I think there's a good future for CSP, especially as we start marketing our heat-engine.

I think the future of PV is going to dim after people get more comfortable with the idea of carbon offsets - they'll invest money into the most efficient carbon-reduction strategies and just continue their own lifestyle... It really does help the planet more than spending ~0.4/kWh to fix up your own lifestyle (rooftop PV) and just letting more efficient strategies go unfunded.

The lack of initiative from Congress on alt. energy is breath-takingly stupid, and probably accounts for the weak stock performance of the solar companies I've been tracking. I think diversifying into wind makes sense. Of course, I'd be more sanguine about Clipper if they were reporting a small profit. We always recall those internet companies which never made a dime.

Photo Voltaic. They claim their cells last 30 years.

tundra:

Some of my thoughts (not sure if greatest is appropriate) have spawned here on "The Fray." I think for the most part we are a little community aside from Moneybox and the rest of the Fray that has takena step towards legitimate economic converse. It is good to see you use it to your advantage.

I'm afraid I didn't quite follow this aside: "(not sure if greatest is appropriate).

I do however agree that our small community has consistantly posted at a level of consideration that FAR exceeds most of the other blogs out there. We all sort of made our homes here... but I'm not sure how this community ever formed to begin with.

I am very interested in the thoughts and comments of the moneybox/TBL gang... in part because I do hold you guys far above the average frayster or average blogger... and I'd like to get some opinions of people that have not been emersed in this over the last two years concerning how self-evident the information that has been presented on our site is.

We've kind of been living in a bubble, so things that make a lot of sense to us could well involve several steps of critical understanding that most people haven't considered - but we've churned over so much we've forgotten those steps.

(I've had this argument about 100 times with my father, who constantly over-rode me and was always concerned about "dumbing down" the website to the point that it would be insulting...)

Specific comments on what is and is not easily understood from a crowd I know to be well informed and very thoughtful.. that might help my argument (or support his, and make me drop mine...)

Anyhow, thanks to the community at large for your help and your support. As always, if you like what you see... push it everywhere you can think of. :)

Congratulations, and three questions:

1. Obviously, this technology will beat corn ethanol. But, what about algae, or worse yet, carbon-enriched algae? (optimal algae growth occurs at 50,000ppm, last I checked, and air is 400ppm).

2. I find it curious you are avoiding carbon feedstocks altogether, and deriving carbon solely from CO2. Do you think that your tech will be used mostly on CO2, or that at least for the next two decades, it will be used directly on unburned carbon stocks, like low-grade coals, etc?

3. are you using seawater or freshwater? Seawater has the greater challenges, but can also provide co-products, and of course, will be more available.

There may not be much seawater in Wyoming, which seems to be the location of the pilot plant. :)

I thought you'd like this.

As for the questions:

1. Algae is more expensive then you would believe. Doing the calculations completely floored me. The vertical systems (which you're quoting when you mention massive yield/acre) are impossibly expensive, and the tubes required constant maintanence to avoid buildup of dead algae (have you ever owned a fish tank?) Right now the best price you can get for Algae is ~5000/ton. Most algae start-ups assume in their business plan that they can squeeze some oil out of the dry algae and sell the rest of the mass (~80%) to shrimp farms or something... Once that market saturates, there would be no way to produce algae oil for under 20.00/gallon, and that's being EXTREMELY generous on this end... We have a right up (the drop down menus aren't working, so some of the pages are harder to find) on algae, as well as most of the other alternative energy possibilities... The pages link through the "markets" page (against my objection).

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2. Part of the goal must be to have clean, carbon-neutral energy. If you're just willing to let the greenhouse effect go you can let Shell drill a billion holes in the oil shale and let Canada consume all their tar sands and we can go to the beach in the arctic for a tan... We want carbon neutral fuels, which means we have to use CO2. If we use pure carbon as a feedstock, we aren't doing any better than natural gas - the same carbon would be emitted for the same amount of energy.

3. We could use either. Seawater may have to be double-processed to get to the level of purity that would be required, but either would work, and WindFuels require only 1.25 gallons H20/gallon C2H5OH produced... so the cost is insignificant. We need to have a page devoted specifically to water - that's going to be important to consider in the west.

Actually we don't know where the pilot plant will be. We aren't there yet.

Our first objective (upon gaining funding), will be a small 5MW facility that would just plug into the grid here in Columbia, that we could use for testing and tweaking. We should have a site selected for the pilot plant by the time that's up and running.

I was just mentioning Wyoming because I thought it was one of the more ideal sites... But if California offers a bunch of help, we can build one there instead... Like anyone else, we'll go where the money leads. I just think Wyoming is the best site overall - there are two counties very near large coal mines that have class 7 wind! and their proximity to the coal mines should give us more than enough CO2... But we'll go to whoever gives more grants and subsidies first... then we'll just license the technology to whoever wants it.

(that's looking forward, we're pretty broke now... so we're still limping along self-funding this.)