Yes, I’ve heard of nanosolar, but haven’t found a supplier that sells them. Do you have a link to somewhere I can buy nanosolar panels for my house?

I would really love a home rooftop solar system that would pay for itself in 5-10 years. Everything I’ve looked at so far is 10-15 years to break even (rebates included).

ethanolproducer.comarticle.jsp?article_id=3557

or; ethanolproducer.com/article.jsp?article_id=3557

nano solar “paints” this stuff on, and uses newspaper type printing presses to do it…

go to website; nanosolar.com/articles.htm

and also website; popsci.com/popsci/flat/bown/2007/index.html

ohm, will you please reprint those stats on nano solar you posted a few days back?

http://ethanol producer.com/article.jsp?article_id=3557

Great info. I’ve been looking for something like this. We all knew corn sucks, but it’s nice to see how some others stack up as well. It would have been nice to see how sugar cane stacked up, since this is what Brazil is using. Hemp has also been touted as a perfect energy crop.

We all know that electricity is the best thing for normal driving, but with E-REV vehicles, the question is: What is the best liquid fuel for a range extender? From the chart, it looks like Biodiesel from Algae is the most promising. Do you have any more info on this?

Also note that the chart doesn’t include the costs of production. For example, Solar Photovoltaics are not only costly in terms of dollars, but also in terms of energy required to produce them. Accounts vary, but all agree that Solar Photovoltaics require years to break even on energy.

but, as you say, e-flex is better, especially when combined with nano solar “free” fuel…

But in regards to cellulosic ethanol, right now that’s as much a pipe dream as a hydrogen economy. There’s plenty of small break throughs, but it’s years or longer away right now. And nothing is still free… cellulosic ethanol production is going to displace something.

Ethanol also still releases carbon dioxide when burned. The idea is that in theory it could be “carbon neutral” in that it only releases as much carbon dioxide back into the environment as the plants the ethanol was produced from absorbed from the environment. But given as already mentioned that current (and for the foreseable future) corn based ethanol production requires the use of fossil fuels at every stage (fuel to power the farm equipment to til the soil, plant the corn, to make the fertilizer, to pump the water to irrigate [not to mention using up a dwinding supply of fresh water], to harvest, to heat both at the fermentation and distilation stages, and then to transport by tanker trucks since ethanol can’t be pumped via the pipelines).

Also for what it’s worth, I just received by EVWorld.com basic (delayed a month) insider edition that has a nice little table showing the number of miles per acre of various renewable energy sources, see http://tinyurl.com/2fr3xu for the full article (scroll about 1/2 down to the “Biofuels versus Solar” header), but I’ll try to cut/paste it below.

Energy Source Miles Driven/Acre Per Year
Solar Photovoltaics 2,250,000
Solar Concentrating 2,000,000
Wind 180,000
Biodiesel (Algae) 370,000
Biodiesel (Palm Oil) 31,000
Biodiesel (Canola/Rape) 6,100
Biodiesel (Soybean) 2,400
Ethanol (Switchgrass) 32,500
Ethanol (Corn) 18,000

In any case, I would hope that since this is the GM Volt site, this is all mute, as most folks here on this site will be using very little liquid fuels (gasoline, ethanol, or diesel) as we’ll be driving EV’s like the Volt starting in 2010/2011.