FuturePundit

The thing I'm puzzled about here is why saving silicon makes your solar cells cheaper. I mean, silicon is really cheap, right? Metallurgical-grade silicon is 77 cents a pound: http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/silicon/silicmcs06.pdf — and that works out to around a penny a watt.

I tried to dig into this a few years ago. Evergreen Solar's 10-K for 2007 http://edgar.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/947397/000095013508001256/b68105ese10vk.htm has some information. Evergreen's competitive advantage is supposedly that they use less silicon than other manufacturers because they don't saw their wafers — they grow them. They say they use about 5g of silicon per watt (in 2007, planning to reduce it to 2½g per watt by 2012), and it sounds like they get paid about US$3.87 per watt on average (US$58M revenue in 2007, maxed-out manufacturing capacity of 15MW/year, 276 full-time employees in manufacturing). Their "cost of revenue" (i.e. manufacturing cost) was US$53M, or US$3.53/W. But 5g of metallurgical-grade silicon at the price above is US$0.008. If each employee costs US$120k per year (including health benefits, and remembering that a bunch of them are Ph.D.s) then that would be US$2.20/W in labor costs, which already accounts for the majority of that cost of revenue.

But they're not buying metallurgical-grade silicon; they're buying "polysilicon", short for "polycrystalline silicon", which is perhaps a bit of a misnomer, since how many crystals are in each piece…

You might want to consider that your brain has limits:

http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2009/12/willpower.php

I don't want to say "you can't do it" but I remember from my school days hitting the wall and there was nothing I could do about it until I'd had time to rest and recharge.

Here are some interesting links about gumption I've collected over the past few months (mostly from HN):

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/burnout/
http://sivers.org/dont-fight-it
http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/006569.html

In short, 10 hours of mental work might be your limit. I know that if I can squeeze in 10 solid hours of good creative mental work, I've had an extremely good day. Most good days I'll eek out 6 hours. Average days are probably around 4.

You might look at options to reduce that 10 hours somehow. Some people drop out of school, some just skip a class a day, some drop a class from the schedule altogether, etc.

You also don't talk about what your 11th hour is. Finding something interesting to you, especially if you're out of gumption, will be critical.

When you're full of mental energy, you can do anything; when you're out mental energy, your choices of what you can do are limited to easy things that are interesting.

Good luck!

I would love to see stats on where these companies are moving to. Are many of them transitioning into remote teams? Did some go out of business? Are they moving elsewhere?

Does anyone have stats on this?

New business formations are on the decline (http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/009854.html) and more businesses are closing shop each year than are forming (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/05/05/u-s-businesses-are-being-destroyed-faster-than-theyre-being-created).

Are these some of the reasons we are seeing vacant commercial buildings in a lot of areas?

"I think, as with many other things, our younger folks are more inclined to be Metro-accessible and more urban"

I do believe that to be true. I wonder if some of these can be turned into more modern co-working spaces that can be rented by the desk. Add a coffee shop, gym, etc into them and I think they would appeal to the younger generation, smaller service type businesses and start-ups. Just a thought.

The article says "in addition to reducing carbon emissions" in regard to the Tesla. I can't see how electric cars actually reduce pollution/emissions of any kind.

Typical coal -> electricity is 33% efficient, but can be up to 50% [1], electricty to battery is 75% [2], and electric motors are about 92% [3]. The typical efficiency will be .33 * .75 * .92 = 23%, with a maximum of 35%. Gasoline engine efficiency is 25 - 30% [4], so we aren't really improving pollution much with electric cars, until wind/solar makes up a substantial part of our grid.

Now it will certainly _move_ the pollution from the cars in the cities to the power plants elsewhere (which is a good thing), but it really isn't preventing pollution.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil-fuel_power_station#Basic_concepts

[2] http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/006554.html

[3] http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/electrical-motor-efficiency-d_655.html

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_efficiency

A human expert may be better when you're in unknown territory (i.e., something happens that doesn't fall into the domain of expertise) because then external factors acquired over a lifetime may prove to be more useful than textbook or algorithmic knowledge.

But more importantly I _do_ know that statistical models are better at diagnosis and prediction than are human experts. Sad to say, doctors, lawyers, judges and other foolish people keep us from using them.

FuturePundit summary article
"Statistical Prediction Rules More Accurate Than Experts":
http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/001558.html

The FuturePundit article reviews the paper:
"50 Years of Successful Predictive Modeling Should Be Enough: Lessons for Philosophy of Science" by Michael A. Bishop and J. D. Trout
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%2250+Years+of+Successful+Predictive+Modeling+Should+Be+Enough%22&btnG=Google+Search

could we balance the scales by burying the corn instead of storing it around our middles?

No. As our new DOE chair has pointed out, growing corn is not carbon-neutral:

http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/002722.html

The US already subsidizes farmers to grow corn to turn into ethanol, but $7bn in the past decade has been wasted because the process isn’t carbon-neutral. “From the point of view of the environment,” explains Chu, “it would be better if we just burnt oil.”

So you can't "rebalance" the carbon scale by turning the corn into oil and then reburying the corn: That's a lossy process that leaks carbon into the air. You should instead simply bribe the agribusiness corporations to leave the oil in the ground and play checkers all summer instead of planting excess corn. ;)