The future for solar power

I certainly believe that there is a very bright future for solar power, but there is also no question that the sector was heavily over-hyped in the past decade. Now as a lot of the hype has gotten burned off over the past year, maybe we can get back to the real business of focusing on real demand and real economics. I enjoyed reading the summary of the plight of the solar power sector in The Wall Street Journal by Yuliya Chernova entitled "Dark Times Fall on Solar Sector", but the article left the issue hanging.

 

My personal view is that economics matter tremendously and we need to walk a fine line between government promotion via subsidy and simply standing back and letting markets work their magic. Maybe we are finally at the stage where government subsidies are hitting diminishing returns and we should focus more attention on focusing solar power on applications where raw cost is not the primary issue. For example, a lot of consumers really would prefer to pay a little more for "clean" energy that helps to fight Global Warming and Climate Change. There are also plenty of remote government facilities which would benefit from being less reliant on supplies of fossil fuels.

 

A lot of the debt taken on by fledgling solar power companies was clearly misguided and we will certainly see a dramatic shakeout of the industry, but that is a very good thing and is quite typical of emergent industries.

 

At some point the Chinese government subsidies for the solar power sector will peak and the sharp decline in component costs will become more moderate, at which point I am sure there will be plenty of U.S. private equity capital available to roll up the remaining viable domestic solar manufacturers at fire-sale prices into a more profitable structure and then move forward.

 

Exactly what the structure of the solar power sector will look like five or ten years from now is anybody's guess, but at least that longer-term future is very bright indeed, even if well beyond the limited and shortsighted vision of the WSJ.

 

And meanwhile we should be profusely thanking the Chinese government for helping to push solar power to be a much more economic option for the production of electricity.

-- Jack Krupansky

Cafe Philo in New York City in three weeks, Thursday, 1/12/2012: Can we have meaning without words?

(Please note the new time: 7:30 PM to 9:00 PM!!)

 

Due to the holidays, the next Café Philo which was scheduled for December 29th is cancelled, so the next Café Philo New York City will meet in three weeks, on Thursday, January 12, 2012. And since we lacked a quorum last week, we decided to hold over the discussion topic to the next meeting. The topic is "Can we have meaning without words?" I suggested the topic.

 

The suggested topics for the upcoming meeting and their votes (out of 6 attendees):

1. Do we need religion? (4)
2. Occupy Wall Street. (3)
3. Is our government democratic enough? (2)
4. Why are there holiday lights? (3)
5. Why do words have meanings? (3)
6. Can we have meaning without words? (5) *
7. How can jargon damage intellectual pursuit? (4)
8. What is important in life? (2)

I have been acting as guest moderator lately. Bernard Roy has been attending as a participant.

 

As usual, the meeting will be held from 7:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. in the back room at Bamiyan Afghan Restaurant at the northwest corner of Third Avenue and 26th Street in New York City. In exchange for free meeting space, it is expected that each attendee will purchase a minimum of $5 of food or drink. A glass of red wine can be had for $6 (plus tax and tip.)

 

After winding down our discussion, we entertain and vote on proposals for the topic question for the next meeting.

 

There are also usually some attendees who go across the street to McCormack's Pub for drinks and food and extended discussion after Cafe Philo, but not limited to the scheduled discussion topic.

 

There are a number of small groups in the U.S. and Europe who meet regularly to discuss topics related to philosophy. Some of these groups go by the name "Cafe Philo." There is one here in New York City that meets every two weeks, every other Thursday. It is organized and moderated by Bernard Roy, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Ramapo College of New Jersey. Each meeting focuses on a specific topic which was suggested and voted on by the participants at the last meeting.

 

-- Jack Krupansky

 

Freak elevator accident

I live in an old New York City apartment building with a predictably cranky old elevator, so I carefully read any news item about elevators. The news this morning was scary indeed, with a woman actually dying in a freak elevator accident not that far from my apartment building. They had the address in the article and it sounded very near a building I had once visited years ago.

 

During my daily walk around midtown Manhattan I detoured slightly (two blocks) to walk on Madison Avenue past 41st and 40th streets, where I could see lots of emergency and media vehicles. I watched and talked to a few people for a few minutes, and saw a stretcher being wheeled into the building, around roughly 2:30 PM, which was like four and a half hours after the incident. That suggests that it took quite some time for the fire department (or whoever) to actually remove her body from the elevator/shaft. Must have been gruesome.

 

I read that the building was built in 1926 – same year as my apartment building. We have multiple "outages" of our elevator every year. I usually walk down the stairs from my top/10th floor apartment when leaving the building; I used to try to walk up the stairs a fair amount; maybe I'll do so more frequently now.

 

When our elevator is out they let us ride in the old freight elevator which is the really old manual style of elevator where the "elevator operator" moves this lever back and forth to manually start and stop the elevator with this scissor-fold door that moves back and forth. Hey, at least then the operator has some options if something goes wrong and can stop the elevator immediately. That's the downside of these fully-automatic modern "contraptions."

 

I have no idea whether the elevator in that build was an older-older model or had been updated to some more state of the art configuration. I suspect the latter since there are a number of sophisticated tenants in that building. Assuming the latter... hmmm... I wonder... was the elevator "malfunction" a hardware failure or (God forbid) a software bug? Or, maybe a discrepancy between the "spec" that the software was written to and how the hardware actually behaves. Or, maybe, there are one or more possible "user errors" that should obviously be treated much more benignly but for whatever reasons was not "handled" properly. My current suspicion is that the "Is door closed?" sensor malfunctioned, indicating that the door was closed fully when clearly it was not, and the elevator was permitted to move even though the door was clearly not closed.

-- Jack Krupansky

Cafe Philo in New York City in two weeks, Thursday, 12/15: Can we have meaning without words?

(Please note the new time: 7:30 PM to 9:00 PM!!)

 

Cafe Philo in New York City will meet in two weeks, on Thursday, December 15, 2011 for a discussion of the topic "Can we have meaning without words?" I suggested the topic.

 

The suggested topics for the upcoming meeting and their votes (out of 6 attendees):

1. Do we need religion? (4)
2. Occupy Wall Street. (3)
3. Is our government democratic enough? (2)
4. Why are there holiday lights? (3)
5. Why do words have meanings? (3)
6. Can we have meaning without words? (5) *
7. How can jargon damage intellectual pursuit? (4)
8. What is important in life? (2)

I have been acting as guest moderator lately. Bernard Roy has been attending as a participant.

 

As usual, the meeting will be held from 7:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. in the back room at Bamiyan Afghan Restaurant at the northwest corner of Third Avenue and 26th Street in New York City. In exchange for free meeting space, it is expected that each attendee will purchase a minimum of $5 of food or drink. A glass of red wine can be had for $6 (plus tax and tip.)

 

After winding down our discussion, we entertain and vote on proposals for the topic question for the next meeting.

 

There are also usually some attendees who go across the street to McCormack's Pub for drinks and food and extended discussion after Cafe Philo, but not limited to the scheduled discussion topic.

 

There are a number of small groups in the U.S. and Europe who meet regularly to discuss topics related to philosophy. Some of these groups go by the name "Cafe Philo." There is one here in New York City that meets every two weeks, every other Thursday. It is organized and moderated by Bernard Roy, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Ramapo College of New Jersey. Each meeting focuses on a specific topic which was suggested and voted on by the participants at the last meeting.

 

-- Jack Krupansky