Well, after finishing my master's I finally managed to land a job in this shitty economic climate. I'm extremely thankful that I found anything, since many of my peers - engineers and scientists from a top 5 university - applied to several dozen positions with no luck. But on top of that, I'm fortunate enough to get paid to do research in an area I'm passionate about, namely the problems of energy and climate. Woot!

In celebration (and out of postpartum academic trauma), I'll be happy to take a stab at any questions about energy that my fellow ex-Lanysites may have. I don't claim to be an expert (yet!), but I've worked pretty hard over the last couple years to develop a broad understanding of energy issues.

So fire away!

Why don't I have more energy?

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Okay, here's one I'm actually interested in: how far away are we from actually having common, widespread use of renewable energy sources? Specifically for homes and businesses, not for cars and such.

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Oh, and congratulations! Sorry for the double post, forgot to add that.

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Sweet, congratulations! I'm in the market for a new one of those. Disillusionment doesn't suit my current one.

Not in the next 20 years IMO. Though we're on the cusp of MUCH cheaper solar being available.

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CONGRATS!

And what do you think the LHC will come up with regarding string theory?

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Something complicated that I wont understand.

It's really complicated at the professional level (which, clearly *I'M* not at) but the basics aren't that difficult. Sorta like...I can explain to you what a star is, and you can understand the jist of it and even pretty indepth shit, even if it's all superficial compared to people who REALLY study it.

So what about string theory don't you get? I can explain the jist/basics. More complicated than that...no.

Though I think this covers A LOT:

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Within 9.5 years.

Great, hopefully you can fill me in on wind power. I do not understand why my government(Canada) and many other governments are buying wind generated power that they can not use effectively. My understanding of this is limited so I'm hoping you can enlighten me.

From what I do understand what matters in energy production is the ability to meet demand. You need to be able to meet demand 100% of the time, anything less than that is not acceptable. Lights need to go on when people flick the switch, furnaces need to generate heat when it gets cold, etc. When brown outs happen, and they rarely do, its a huge fucking deal.

Traditional power generation such as a coal fired plants are able to provide consistent power on demand. The problem with wind power is that it is not consistent, the variability in its generation is huge and can change quickly. Because of this wind power is unable to consistently and reliably meet demand. Since wind power can not meet demand other traditional sources of power generation have to make up the difference.

So the question I ask is why are our governments investing huge amounts into a source of power generation that can not provide us with the power we need. Essentially they are buying power they can not use and we the consumer are paying for it. All in the name of "green" energy. In one report I've read it states that wind power can only replace traditional power by 4%, that's 4% even if the total wind generated power is 100% of the consumed energy.

There are many ways to utilize wind energy but direct from turbine to grid does not appear to be one of them. Any input from someone who knows more about this than I is appreciated.

Here is a link to a report from the largest grid operator in Germany that evaluates the use of wind power.

http://www.windaction.org/?module=uploa ... fileId=232

Solar power has been around for what, 25 years or so now? And yet is still only used in like 0.0000000001% of homes and businesses in the world?

I would think after 25 years that the technology has been mastered enough (not perfect, just mastered) to where this would be far more widespread and common, especially in states like Arizona where I live where the sun shines basically every day of the year.

That is just the one thing I have never understood- why we don't use solar power far more. I mean it is out there, the sun is there... and yet we ignore it it seems.

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Maybe the people doing the work on solar power are also all gamers and they just aren't aware of that fact at the moment!

It's because the current generation of solar cells are not efficient, and the cost per kilowatt-hour is higher than other sources. The cells can only absorb energy from a couple wavelengths. Newer solar cells use multiple junctions to absorb more colors but they are expensive and use exotic materials.

The technology is improving, but it's not there yet. It hasn't been ignored. Many 100s of millions of dollars have been spent on it. It's just very hard to reliably build a cheap and efficient cell. Multi-junction cells are still for the most part grown by hand.

