Now I know why the goofy name for this company. Their one-trick pony is a cylindrical solar panel. Solyndrical, plus a suitable Kumbayah web 2.0 ending, I get it.
The problem with these panels is the same problem with water injection to boost the expansion of an internal combustion engine. Sounds dumb right? Water kills fire. Oh, but wait, if the heat of the fire is used to power the unbelievably explosive power of steam expansion, then you actually get MORE power from each ignition, right? Amazing! Oh, but… water kills fire.
Even if you can get the system to work consistently, the steam expansion would remove so much energy from the cylinder that a tremendous amount of fuel would be required just to keep the engine warm enough to run. If that makes sense to you, great, and if you don’t see how that works, it’s okay. For now, take my word for it, but you really should look into it for yourself.
[pullquote]It’s the same problem with this cylindrical Enron bullshit the administration just blew half a billion dollars on[/pullquote]
Cockamamie Solyndra Design
It’s the same problem with this cylindrical Enron bullshit the administration just blew half a billion dollars on. The circular cross section is supposed to allow the solar doohickeys to catch light from all angles, even reflected and diffused light. The fundamental problem is that they are reducing the amount of cross-section, and therefore guaranteed losing energy. No matter what you do, you cannot increase the amount of sunlight that falls upon a given rooftop. In order to capture all of it, you cover the entire rooftop.
Because of our unique design, light snow falls through the Solyndra panels and the panels actually benefit from the increased albedo (reflected light) from a fresh snowfall. Solyndra systems experience less system loss due to snow.
If you cleverly cover only half of the rooftop, but then catch what slipped through the cracks as it bounces weakly back up from the roof, you have not improved your energy capture. A little bit of trigonometry and THE WILLINGNESS TO USE IT are all it takes to prove to yourself that no matter what these clowns are doing, it could be better done by improving a sheet covering the entire roof.
It’s bad enough that the financing of this thing is beyond a presumption of honest mistakes. But for the laughably bad science behind this to be so flimsy, so transparently nonsense… it just blows me away. I only saw this graphic when I went looking for a Solyndra logo to mash-up with an Enron logo: Solynron!
Right away I saw the fallacy in this cylindrical design. How can so many have been duped, you ask? They wanted to be. This is not science. This is an intentional fleecing of the U.S. taxpayer. An ideologically committed hard left government shoves loans at shell companies who sing a green tune. Companies like Coca-Cola and others are offered huge tax incentives for festooning their plants with this bullshit. Guess what, the U. S taxpayer just paid for it twice. But before the whole thing comes crashing down, the company is supposed to declare bankruptcy, which lets the green-feasting executives off with the cash, the workers were employed while others went jobless to finance it, and the government scratches its head and determines that what was needed was more targeted stimulus.
This is tyranny and theft. Nobody believes this Solyndra crap works, but when this regime tells you to buy it for your plant or else, you go along and hope the bridge holds.
Well it didn’t. Gotcha.
*It’s not actually a perpetual motion machine design, but it’s close. And it’s not actually a Ponzi scheme (unlike Social Security), but it’s close. And I don’t hold it against Coca-Cola. They’ve been had.
Yay! Keep telling the truth!
As a reluctant user of solar doohickeys (the old-fashioned kind, not these), I groan whenever I hear somebody extolling the near-magical virtues of PV technology to Change The World, Man. Especially when I just got back in the house from scraping or brushing snow off them.