This is the first in a planned series of posts on energy policy, arguably one of the most critical, long-term problems facing not only the United States but the world, and an issue that is already being discussed in the current electoral campaigns.

Fundamentals – The nature of energy

What do we mean when we talk about energy? Most people think of oil, and when they think of oil they think of gasoline prices. Some of the more broad-minded think also of electricity, natural gas, and coal. In the end, some nonsense about energy independence is spoken in most discussions about energy policy, with proposals for the future involving some combination of biofuels, wind power, nuclear, and other non-petroleum-based forms of fueling our lifestyle.

The problem we face regarding energy use and future sources is extremely complex, and solutions cannot be analyzed without a good working knowledge of the underlying science and technology. Unfortunately, it is questionable whether the average American citizen has a good working knowledge of science.

This may seem too basic, but it needs to be remembered that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It changes form (including going to and from matter via the infamous E=mc² relationship), but it has to come from somewhere. Some of the forms energy can take are taught at the middle school level, such as kinetic energy, which is associated with motion, and gravitational potential energy related to elevation changes in a gravitation field, like being on a hill. When we drop a ball, we are converting gravitational potential energy into kinetic energy.

Chemical potential energy is what makes gasoline so useful to us, and that chemical energy is converted to heat when the gasoline is burned in our cars. Some of the heat is then converted by the engine to kinetic energy used to move the vehicle, while most of the heat is wasted.The point is that the energy is not created, nor is it destroyed, it merely changes form. This fundamental law must be kept in mind during any discussion of energy policy.

Many of the misconceptions regarding the feasibility of different technologies associated with energy arise from a lack of knowledge of the nature of energy. A prime example of a misconception of this nature involves biofuels from corn, switchgrass, or some other plant source grown solely for the purpose of making fuel. Close examination reveals that biofuels are merely a highly inefficient form of solar energy. That is what plants do, use the energy from sunlight to drive chemical reactions to create useful organic molecules. We then add more energy to convert those organic molecules that were useful to the plant into organic molecules that are useful to us as fuel.

The energy we put into making biofuels isn’t limited solely to converting the biomass into fuel, we also have to transport the biomass from the fields to the conversion facility, and even before that in the case of corn we have to use fertilizers, pesticides, and tractors for tilling along with pumps for irrigating. This is why the ethanol made from corn or switchgrass is not the perfect solution that some fervently advocate. It makes one question if this is really better than direct conversion of sunlight to electricity through the use of semiconductor solar cells and then using that electricity for making fuels from biomass left over from food production.The use of arable land for making corn-based ethanol is one of the suspected of many causes underlying recent increases in food prices.

I suspect most agree that food for our bodies is more important than food for our cars.

Petroleum has been such an economical and useful source of energy we have forgotten what life was like before the oil age. It is an energy resource that starts out in a relatively easily transportable liquid form when we pump it out of the ground, and the process of refining it into useful forms, while not trivial, is very straightforward. Regardless of the origin of the oil we pump from the ground, whether from dead dinosaurs, anaerobic bacteria, or some other method of formation, we are benefiting today from energy captured and converted long ago into the chemical energy of the organic molecules. The use of the term deposits is telling, because we are using up the energy banked so long ago and now have to move to either another bank account (nuclear), or pay as we go (solar and wind power converting energy real-time into a form we find useful).

Question one we should ask when considering any energy policy is, “Where is the energy coming from?” In the case of biofuels, it is coming from many sources, including the sun along with the energy we put into the process, and we need to evaluate whether the amount of energy we get out of the process is enough in excess of what we put in for it to be feasible.

It is highly unlikely we will find another energy resource as convenient and cheap as petroleum has been because the laws of thermodynamics are against us. The next entry in the series will discuss these laws, but for now accept this admittedly cynical summary:

0. There is a game.

1. You can’t win.

2. You can’t break even.

3. You can’t even get out of the game.

Here are some solar panels that are designed to be easy to install using materials that are familiar to non-specialists:

   Lumeta’s “peel & stick” solar panels can blanket a roof in under 35 minutes

I’ve had a while to come up the learning curve for Vista on my replacement laptop that has a dual-core AMD Athlon 64 bit processor in it. The dual-core Athlon doesn’t score as well as comparable Intel Core Duo processors, but I’ve already noticed a much better response time than my older, single-core processor machines, even the higher clock speed 64 bit Athlon laptop that was destroyed by a milk spill (of all things). Unfortunately, the dual-core Athlon seems to run rather hot, and the placement in this laptop is such that the heat makes it up to the touch pad and palm rest area on the top of the laptop.

Perhaps I should be one of the testers for hardware designers because of my heavily multitasking ways. I generally have at least 10 windows open, from at least 4 applications, with multiple tabs open in my four browser windows. I use the alt-tab key combination to switch back and forth while I read/write and otherwise use the computer. In the past, within a few days, I would overwhelm a single-core processor computer, no matter how high the clock speed, once I had installed all my applications and had configured everything to my liking. This new dual-core laptop seems to be taking it all in stride.