And the process of creating solar cells has a lot of downsides also -- toxic chemicals and lots of hazardous waste, at least last time I checked.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

New solar cell technology is just around the bend, however it's also not a constant source of power, and the ability to 'store' is limited. Solar power is great for sunny areas, less so for areas without a lot of sunshine. Still...with bew solar cell technology promised, it will become MUCH cheaper and a good source of alternative power.

Though if it becomes more common, there will be les revenue for the solar people on selling excess power which many can do now.

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Yup, any semiconductor fabrication is a dirty process. And there are occasional delightful explosions when people mismark the vessels they cleaned with acetone.

Congrats Noojens!

Here's a question for you. How much power is lost in converting between AC and DC?

If you have a good power plant, nearly none. We use DC power in my data center (at least we will until we move), because overall DC wastes less energy than AC.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

http://www.scientificblogging.com/jane_ ... els_really

Solar is going to take off if they ever get this into the market.

Whew, lots of posts overnight! Thanks for the contrats all


Renewable electricity is not so far off. Hydroelectric power is clean, cheap, renewable and dispatchable (can be ramped up or down nearly instantaneously, unlike coal/nuclear plants). The downside, of course, is that we've already tapped most of our viable hydro sources, unless we want to do Three Gorges Dam-scale hydro projects, which have huge environmental and social justice downsides. About 20% of US electricity generation currently comes from hydro, though, so many people already use a significant portion of renewable power.

Wind is taking off. I had the pleasure of meeting a former CTO of GE a few months ago -- the guy who took GE wind from nothing in 2002 to a $7 billion business last year. Not exactly a lightweight... he's moved on to working as a venture capitalist (investing heavily in plug-in hybrid electric vehicle companies, incidentally). He said (and I verified) that under the current federal and state incentives, wind is cost-competitive with coal -- and in the current economic climate of skittish investors, its low capital cost makes it the clear choice for constructing new power plants... in regions where the wind blows, anyway. There are some problems with wind, of course:

1) It's variable. Better wind forecasting algorithms, better large-capacity storage techniques (compressed air storage, supercapacitors, better batteries [the ex-CTO is also investing heavily in battery companies like A123], superconducting electromagnetic storage, flywheels, etc. are options), peak backup plants (natural gas isn't going anywhere), and dynamic metering/pricing of electricity (residential "smart grids") are all needed.

2) Like hydro, there are a limited number of economically viable wind sites. 20% penetration is about as far as wind will go.

3) US wind subsidies are erratic. This makes it difficult for investors to assess the payback time of wind projects. We need a consistent, long term wind policy to facilitate widespread investment in new wind farms.

4) Wind turbines aren't manufactured domestically. Bear this in mind when you hear talk about "green jobs." The US has great manufacturing capacity, but it's not being leveraged to build wind turbines, yet. Instead, they're shipped overseas from Europe, adding to their cost and embodied energy.

5) On-shore wind is where the people ain't. The densest wind resources are in North Dakota -- smack in the middle of the country, and far from load centers in CA and the Northeast corridor that desperately need more power. Significant upgrades to the grid, in the form of new high-voltage DC lines that cross many state boundaries (a political friggin' nightmare to get through), need to be made.

Solar gets a lot of press, but is currently a factor of 5 away from being cost-competitive with wind/natural gas/coal, and that's with federal/state subsidies. It's 10x more expensive than coal without subsidies. Like Tarot and others have said, there are new PV technologies in the pipeline that could bring the price point down. Economies of scale will also take effect once the solar industry grows and gains momentum. The Secretary of Energy (Nobel physicist Steven Chu, for those of you who didn't know!) has said a few times that there is a Nobel-level discovery waiting to be made in photovoltaics. We'll see -- science has a way of changing the game. But for now, PV plays a negligible role in the electricity picture. Concentrating solar power (focusing sunlight with big ass mirrors to boil water and run turbines) is actually cheaper on the utility scale, and there are some 100+ MW plants in the Arizona desert making money off of this tech today. Solar, of course, carries the same variability problems that wind does, and requires the same technological solutions.

