California schools $
20M solar project - Page 17

 

On Wed, 02 Jun 2010 21:45:44 -0400, the renowned "Michael A. Terrell"


That's because _nobody_ *repairs* HF tools, you just toss them!

I'm going to have a $
.99 angle grinder repaired? The guy can't take
the screws out for that.


Best regards,
Spehro Pefhany
--
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Spehro Pefhany wrote:

   Woosh!!!


--
Anyone wanting to run for any political office in the US should have to
have a DD214, and a honorable discharge.

 


The "economies of scale" aren't just the simple stuff, such as when
you ship 100,000 units a year it becomes worth your while to put most
of the electronics into an ASIC. It covers the sort of developments
where people think that the market is big enough to justify developing
a completely different way of making solar cells.

This sort of development is highly speculative and costs tens to
hundreds of millions of dollars by the time you've turned it into a
production line - nobody invests that kind of money until they are
pretty confident about the eventual market.

Economists don't understand any of the technical details - they just
know that as the market for a product expands, the unit cost tends to
halve for every ten-fold expansion in production volume.

The first computer I ever worked with hands-on was a PDP-8. It cost
something like ten times what I was being paid per year at the time.
Nowadays there are single chip processors that are moe powerful that
sell for about what I'd earn in a minute if I could persuade someone
to hime me. Solar panels need area in a way that processors don't, but
they are going to get a lot cheaper to make and a lot easier to mount
(perhaps as stick-on films).

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

 

On 2/06/2010 11:03 PM, Bill Sloman wrote:

Inventing a different technology is not an economy of scale, and there's
no guarantee that it will materialise.


So why do car bateries still cost so much?

Sylvia.

 

On Thu, 03 Jun 2010 17:37:02 +1000


    Because car batteries are a mature technology that hasn't changed
much in the last half century. Digital electronics is a fast changing
technology with huge demand to drive development. Photovoltaics is a
changing technology with a relatively small but growing demand - many
companies are working on improving the manufacturing technology which is
why we see vacuum sputtered thin film, string ribbon and even roll to roll
printing being developed as manufacturing processes.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith                          |   Directable Mirror Arrays
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