I think my ultimate machine will be the Macintosh that will eventually come out that has two Intel quad-core processors. Of course, I won’t be able to afford it, but I can dream, can’t I?

I’ve always been a big advocate of efficiency in resource use and minimal generation of pollution because it’s not simply poor form to crap in your own bed, in the long term it is deadly, regardless of what those who would like to think otherwise say.

On the face of it, increased use of ethanol seems very promising in reducing at least some of the petroleum usage of the United States along with improving some aspects of the pollution generated by cars. Unfortunately, when you look deeper, the cost-benefit ratio is not so clear.

Oil, what we like to call the organic liquid mixture more properly termed petroleum, has many benefits that have created the worldwide economy we have now.

What is it about oil that makes it so special?

For one, it is a true energy source, very little energy is needed relative to the amount of energy gained to pump oil out of the ground, transport it, and refine it to forms more useful to us. For the case of ethanol, we have to grow the source material, whether it be cellulose from trees or sugars from corn or other plants, then we have to convert the raw materials into ethanol using any of a variety of processes that while they do not consume more energy than is contained in the product, it is certainly not as high yielding as the oil-based system.

In short, petroleum is a source of energy that has a low energy cost to convert to a useful, easily transportable form (such as gasoline among other products) whereas ethanol is a complicated method of converting the energy of sunlight into another form of energy, using water and other precursors (not to mention the energy costs associated with growing the raw materials and transporting those bulk solids to a conversion facility) to make the useful, easily transportable form of chemical energy.

I am not trying to argue against ethanol or any other alternative ways of transporting chemical energy (for that is what gasoline, ethanol, or other alternative energy sources are, ways of transporting chemical energy that is released through burning), but we must understand the energy economics of the cycle we are proposing along with the monetary economics.

Ultimately, true practical sources of energy involve either sunlight, uranium or other fissile material, fossil fuels, or in limited amounts geothermal. Other “sources” are merely converting these fundamental sources into a different form. For example, hydroelectric power, in addition to requiring dams that are not exactly environmentally friendly, is merely a way of converting the sunlight that evaporated the water that fell in the watershed as rain into electricity.

Ethanol burners, hybrids, not even fuel cell cars will avoid these fundamental energy economics, because the power has to come ultimately from somewhere. The true solution to the oncoming crisis of petroleum lies in understanding how to harness the fundamental energy sources, not short-term slogans that proclaim that ethanol or some other quick fix is the panacea.

A “tag cloud” has been generated for the recent State of the Union Address by President George W. Bush. Tag clouds were originally created to indicate which tags used to label/categorize blog posts were used the most; it lists the words (or tags) used in different sizes, with the larger sizes for the most used tags. In this case, the larger words are the ones used more often in the speech.

I am always interested in new and creative ways of displaying complex information, and tag clouds can be more effective than a mere listing of words with their frequency.

Technorati Tags: President Bush, State of the Union, politics, technology

…from MSNBC.com:

Good news! Black hole won’t destroy Earth

Boy, I am relieved. I was seriously worried there for a while.

[/sarcasm]

Investigators in Austria are stymied in part due to obsolete technology, the Commodore 64 computer used by the kidnapper of a young girl (the crime commenced in 1998) presents complications because the data transfer to a more modern system to do searches is problematic and will likely result in data loss.

In one of the books of the Foundation series (or possibly even as early as some of his Empire books, I don’t currently have the references available due to personal circumstances), Issac Asimov wrote of information loss due to obsolescence. We have been able to reconstruct much of our ancient history because the records of the time required no more than eyes and a knowledge of the language used to record the data to interpret them.

Our reliance on technology for record-keeping, using methods that become obsolete and impossible to read without the right equipment beyond the human eye, are not as permanent as carvings in stone or even ink upon paper, and inevitably result in this memory-loss through neglect. The difficulties of the authorities in Austria in reading data from a system that is a little over 20 years old is but a not-so-early warning of what Asimov predicted decades ago.

One of the blogs at ZDNet.com points out something I have been aware of for quite some time, but haven’t posted upon. Perhaps I should start making some noise. From Tom Foremski: IMHO, “US chip leadership is in trouble - but business is good“:

The bad news is that US is likely to lose its lead in chip manufacturing expertise and that could be catastrophic to the US economy. The SIA and the chipmakers and other groups are lobbying hard in Washington D.C. to make sure that the US funds more basic research, invests in education so it has a highly skilled workforce, and can provide new ways to finance multi-billion dollar fabs.

“There is no other industry like the chip industry that has created so many jobs, and has contributed so much to the GDP of this country,” said Mr Scalise. So far so good, I said. Why should we be so concerned about the future when the US chip industry is doing so well?

Mr Scalise and the others, pointed out that it is becoming more difficult to manufacture in the US because of fewer science and math students, and the economic incentives are much less than those offered in other countries. Yet each chip fab provides significant economic value to the host country because of the infrastructure that grows around it. Many other countries recognize that benefit and are offering significant incentives for chipmakers.