Biomass is a source that gets less press, but is more viable than solar. And I'm not talking about corn ethanol here, or any other liquid fuels. That's another beast entirely. I'm talking about burning wood in rural areas, or burning municipal solid waste in urban areas (shit and garbage). There are significant unanswered questions about whether feedstock forests for wood-burning power plants can be harvested sustainably, and what the actual carbon balance of such a plant is (advocates claim it is carbon-neutral, without real proof; the scientific jury is out on this one). Municipal solid waste, however, is a win. Greenhouse gases from trash are by and large vented to the atmosphere, except in situations where landfills are capped. Might as well emit the same level of GHG through combustion, and get energy in the process. How much energy? NYC could get 30% of its electric power from the waste it produces. A city of 10+ million people generates a lot of trash.

Nuclear, while not renewable, is at least clean (in the carbon sense). It's stalled in the US, though -- no new nuclear plants have been built in this country since 1973. The nuclear waste storage problem needs to be solved before anyone's willing to invest in new nuke plants... and the Obama administration is essentially killing the Yucca Mountain project by halving its funds every few months. On top of that, nuclear plants take 5-7 years and $3-5 billion to construct (compared to 1-2 years and a few hundred million for a wind farm). Nuclear will play a role in our energy future (France is 70% powered by nuke plants; Japan almost half), but there are significant barriers to uptake in the US. Nonetheless, 20% of US electricity is currently generated by nuclear reactors, so again much of our electricity is carbon-free.

SO! To answer your question, we're at least a decade away from significant penetration of renewable electricity resources. The DOE goal is 20% wind by 2020, and this is honestly feasible -- not due to national altruism, but simply because it's cheap and easy. This assumes we continue to have Obama-esque support of clean energy projects (here's hoping).

In the mean time, new coal plants with no form of carbon capture tech are being built every week (multiple per week in China). The climate change problem isn't going anywhere, I'm afraid.

You absolutely need 'traditional' sources of power generation that are able to provide constant and continuous energy for when the wind is not blowing. That said, these sources (coal, oil, nuclear, gas turbine, hydro, etc) have flexibility in the amount of energy they generate otherwise things don't function when the entire east coast gets home at 5:00pm (as an example) and turns on their lights, appliances, and heaters/air conditioners.

So while it's not a perfect solution to require redundancy in your power generation, which is effectively what wind power is, the fuel for wind power is nearly perfect and should be taken advantage of as much as reasonably possible.

My attempt at an analogue would be fresh foods, they're more expensive and not as readily available as foods with a shelf life but that doesn't stop me from buying them (provided they're not too expensive and too inconvenient to buy).

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Kuwen Furyblades
Hunter of Memento Reejeryn
Champion of Faydark

I can't say much re: string theory. I took a couple grad quantum classes, but didn't take quantum field theory or anything string-related, more's the pity.

Here's some more physics funny for ya, though:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index ... n-collider

That's a great point. A quick clarification, though: wind power isn't wasted. When wind resources are high, other sources of electricity (coal and natural gas) can be turned down. This saves money, decreases the necessity of imports and mining, decreases emissions, etc. Wind isn't a pure win, but it's still a win.

As Argrax said, at present we absolutely need backup generating capacity that can be quickly turned up or down to facilitate integration of wind into the grid. This means natural gas plants, since coal plants take hours to increase or decrease output, and the costs of changing nuclear plant outputs are too high.

Thankfully, both the Canadian and US grids already have huge amounts of natural gas generating capacity that sit idle 90% of the day. This peak capacity is only turned on at times of maximum demand (as Argrax said, generally around 4-6 pm), because natural gas is expensive. In countries with substantial wind penetration, like Denmark (20%) or Germany (8%), existing natural gas capacity is used to "fill in" the variability of wind. It's an imperfect solution, and it's been said that the German grid would fail if it couldn't import consistent, cheap nuclear power from France.

