Which is pretty cool – AND they’ve actually made them, which is even cooler.

Looks like it might need to be hand-aimed though. Bit of a pest, but less of a pest than the water needing to be hand-pumped.

I’ve been looking at quite a lot of these recently… eg:

Which is the Solar-Fire variant that uses 360 (6m by 6m) slightly curved mirrors to focus on an area about the size of a plastic-bucket bottom, or like a small and very very overdone pizza. The solar fire one is also manually controlled

6m by 6m is pretty big… I quite like the idea of having lots of de-coupled mirrors, each with their own inbuilt guidance system… so the turn to face the sun like flowers etc… and you could put them on the side of houses or on top fences etc… up on rooves… and you can just add more, as they’re needed etc.

Like these, but smaller and crapper.

controlled by those little photovore robots

So that’s my theory etc.

Mind you, one of those dishes does 3kw… which is about what it takes to run an average house (if you tweak your boiler down a couple of degrees)… and the cheap-end of retailer solar-electric is around $1.5 a watt now – and for that ($4.5k) you’re getting a system with no moving parts, and without a 700° C thing that’s too bright to look at in your back yard.

If you don’t mind sewing your own, crystaline laminates are about 50c a watt. Theoretically these things last for 25 years… but I think it’s a fair bet that the solar-moore’s law will deal to that – and after about 10 or so, the cheapness of solar will change the way people use electricity – possibly by having dual-systems… eg: a 12v DC system and separate 120/240 volt systems – for big legacy appliances. Really it’s a waste of energy converting up and down. The only reason we do it is because we’re grid-tied.

This is a bloke playing with the bendy 120w ones you can get off ebay for about $280 a go

Which is about $2 a watt – not including the inverters and batteries and whatnot that you’ll need. You’ll need about 24 of these to match the parabolic thing at the top… but something tells me they’ll be a lot less grief to look after.

I think a large chunk of the energy crisis is probably going to just go away – if this stuff proliferates. I think innovation on this front is going to go from trying to make physical machines, to using the output of the bendy-solar-manufacturers as a platform… the way people build on twitter etc.

We have a funny relationship with space… and space travel. We know what it’s supposed to be… what it’s supposed to be like – we just can’t do it. We’ve got a whole (massively popular) genre of entertainment based on something we can’t (for one reason or another) do. Part of it is that our political systems are too corrupted by wealthy interests – so more is spent on air-conditioning in war-zones, than on NASA. But part of it is that the laws of physics simply ain’t allowing it. We’re kindof stuck.

But this post isn’t about that, it’s about solar – which seems to be taking a fucking eternity to get here. At least once a month, some amazing new breakthrough happens… like this:

That’s a solar-cell array printed on paper using vapor-deposition (low-temp in a vacuum etc), in a way that is so robust that it’s foldable… up to about 1000 times (it ain’t indestructible, but still…). It’s from MIT (for all you people who think that only corporations innovate).

Currently running at about 1% efficiency – which they say they can improve… the crystalline cells are approaching 29% these days.

So what’s going to happen? Fuck all I bet. It’ll get tied up with patents so no one gets to use it except massive corporations, who don’t really want to use it and would rather sell incremental improvements to existing products, or whatever.

Konarka seem to be quite close to… changing the world, but they’ve seemed that way for years now – and the only thing that I’ve seen that I can actually buy, is a fucking solar-powered backpack, which is extremely underwhelming. Their web site has pictures of things that look like this

But danged if I can find something that I can actually buy and chuck up on the roof. If I want solar, I have to fall back on the clunky glass variety, or…

… actually, scratch that, these things ARE starting to turn up on Ebay.

$240 for a 68W flexible strip – that’s a fuck of a lot cheaper than it was last time I looked. $240 is less than I spend on a drunken night out. I spend over $3000 a year on fucking latte. Instead of buying more nuke power plants, the Japanese should just buy millions of these and drop them from helicopters over Tokyo. It’ll be cheaper than re-nuking – and more resilient. Trouble is… their govt already invested in nuke, so now they’ve got a $70-$250bn cleanup bill (The Belarus govt estimated Chernobyl to be over $250bn… and really, that disaster is still going on, which is why the Russian Govt is asking for financial help from the British to re-build the containment on the fucked reactor)

The Japanese are already committed to waste… and now millions of jellyfish are attacking their remaining power-plants, as they’re also doing (weirdly enough) in Israel and Scotland.