One worrying trend is China. Mr Scalise and his team recently returned from a fact finding trip to China. He said that SMIC, the country’s largest chip maker, is able to take advantage of sweetheart financing deals. The government of a large province in China is building billion dollar fabs and it will lease them to SMIC. This means SMIC doesn’t have to raise billions in capital markets to finance its expansion. This is a significant competitive advantage for SMIC.

The reason I had an expatriate assignment in France was because the newest fab (aka “wafer fabrication factory”) for my company (Freescale Semiconductor) is there, in large part because of tons of subsidies from the French government. Many fabs are being built in China, as Foremski notes in his post. Aside from jobs lost in the US, do we really want to be exporting the basic technology that powers our smart-bombs, guidance systems in our tanks, fly-by-wire systems in our jets, essentially all the technology that gives our military a huge advantage on the battlefield to a power that arguably will be our greatest rival in the 21st century?

My vote would be no, even if my future employment prospects were not affected.

What do you think?

For want of a nail…

This is interesting news:

Intel’s cellular phone effort a huge failure

Darrell Dunn, InformationWeek
EE Times
(06/27/2006 6:05 PM EDT)

DALLAS — Intel, the world’s largest semiconductor company, on Tuesday finally owned up to one of the most colossal failures in that industry’s history when it unloaded its communications and applications processor business to Marvell for $600 million.

It’s not surprising that Intel tried to slip that announcement in under the cover of its much splashier Woodcrest server processor extravaganza on Monday. There undoubtedly was a lot of anguish in Santa Clara when Intel finally bit the bullet and dropped its long battle to gain a position as a provider of processors for cellphones.

Intel plowed multi-billions of dollars of investment into the market with a covetous eye towards what is one of the largest volume markets available to processor manufacturers. Research firm Forward Concepts estimates that 830 million cellphones shipped in 2005, and that within two years, more than 1 billion cellphones will ship per year.

Why is it interesting?

I can recall my trepidation when Intel entered the commincations and applications processor business. While TI is the leader in many segments of this diverse market, my company (Freescale Semiconductor) is a major player, and it is never fun to compete with a company that has a lot of cash to plow into R&D.

Apparently, money can’t always buy success, thankfully. An object lesson that end results often do not resemble the initial predictions.

Astronomers have an unusual problem that those of us who have to clean our houses wish we had: they are not seeing enough dust, at least in the supernovae they are examining.

What are the implications?

An article at ScienceDaily explains it well.

Technorati Tags: science

Almost two decades ago in a test on electrodynamics, I was asked to re-derive the fundamental equations of electromagnetism (the Maxwell Equations) with the assumption that magnetic monopoles existed.

What the heck am I talking about here? Well, most people are familiar with the two types of charge that exist in the universe, positive and negative charge, and that there are fundamental units of this charge, protons for positive charge and electrons for negative charge (and yes, I am skipping those interesting but baffling to the majority quarks because they do not pertain to this discussion, if you want to discuss them, email me or go to the Physics department at your local university). Similar fundamental units of magnetisms do not exist; there are no “north monopoles” or “south monopoles” to complement the protons and electrons.

In my exam, based upon a few fundamental assumptions, that monopoles of both varieties existed and that there was a continuity of magnetic charge just as exists for electric charge, I was to derive the form the Maxwell Equations would take and explain the physical consequences of the new equations. At the time, I speculated that if there were such a thing as negative mass, something similar to the Maxwell Equations could be derived for gravity, and that there should therefore exist an equivalent of “gravomagnetics” with similar behaviors due to moving mass as there are because of the magnetic fields generated from moving charges. Needless tosay, I did not include these idle thoughts in my answer to the question, and admittedly it was not the best use of my effort during the exam, but the question was actually pretty straightforward so I did have the spare time.

While a “negative mass” has not been discovered, a recent measurement seems to point towards a possible derivation of a quantum theory of gravity, which has eluded Physicists for decades:

Scientists funded by the European Space Agency have measured the gravitational equivalent of a magnetic field for the first time in a laboratory. Under certain special conditions the effect is much larger than expected from general relativity and could help physicists to make a significant step towards the long-sought-after quantum theory of gravity.

Just as a moving electrical charge creates a magnetic field, so a moving mass generates a gravitomagnetic field. According to Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, the effect is virtually negligible. However, Martin Tajmar, ARC Seibersdorf Research GmbH, Austria; Clovis de Matos, ESA-HQ, Paris; and colleagues have measured the effect in a laboratory.

I need to read the original paper, but based upon what is written in the article linked, this is pretty damn exciting to a real Physics geek like me. Although this result is not exactly what my speculations led to, it is gratifying to know that back when I was in graduate school even my idle speculations while working out an exam problem had merit and were not completely off base.

Technorati Tags: geek cool, science

In a comparison of dual core chips (in other words: essentially two discrete CPUs in one package) for PCs, CNet has declared a winner in all categories, including the most vital, price for performance.

As an insider, I am not surprised, even though I do not work for either company in question. I have been exposed directly or indirectly to both the designs and the process technology of both companies, and the results follow the trends I saw five years ago.

Start from the first page of the article if you want to see all the results.

Technorati Tags: technology,