So there are definitely issues with wind, as you say. However, peak plants can ameliorate these issues at present, and better solutions are on the horizon:

- Demand control from smart metering and dynamic/transparent electricity pricing
- Better storage (examples in a previous post)
- Better wind speed prediction algorithms

The idea is that by the time we have enough installed wind capacity for its variability to jeopardize grid stability, one or all of these solutions will have been implemented. The stimulus package contains money for 40 million smart meters, and Google is doing a cool project to let homeowners see the output of those meters in near real time. Nanotechnology is revolutionizing the battery picture, and plenty of people are working on atmospheric prediction algorithms. It's only a matter of time.

55 years since the first solar panel was used outside the lab. It was used to power a phone station far from the grid in the ass end of Georgia. 4 years later a panel was put on a satellite.

It's an issue of cost. PV electricity is 10x more expensive than coal without subsidies, 5x more expensive with subsidies. Silicon cells suffer from competition with the LCD and computer chip industries. Alternative solar cell materials like cadmium telluride have come onto the scene in the last 5-10 years, producing power at about half the cost of silicon cells. First Solar grosses $6 billion on thin film solar cells annually. But the tech is still not cheap enough to take off in a big way (and, like Vana and others said, there are issues with using a bunch of nasty heavy metals in semiconductor processing).

Economies of scale will cheapen the manufacturing process... but feedstock scarcity (for silicon-based solar cells, at least) will only become more of a problem. There needs to be a revolution in solar cell technology, something that can make PV films basically as cheap as paint.

If I'm recalling correctly, back a few years ago in one of my undergrad courses, it was stated that some very high number, I want to say 70+%, of newly installed capacity (last 10 years or so) has been natural gas turbines (more or less akin to a jet engine). They're a very efficient way to produce power (relative to other fuels - upwards of 40% of the theoretical yield) but such a volatile commodity.

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Kuwen Furyblades
Hunter of Memento Reejeryn
Champion of Faydark

Yes, wind power is absolutely wasted with our current grid structure. If you have installed wind power that can meet the max capacity demanded by consumers but you are at low peak times that wind energy is wasted, BUT, we are still paying for it. Meaning if you have a wind farm generating 100 megawatts but the demand is only 10 megawatt at 2am our government(provincial governements in Canada) are still paying for the 100 megawatts ...but its going nowhere.

Wind generation at present is only financially feasible if it is heavily subsidized by government. To get wind to provide 20% of actual energy used would require huge overhauls to our grid structure, technological improvements to energy storage and large redundancy spread over a wide area. None of these are factored into current payback models of wind generation.

Noojens, congrats. Would you mind if I ask why you decided not to do a phd? I have read some of your posts in the past, and it seems like you might be the type of person interested in doing so.

About the solar power, I am fairly convinced that silicon solor power is just not the way to go. As was previously mentioned, there is a huge trade-off in fabrication of silicon real-estate and the benefits of solar power.

“Fabrication of a single 2 gram silicon DRAM microchip requires 32kg of water and 41MJ of energy and produces 1.7kg of waste”
E. Williams and R. Ayres and M. Heller, Environmental Science and Technology, 2002

Those values are approximately the same for solar cell fab.

In addition, there are many reasons that silicon isn't the most efficient material to be using. There are many different material properties that play into this from more academic standpoint (bandgap sucks nuts for solar) and more practically it's not light and flexible enough to sit on the roof of a car like paint. It's also expensive and hard to repair.

With regard to biomass, look at some of the numbers on area/life cycle. It's a great idea, but practically everyone would need their entire backyard to be full of corn to make a big dent in the US's power consumption.

There's some really promising work going on involving the use of bacteria and algae rather than plants as a solar power energy source. They both multiply like crazy (double in 1~3 days depending on organism). They are working on efficient methods extracting just the right "stuff". For science types, they extract the lipids from the organisms; lipids are fat. All of the cells in your body have an outer layer that is a lipid bilayer (double layer).

