New Ideas and New Products

Skype have released their iPhone software today. But is it actually worth using?

In my opinion there are two main issues with the use of the application on the iPhone. One relates to the network providers and the other to the phone itself.

1. You can only use it if you can connect to a wifi connection. Presumably network providers didn’t want this using up their mobile data bandwidth. That in my opinion makes it fairly useless.
2. You will only be able to receive calls if you have the application open. I know I don’t intend to walk around with my iPhone permanently running Skype.

Perhaps it makes it a bit easier to call your friends around the world but the benefits look fairly minimal.

An application that ran on Google’s Android would make more sense as at least it would be able to run in the background.

The iPhone is a great phone and I know I wouldn’t want to be without mine but I’m frustrated with some of the issues. You know that if Apple owned Skype they would not release the Skype app in its current state as they know they wouldn’t be able to wow their customers with the current restrictions. Perhaps by allowing apps such as this on the iPhone Apple are actually diluting their brand which they have worked so hard to build. Apple is known for quality IT and software that work out of the box. The Skype app doesn’t really fit with that idea and I expect there will be more apps like this to come.

Do you have any examples of other apps that are high profile but disappoint?

Last Thursday I wrote about how China was going to give the solar industry a boost by introducing government backed incentives for solar project developers.

Well yesterday Japan announced it was going to extend its already existing Solar incentives by providing around 2 Trillion Japanese Yen to be spent on solar projects over the next three years. This equates to around 1GW of demand per year which is very significant seeing as Japan only installed around 280MW last year.

Japanese manufacturers of solar panels such as Sharp and Kyocera should be the first to benefit but the solar industry as a whole should benefit from this extra demand as it reduces the supply/demand inbalance I talked about last Thursday.

Most of the additional demand in Japan will come from Building Integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV) as land values are too high to justify large utility scale “solar farms” as Japan is such as mountainous country.

So two good bits of news for the solar industry in one week. With the G20 meeting on Thursday we could see some further positive news. There is also talk of a green stimulus element to the Chinese stimulus plan which would be further good news for the alternative energy industry as a whole.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the British team that is attempting to build a car to break the 1000 mph mark. This supersonic car is to be called the Bloodhound SSC.

So I was pleased to see the mainstream UK media publishing the following story.

This piece is actually written by John Piper who is the engineering director for Bloodhound SSC. He talks about some of the challenges they are facing in terms of the stability of the structure of the car due to the immense forces it will be subjected to.

He talks about using a diffuser to stabilise the car and it is the use of this bit of technology which is causing all the arguments amongst Forumla 1 teams right now.

The solar industry received a boost today when the Chinese government said it was going to step in to provide incentives to encourage the development of solar installations.

This is good news as the solar industry has had a tough time through the credit crunch and consequently there is an oversupply of solar modules which is driving down prices and effecting manufacturers’ margins.

The Chinese government is saying that they will subsidise solar projects to the tune of around $3 per Watt. Given that solar module prices are currently around $3 per Watt that means that all the developers will effectively pay for is the balance of plant and labour which should be considerably less than what is paid in Europe, Japan and the US. Therefore, this effectively makes the cost of installing Solar in China less than half of what it was before today’s announcement.

The focus is going to be on Building Integrated Solar Photovoltaics (BIPV) and systems will have to be over 50kW to qualify. So we aren’t really talking about Chinese families putting solar panels on their houses as for this you would need nearer 10kW. I guess it will focus on factories, schools, hospitals, etc.

The Chinese are also making sure that subsidised installations will use quality panels requiring at least 16% for monocrystalline panels, 14% for multicrystalline and 6% for thin-film.

The big question is what does this do to solar demand. How many MWs will China install this year and going forward? It’s really hard to say but I think this could add 500-1000MW this year. Planning processes are likely to be fast and installation times will be quicker than in Europe and the US .

China is expected to need to double its electricity generating capacity between 2005 and 2015 and so it looks like solar can play a fairly significant part. China has the manufacturing capacity and technical expertise to continue to expand and this is likely to play a big part in helping the solar industry globally to get to grid parity.

Ultimately this subsidy is about supporting the Chinese solar manufacturing industry and developing a home grown source of additional electricity generation capacity. However, perhaps there is an element of China taking its first steps towards helping the world deal with climate change.

However, you look at it we now have great subsidies in place in the two most important economies: the US and China. Hopefully they can now build on the efforts that governments in Europe and Japan have made to develop the solar industry.

A fairly significant amount of money from the recent Stimulus bill has been earmarked to develop the alternative energy industry in the US. The net effect of the legislation could translate to around $150 billion of investment. There are numerous programmes in place from direct federal investment in R&D, putting solar panels on government buildings and making them more efficient, upgrading the electricity grid, support for electric vehicles manufacturers, etc.

The most important in my mind though is the $6 billion of federal loan guarantees for new alternative energy projects such as solar and wind installations. This $6 billion investment will support $60 billion of government guaranteed debt financing which is sorely needed after many financial institutions have simply stopped providing to financing to capital intensive infrastructure projects.

When I first read about this part of the bill I thought to myself, this is really good news for the alternative energy industry, but, it’s going to take them a long time to get this money to the people who need it. The applications for this kind of financing through the Department of Energy have historically taken months or even years. Energy Secretary Steven Chu has been revamping the process to apply for DoE grants and he had said he expected to see projects being approved by May which I thought sounded ambitious. Therefore it was great yesterday to see the first company benefit from this programme.

