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I put some used PV panels on my shed's roof and wired them up to the bottom element of my electric water heater. This cut my household electric use in half. Not connected to the grid so no expensive permits needed.
I'd work on this.
Why is it never surprising when we hear stories like how Edison bought a thermoelectric generator company (Clamonds’s Improved Thermopile) and ceased development. How much human progress is hampered by the desire of some to profit, no matter the cost to the world?
Why is it never surprising when we hear stories like how Edison bought a thermoelectric generator company (Clamonds’s Improved Thermopile) and ceased development. How much human progress is hampered by the desire of some to profit, no matter the cost to the world?
If it were really that valuable to human progress wouldn't another company or competitor to Clamonds’s Improved Thermopile become extremely profitable and valulable?
Mostly bc short term profit maximization can be thought of as a greedy optimization which is blind to long term gains. This is why the tragedy of the commons happens
I put some used PV panels on my shed's roof and wired them up to the bottom element of my electric water heater. This cut my household electric use in half. Not connected to the grid so no expensive permits needed.
Yeah I wish there was more of this happening. BTW what happens when your water is fully hot and the sun is shining - does that panel detect there is no load so doesn't generate?
Obviously you'd want a cut off at some temp though, for safety concerns.
Why is it never surprising when we hear stories like how Edison bought a thermoelectric generator company (Clamonds’s Improved Thermopile) and ceased development. How much human progress is hampered by the desire of some to profit, no matter the cost to the world?
If it were really that valuable to human progress wouldn't another company or competitor to Clamonds’s Improved Thermopile become extremely profitable and valulable?
Look at Musk’s electric car story: there were a variety of electric cars that companies killed off (like the EV1) years earlier than the Tesla was released. It’s unclear if anyone who had the capital would have seriously entered the space if Tesla as a company did not exist. Maybe we’d be exactly as far along, but there’s a good chance the lack of “electric car infrastructure” and internal company incentives would basically keep anyone from going far enough before killing their project.
When the path to profit is only a short journey from where we are now, you’re right that some other company will probably adopt it. But add two or three hard steps that they need to overcome first, and it’s pretty common for human progress to stagnate in a local maxima for a long time.
I put some used PV panels on my shed's roof and wired them up to the bottom element of my electric water heater. This cut my household electric use in half. Not connected to the grid so no expensive permits needed.
Yeah I wish there was more of this happening. BTW what happens when your water is fully hot and the sun is shining - does that panel detect there is no load so doesn't generate?
I have a mixing valve on the output of the water heater to mix with cold down to about 50C. This lets you get around 2x the nameplate capacity of hot water out of the tank so there is enough to bridge a cloudy day.
To get the full capacity of the panels, it necessary to choose a water heater element that matches the source impedance(Vmpp/Immp) of the solar panel array.
Why is it never surprising when we hear stories like how Edison bought a thermoelectric generator company (Clamonds’s Improved Thermopile) and ceased development. How much human progress is hampered by the desire of some to profit, no matter the cost to the world?
If it were really that valuable to human progress wouldn't another company or competitor to Clamonds’s Improved Thermopile become extremely profitable and valulable?
The issue here is resting that value judgment on a small number of people (in this example, one person: Edison) to determine if it's valuable to human progress. They could be malicious or simply wrong about their estimation.
But also, no, markets aren't efficient, so they won't necessarily be correct on value-for-human-progress.
Why is it never surprising when we hear stories like how Edison bought a thermoelectric generator company (Clamonds’s Improved Thermopile) and ceased development. How much human progress is hampered by the desire of some to profit, no matter the cost to the world?
(thermoelectric generators have pretty terrible efficiency, though)
"This website runs on a solar powered server located in Barcelona, and will go off-line during longer periods of bad weather." - https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/power.html What a lovely idea.
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is...