Here is just one of the places working on this
http://biodesign.asu.edu/research/proje ... er-biofuel

Cicely (or anyone else) - The link above is research going on in Tempe. I have no idea if you live close enough. However, if you (or anyone) would like a tour of the labs or to ask questions via email, I can most likely pull those strings. I don't work with that group, so I have a limited knowledge of detail.

How viable would it be to set up a solar farm in a remote desert region where the land is cheap and the sun is strong year round... and sell off the energy?

Obv building the distribution would not be cost effective... but could using the energy to produce Liquid Hydrogen from water be viable? (I know other than finding a solution for getting water in the desert... deep wells, ship in water ship out hydrogen/oxygen?

Just a nice Idea for the sort coming of a sorce for hydrogen for the new style cars.

As far as wind power, I find people are putting much to faith in it without pondering the possible impact on the gobal enviorment...

100 years ago could people imagine the impact drilling black stuff out of the ground could have on the atmosphere? I believe the same could be said about wind turbines 100 years from now if it becomes "the" main power source for the population like oil today.

Hey, sorry for the delay... just completed a 48-hour travel odyssey to the south of India. Now I'm all jet-lagged and discombobulated

I don't doubt that on occasion when the wind is blowing, the ISO can't use the power and therefore doesn't purchase it. My question for you is, how often does this happen?

Two points:

1) Wind subsidies are designed to be a temporary jump-start to the industry, and the subsidies will cease when economies of scale and improvements in manufacturing techniques/supply chain management, etc. make wind power attractive on its own merits. This time is not far off.

2) The US and Canadian grids need to be overhauled, period. Outages and brown-outs have been occurring with increasing frequency due to aging infrastructure. Since deregulation of the power markets, no one has an incentive to invest in grid maintenance (not the generators, or the ISO's, or the utilities). A stable grid is a public good that the government should invest in -- and if this happens to facilitate integration of renewables, so much the better.

Thanks! A PhD is something I'm considering, but I want to get some work experience first. With a master's, I'm pretty much optimally positioned to start a career in industry... by getting a PhD I'd be pricing myself out of a big chunk of the job market. Plus, 3-5 years is a big time investment, and I want to be certain it's what I want.


Silicon's not a bad material for solar cells. Its strength is that the material is already extremely well understood, since it's been used in other applications for decades. The theoretical upper limit on efficiency of a silicon solar cell (~22%) has been reached in the lab. The only improvements silicon-based solar cells are going to get will come from improved manufacturing processes as the industry grows.

But you're right, silicon definitely has its problems, not the least of which is feedstock scarcity/competition. And thin film PV materials (amorphous silicon, CdTe, CIGS, or whatever) can be deposited on bendy substrates, which opens up a whole range of building-integrated applications (saving on system and installation costs).

Yeah, cellulosic ethanol is definitely where biofuels are going, whether from algae or bioengineered crops. Corn ethanol is a wash from a carbon standpoint, a very minimal gain from an energy security standpoint, a huge water drain, and is increasing food prices nationwide. We'll see if corn subsidies get axed (as they should) with an Illinois president in the White House

Thanks for the reply noojens, I think you have hit on the main issue I have with wind power. We, the public, are investing large amounts into wind power that we currently can not use due to the deficiencies in our infrastructure.

If you read the report I linked or familiar with other sources wind power is not able to replace traditional sources of power generation to a significant extent. In Germany its only 4% with a maximum of around 8% given current technology. As has been said, wind doesn't provide a constant source so other means have to be available. Many sources can't be ramped up quickly, even those that can still need the physical infrastructure and manpower available on demand. These have to be in place whether the wind is blowing or not. When the wind is blowing these resources are wasted and vice versa.

So your question of how often this happens, a large portion of the time. Turbines are inefficient in that there is only a small window where they actually work. If the wind isn't blowing fast enough the turbines do not produce any power, too much wind and the turbines need to be shut down or they destroy themselves. The average efficiency is ~20% so a 1 megawatt turbine is only averaging .2 megawatts over time. Some times its producing 100%, sometimes 0.