And for the same £ that the UK pisses up the wall on storage of nuke-waste created by people in the 1970s, it could buy about 6.3 MILLION of these panels a year, and just give them away. And that doesn’t account for bulk buying, or Moore’s law, which does alseo apply to solar, albeit at a slower rate.

But they can’t because they’re committed to waste.

–

Which naturally leads to this : Solar-uptake from the favela, or more accurately, the faveloid farm. People in India not bothering for major institutions to provide the infrastructure, and instead (like they did with cellphones) going straight for the (semi) off-grid option.

I think we’re going to see more and more of this – the innovations that really matter are slum-driven… or… favela-chic driven… or… places where lack of “governance” (which is expressly designed to create corporate monopolies) grants freedom to create solutions that are actually people-based, rather than serving some capitalist aim.

I see in Ebay, adverts for solar cells are accompanied by photos of scantily-clad women… and by scantily-clad, I mean really, budget-level, pirated stock-photography scantily-clad.

And I see this as a good sign, because it means that the market has hit drek-bottom and is competing on every desperate angle it can possibly find – which means the prices aren’t artificially high, because some toss-weed corporation is charging a monopoly rent on patents that it bought.

–

Ignoring that though… I think there’s another interesting angle that comes from uptake of off-grid solar – and that is that people will become aware of what electricity they’re actually using… which naturally feeds into and multiplies with a revolution in home-automation, which is coming, I promise you. Being able to play your power-consumption like a computer game, will massively reduce the amount we use.

It’s a kindof consumer-union for would be solar-buyers. They get to buy in bulk and advise on local conditions / best setups etc.

I’m quite interested in the retrofitting of green-tech into urban environments – and this could well be a good way of going… because as far as I can see, our various governments are utterly in thrall to the existing systems. Which suck.

And here it is:

The design philosophy is something like:

- made out of bits you can find pretty much anywhere for free-ish.
- no permanent attachments – no glue, staples, nails etc so you can experiment/swap bits
- avoid big bits of stuff – because they can be hard to find.
- flexible design so it can be built round the hardest to find bit – the glass.

So there it is. It’s
- 3 layers of cardboard box cardboard,
- a couple of bits of polystyrene
- a window pane
- a load of beercans cut in half and crimped together
- a bit of copper tube at the top
- all connected together with bicycle inner tube.

All of which I scrounged from local businesses – the most beneficial aspect of which is that you get to talk to and befriend local business peeps… apart from the beer cans which I was forced to buy and drink myself. I also put tape around the edge of the glass because its sharp etc.

So there you go. I’m going to go through a bit of an experimental phase… I think double glazing it would be a good idea, and it will need to be water-proofed. I’d like to get away without using polystyrene if I can as well.

But there it is… a reasonably overcastish sort of day, but bright enough to cast a shadow…

… and the bit of pipe sticking out the side is too hot to touch.

I’ll make an instructable or something once I’ve gone through a few more iterations. I’ll need to get some more beer cans as well probably.

That green is a million billion illion willion squillion leaves, and each one is almost certainly a little flat thing that’s been specially evolved and angled to aim at the sun, and quite a lot of them follow the sun across the sky. This is not an accident, and it’s not Mother Nature trying to tell us something… although…

This turned up on the TED rss a couple of days ago:

It’s Bill Gross going on about a couple of things for which I have a tangential fascination – genetic algorithms and Stirling Engines … and solar energy obviously. Everyone loves solar energy. Except amature nuke shill morons who are probably suffering from some sort of authority-worship/obedience complex. I blame the parents.

Unfortunately it’s from 2003, and the only things I can find that point to which direction this thing went in, are boring looking arrays of mirrors and fresnel lenses… though I daresay they’re still better than I could do. They’ve gone for the money. They’ve gone for centralisation.

Still, if it works…

I do like the initial design though – and the philosophy… something decentralised and cheap enough for anyone.

Other than that of course… this thing just looks… right.

It is it’s own built in marketing. Sometimes something just looks so cool, you’ve got to get one whether it works 100% or not.