Recently I attended parts of a series of lectures hosted by the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment.
The most recent lecture was by Dr. David Eaglesham (formerly) Chief Technology officer of First Solar, another basketcase in the "solar will save us" industry that according to Amory Lovins, writing in 1976, was supposed to save our asses by the year 2000 except that it now seems to be 2012 and our asses, um, aren't saved by solar energy or anything else.
A small matter, one supposes.
Dr. Eaglesham's lecture was entitled Challenges for the Photovoltaic Industry.
Here is the sum total of what Dr Eaglesham's lecture - according to me at least, although I admittedly hold a jaunticed view of such things - about the problems of the solar industry came down to: "Not enough subsidies."
If you ask me, one of the problems of the photovoltaic industry is that its products don't work very well, but, again, no matter. I may remark below on some more substance about Dr. Eaglesham's lecture, and some of the questions I posed, and also questions that were not asked by anyone in the audience, which may well have consisted of a set of people 100% of whom may have been much smarter than I am.
(A good goal in life is to try, as often as is possible to be in rooms where one is the dumbest person in the room.)
However this diary is not about "problems of the solar photovoltaic industry." This is about the technology that is - whether you believe it or not - far more critical to the issue of climate change than, in my opinion, than solar PV energy will ever be. This is a diary about turbines.
In any case, I was just speaking of people who are much smarter than I am. To that point, the director of the Andlinger Center is Dr. Emily A. Carter. The paper I will discuss in this diary was written by her on the occassion of her election to the National Academy of Science and was published in the Proceedings of that Academy, PNAS April 5, 2011 vol. 108 no. 14 5480-5487.
Here is the title of the paper: "Atomic-scale insight and design principles for turbine engine thermal barrier coatings from theory."
It's a paper about refractory materials and superalloys, a topic in which I am very interested and about which I commented, albeit peripherally, in my last diary about the radioactive metal Technetium, a diary which, upon review, seems to have contained one statement that may have been misleading.
NNadir is a liar.