What this means is that to get to the maximum replacement of traditional power sources of 8%(nobody is getting this amount right now that I know of) of consumer demand you need at least 40% capacity. When the turbines are operating at peak efficiency all of the excess is wasted. I'll use a specific example from where I live, New Brunswick Canada, our government has been investing in wind power heavily over the last few years. We have a nuclear power plant and coal fired plants, neither of which can be moderated to accommodate fluctuations in wind power generation and there isn't a market to sell excess power elsewhere. We can't use ANY of the wind power we're generating, none. Yet we've invested 100s of millions into capital construction subsidies and power purchase agreements.

We should be investing this money into updating the grid structure, improving our ability to make use of green energy sources. What it boils down to is that we're putting the cart before the horse.

What kind of global impact are we talking about?

I remember there being a Discovery or Neo Geo series about the global impact of massive scale wind power. I was also probably half asleep but I think it has to do with wind currents and temperature/weather. All those propellers are catching the wind and that wind was going somewhere.

Trees catch wind too, damn trees!

Kit, I posed your original question to a good friend of mine who I did my undergrad with; he went on to do his masters in engineering mathematics, his thesis was on mathematical models attempting to predict the wind based on past data. He's spent the last couple years working in the industry.

Anyways, rather than attempt to paraphrase his response, I'll post it verbatim:

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Kuwen Furyblades
Hunter of Memento Reejeryn
Champion of Faydark

Yeah, deforestation does effect wind patterns, among more harmful things to the environment.

Kuwen, the 4% came from the report produced by one of the largest grid operators in Europe where they evaluate, not very positively, the use of wind energy.

While the amount of wind energy that makes up total capacity is interesting it isn't a useful number when evaluating the efficiency of wind energy. What I would like to know is total capacity vs power produced when we're talking about wind energy. I'll give a simple example to illustrate, consumer demand is 100MW and a traditional coal fire power plant has a 100MW capacity, in addition there is 50MW of wind power generation capability. At present the wind isn't blowing so the coal fired plant is going full tilt, shortly later the wind picks up and is producing at capacity. So Kuwen, what's that coal plant going to do? Shut down feeding more coal? Send the workers home? What about the capital cost of the redundancy? The reality is that more power is being produced than is required and furthermore the resources used to meet demand is higher. It makes people feel good when you claim that you're using that 50MW of green power even though the coals still burning.

My argument is not that wind energy isn't useful, can't be efficient or that we shouldn't be pursuing it. I argue that heavy capital investment in wind generation at this point is premature and actually delays us from incorporating it efficiently into our power supply. Your friend is spot on about whats possible, its out there, but instead of us investing in on-demand power plants to work in tandem with wind and the grid infrastructure needed to make use of green energy we're investing in the generation of that green energy that we can't use efficiently right now.

An interesting story on 'high altitude' wind power which highlights many of the hurdles discussed here:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/06 ... index.html

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Kuwen Furyblades
Hunter of Memento Reejeryn
Champion of Faydark

Use the excess energy to produce Hydrogen, yes it's inefficient, but will lower oil demand. And the power doesn't go to waste.

Well what ever ideas or thoughts I bring up about this will just cause you to scoff at them... Just like if someone tried to explain the over use of carbon fuels and the effects of the atmosphere in the 1940's... they would have been scoffed at.

I just think that the big thinkers need to take pause and think of possible scenarios and test them before claiming a source of energy is our savior.

I understand your perspective. Unfortunately, it is shared by far too many Americans. We have a big problem with this in the US. It is so hard to find American students who want to stick it out for a PhD. If you look at the PhD programs in engineering at all of the Research One universities, you see 80-90% international students. I don't know what it would take to change this, and I suppose it's debatable whether or not this needs to change. However, it is something I want to change. As far as pricing yourself out of the market, that depends on what you want to do with your career. (If you want to chat more, send me a message. I can tell you about why I have the best job in the world!)



