support the EMC core process have likewise
passed into public domain. Basically, it is a licence to print money.
24/7 operation will output one acre of PV from a state-of-the-art EMC
furnace in one week. Currently PV is retailing for $7/watt, valuing
the acre of PV at $3.5 million when it is finished in retail PV Panels.

If you bought the electricity retail from the grid, 12 kWh/kg @
$012/kWh x 30 kg/hr x 24/hours x 7 days comes to $52,358.40 for the
power bill to crystallize the PV.

The normal state of affairs is this:
(1) Sand is processed in an arc furnace to semi-purify it to "Metal
Grade" because that's good enough for 95% of the customers who are in
the metallurgy business. MG silicon is also called Metallic Si or
Industrial Grade, from 98% to 99.9% pure. Every kg of MG Si generate a
kg of CO2 the way they do it.
(2) 5% of the MG Si is transported elsewhare to be processed by the
Seimen's Process into "Electronics Grade" Si, at great trouble,
expense and pollution.
(3) The EG Si is then transported somewhere else for remelting a third
time and pulling crystals for the electronics business. This Si is
9-nines pure (99.9999999%)
(4) "Tops and Tails" and breakage scraps are sold and transported
somewhere else for a fourth melt as "Solar Grade" (SoG) Si for casting
in an EMC furnace or other competing process. This Si may be 5-nines
pure (99.999%) provided that B & P contaminants are below 1 ppm each.

Currently the scoundrels have cornered the market on EC-grade scraps
for the next year at least -- long enough to drive under the smaller
players and monopolize the industry under a price-fixing cartel.

The alternate reality is this: it takes a 5-yard dump truck of sand
once a week to feed an EMC operation. The SiO2 is purified to 5-nines
in step #1 and flows still molten to step #4, skipping a lot of the
expense. Si is about similar density to concrete, about 145 pounds per
cubic foot. It is sawn into wafers the thickness of business cards.

Two wheelbarrows of SoG per day makes 600 meters^2 wafers after sawing
kerf losses and nominal breakage. The volume of materials needing to
be processed is relatively small. Each day 2 to 4 wheelbarrows of sand
have to be ready to feed the furnaces that day. Pre-purification steps
with acids require non-reactive plastic containers to hold that much
material. A dozen polypropylene 55 gallon barrels leaves some spares
on hand to get ahead a bit on the furnaces.

You should be getting the idea that this is not heavy industry, but
small business. There is room in the marketplace for 50,000 of these
PV factories to bloom, and ten years run before the market could ever
get glutted.

All the technology is public domain. Nobody can keep anybody else from
going into the business. There are no choke points, no strategic
ingredients that can be cornered. Even the power transistors to make
the awesome power that runs the furnaces can be made with public
domain technology. If we have to, we can make the acids too.

Hydrogen plays a key role in the Si purification, but no need to get
into the details here. Geopolymers <http://www.geopolymer.org/> are
not public domain, but can be licenced as needed, or wait it out.
Geopolymers solve most of the problems with the H2-Economy.

That's also something that need not be discussed at this point. For
stationary storage of H2, zerolites were extensively researched in the
1970s and 1980s for transportation fule carriers and rejected as too
heavy and bulky. For stationary applications, however, weight and bulk
are not a problem. Zeolites can store large quantities of H2 at normal
pressures without fire or explosion hazards. Geoploymers are synthetic
zeolites which are moldable into complex shapes at normal temperatures
and can be composited with carbon-fiber fabrics for super-strength.

The expectation of H2 presense then permits design with H2 fuel cells
for stationary power. Both Molten-Carbonate (MCFC) and Solid-Oxide
(SOFC) fuel cells are high temperature operation devices which fit
right in with a Solar PV manufactuary. Again, they dispense with the
choke points (in this case no precious metals like platinum).

Once you have your first acre of PV you could pull the plug on the
grid. You are perpetually assured of fuel, of electric power 24/7, and
a supply of pure distilled-quality water needed in several place in
the operation. However, with only one acre of PV one must operate in
daily batches. It requires at least four acres of PV to run 24/7/365
with stored power.

So, where are we in this scenario? I currently have pulled about 470
top candidates of expired-patent technologies out of the USPTO
database. These are being sifted and organized. It currently
represents 122 megabytes (which may grow considerably) of data which
will be uploaded to the website when it is indexed. A CD-ROM or
DVD-ROM version will be available for faster access from local drives
than even the fastest broadband. The website currently contains an
eclectic assortment of data, 7,000+ files and bits, which is another
600 megabytes. Combined they both can't fit on CD-ROM, but I have
enough other stuff to fill a DVD to the brim.

Currently the website is getting about 22,000 to 30,000 visits per
month without any effort to promote it other than keeping search
engines informed about what's new. This new patent collection very
well might hit a sweet spot of all the interest in Energy Independence
and Environmental Decay. My pages are often up in the first page of
Google Results for relevance on these issues.

I merged two websites last month, and things are still bumpy over
that. Major overhaul is needed to weed out broken links and obsolete
stuff. I began a wiki which has an initial 93 pages, but half of those
are place-holding stubs waiting for me (or you) to fill them up and
make more branches and links.

The wiki gave me the idea of creating a second patent wiki just for
this collection. I am using an open-source freeware, TikiWiki, which
seems adequate for the job. One thing Wikifying the patents does is it
gives a search pages function otherwise missing from the website as a
whole. Unfortunately, the wiki mode can't be easyly transferred to
DVD-ROM.

So that's where this stands today -- about a couple of weeks from
uploading to the website. Then a couple more days for the search
engines to go through it. Then the spark happens that changes the
world within ten years time to an H2-PV world. And they all lived
happily ever after...

http://h2-pv.us/H2/H2_Basics.html
http://h2-pv.us/PV/Solar_Maps.html
http://h2-pv.us/H2/PDFs_Dloaded.html
http://h2-pv.us/wind/Introduction_01.html
http://h2-pv.us/wind/Big_01.html
http://h2-pv.us/wind/strip_mining/strip_mining.html
http://h2-pv.us/wind/towers_prior_art/towers_prior_art.html
http://h2-pv.us/PV/DOE_Slides/Govt_PDFs_01.html
http://h2-pv.us/H2/h2_safety_swain/swain_safety.html

http://h2-pv.us/Welcome/
http://h2-pv.us/Interesting/
http://h2-pv.us/Ecovillage/
http://h2-pv.us/ecocity/Palaces/New_City/New_Ecocity.html
.."
George
http://transitions.stumbleupon.com


On Wed, 06 Dec 2006 15:43:23 -0500, "Keith Johnson"
<keithdj@mindspring.com> said:
[snip]
> The most important inventions now must encompass our collective purpose 
> and our aspirations for the long haul--like permaculture, the creation 
> of productive and sustainable landscapes through means that leave a 
> minimal human impact. With its fusion of justice, sustainability, and 
> meaning, permaculture joins the co-op movement, the American 
> Constitution, and Buddhism in a long tradition of positive inventions.
> Kim Stanley Robinson, author of Antarctica
> 
> 
> -- 
> Keith Johnson
> Permaculture Activist Magazine
> PO Box 5516, Bloomington, IN 47408
> (812) 335-0383
> http://www.permacultureactivist.net

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