I still have to disagree with you about silicon. The efficiency achieved is better than 22%, but you are still dealining with a 1.1eV bandgap material. I am not sure how well versed in solid state physics you are, but there are somethings you just can't get around. The material's bandgap determines how much of the photon's energy will generate electron-hole pairs and how much will be converted to phonons (lattice vibrations) that are "wasted" energy. You can play games with fab, but then you are fighting things like penetration depth/minority carrier lifetime, etc. I am not sure what you mean by scarcity when it comes to silicon....silicon comes from sand.

With regard to the other materials, there are many people working on a huge range of chemistries. However, when it comes down to it, we still have a long way to go. Althought, I have a lot of faith in this work it's not the be all end all solution. The last NSF review panel I was on was for proposals in this area; lots of new ideas there. There are some great things on the way, but as I said on the way.

You don't know if you don't say them. But yes, it's easy to sit there and say, "Hey, X made pollution so I'm afraid of Y, but I won't say why."

Yeah, it's definitely an interesting debate. It's tough, honestly -- I'm a pretty capable student, and I've always done well compared to my American classmates, but the international grad students I've met blow me away. When you have a pool of a billion+ people in India or China competing for a few educational spots, those who rise to the top are bound to be extremely talented. Most of my international classmates wanted to stay in the U.S. after finishing their degrees, though, so the financial investment the NSF/DOE and other funding agencies are making in these students will at least result in increased intellectual capital in the States.

As for me, I think being a professor would be a great job... I'm just not convinced that it's worth spending another 3-5 years as a PhD student working 70 hour weeks for <$30k a year, when I could be making triple that for half the work in industry... plus, with postdoc inflation it might be another 2-6 years after my PhD before I finally land a tenure-track position at, say, $60k/year. Ten years of student living to reach that point? I mean, I love learning and studying, but at some point I imagine I'll want to have a home, a steady income, and at least the option of starting a family.

Maybe I'm focusing on the negatives, though. Also I'm not entirely sure what PhDs do in industry. I'll PM ya to get your side of the story.

Silicon is the second most abundant element in the earth's crust -- not arguing that. But as I understand it, there's a limited feedstock of silicon that can be easily refined to a usable form in semiconductor fab. Dirty feedstocks can be purified, certainly, but the input energy and cost increases. Sort of analogous to extracting oil from tar sands or shale. Sure, there's oil there, but it's won't be economically viable to extract until the price of oil hits $200/barrel or something. Correct me if I'm wrong.

For sure. There's a lot of exciting stuff being done, and (for now) a lot of research funding in the field, but it's all unproven and a long way from commercial-scale production. Solar water heating and passive solar space heating are cost competitive now, and concentrating solar power on the utility scale is getting close, but PV is unlikely to be a big player in the next decade.

Missed this. It's a good question... I've thought a bit about it and asked some experts, and no one really knows. If you look at the total kinetic energy of the bottom couple hundred feet of the atmosphere, it dwarfs global energy consumption. I can run the numbers again, but it makes the amount of energy we could possibly extract with wind turbines look utterly insignificant.

That's not to say that large-scale wind farms don't change local air currents and temperatures. I don't know if anyone has done much modeling of this problem, or if the tools even exist. Computational fluid dynamics is hard

So yeah, very good question.

I don't know what your degree is in, but we start at around double that.

Really? Because I've looked up the publicly available info on salaries at various state schools, and assistant profs in engineering and the sciences are typically in the 60-70 ballpark, with distinguished professors being the only ones to break six figures. Are you at a private university?

Actually let's continue this in PMs

At a university I'm at the average prof here makes $110k a year plus professional development, research and travel stipends. They teach 5 courses a year, are expected to do some community service(a 1 hour meeting once a month) and ground breaking research at their labs(cottage by the lake) during the summer months. Its a pretty good gig once you get tenure.

Understatement of the year anyone?

It's all about learning to love teh MATLAB!

Can you believe it? You've already finished C. You think you can do Matlab?

Intersubband quantum wells are serious business.

you guys are losing me...