The company Solyndra is a manufacturer of Solar Photovoltaic panels and they have received loan guarantees of $535 million to allow them to build out a new commercial sized production plant.

Although it was positive to see that money was starting to be allocated at this early stage I was somewhat surprised to see this programme being used to support a manufacturer with a relatively unproven early stage technology (they use a relatively inefficient thin-film technique using CIGS instead of the established crystalline silicon technology). It seems to me the DoE should be targeting this money at new alternative energy installations such as large scale solar and wind farm projects. There is currently an excess supply of solar panels in the market and adding to that supply in the near future is not going to help the industry as a whole or the economic viability of a company based around young technology. Don’t get me wrong I’m all for investing in new technology and R&D but I don’t think this is the programme that should be used.

There is an opportunity to take advantage of the worldwide excess supply of solar panels by helping to fund large utility scale installations who can take advantage of depressed solar panel prices based on proven technology. These large projects are far lower risk than providing debt to an early stage company like Solyndra. Solar farm projects have very predictable cash flows, low ongoing costs, and can be installed quickly once approval has been given.

I will keep my eyes peeled for further news of where this money is going and keep you updated.

So what is the situation with nuclear fusion? Are we close to being able to use nuclear fusion as an electricity generating source?

After the invention of the nuclear fission bomb back in the 1940’s scientists were able to find a way of using the energy released from splitting atoms to generate electricity within about 10 years. However, it is now around 50 years since the Hydrogen bomb was invented so why haven’t we been able to convert this into a feasible source of electricity generation?

As an idea electricity generated from nuclear fusion is perfect. It is a clean source of energy (unlike coal, natural gas or crude oil), it uses Hydrogen as fuel (the most abundant element on earth), it requires tiny amounts of the fuel, it produces no radioactive waste (unlike nuclear fission that uses Uranium), it can provide baseload power (unlike wind or solar) and it does not rely on the weather (unlike solar, wind and hydro power).

There a number of problems with nuclear fusion with current technology.

1. We end up putting in more energy than we get out.
2. The length of time between actual fusion events is too long, i.e. in the order of hours rather than minutes or seconds.

However, technology is improving. Whereas say 15-20 years ago experiments were inputting say 30 times more energy than they were extracting, a project in Korea now expects to be about 1 to 1. So why do we have this problem of not being able to extract more energy than we put in?

This really relates to the amount of energy we need in order to force the two atoms together. But first…

A quick explanation of Nuclear Fusion:

Nuclear Fusion is the forcing together of two atoms to create a new heavier atom. When you force two light atoms close enough together they will combine together to make a heavier atom and also release energy.  The fuel that tends to be used is Deuterium which is a special type of naturally occurring Hydrogen which is made up of one proton, one neutron and one electron. These are forced together to eventually produce the inert gas Helium.

So why do we get energy out when we combine two light atoms together to form a larger one? Well this is explained by Einstein’s famous equation E=mc^2. What this equation is saying is that energy and mass are essentially the same thing. Or in other words mass can be converted into energy. So what we find is that when we bring two light atoms together the resulting larger atom does not have the same mass as the sum of the two lighter atoms. It actually has less mass and the mass that no longer exists has been converted to energy.

The problem is that in order for us to force these two small atoms together they have to overcome an enormous electrostatic repulsive force which is the same force you experience when you try forcing the north pole of two magnets together. This force is far stronger than the gravitational attraction of the two atoms. If we can get the two atoms close enough together then another force known as the “Strong Force” overcomes the electrostatic force and the two atoms combine and fusion occurs. Therefore we have to put in large amounts of energy to get fusion to occur.

In a huge body like the sun the energy released by the fusion of one set of hydrogen atoms contributes to another set and so on and therefore it is self sustaining. However, on earth we have to use only a small amount of material so that we can initiate fusion and also contain the energy that it gives off, if we failed to contain it we would have an almighty explosion.

This means that the fusion events that have been created in experiments only last a short time. For example the Joint European Torus were able to create an output of 10MW but for only half  a second. The experiment then has to be setup again which can take hours.

One new project called ITER in France which is currently under construction hope to be able to produce a net energy output for a meaningful length of time. However, this is still probably 20 years away and even then it is only an experiment.

It doesn’t look like we are going to see electricity flowing into our grids from nuclear fusion in the near future. However, i think it is really important to continue to explore fusion as a source of electricity because it has the potential to provide cheap, clean baseload power. The IEA expect energy demand to increase 50% by 2030 due largely to a demographic shift towards the middle class in developing countries such as China and India. We clearly can’t rely on coal and natural gas due to depleting reserves and the effect it is having the climate. And as much as I support the use of wind and solar and other forms of alternative energy what we really need is a baseload source of power. At the moment the only other alternative is nuclear fission which I think we will have to rely on until we can find a way of making nuclear fusion work for us.

So we got it, “Cut and paste” is coming to the iPhone at long long last! Another 100 improvements will also be added to the iPhone software which includes multimedia messaging and a fully integrated search function. Unfortunatley there was no mention of Flash but I guess we all knew that was a long shot. Tethering also didn’t get a mention until the Q&A which is really going to be a factor for the operator to decide.

The first half of the presentation, which you can see here, was given over to how developers can use the various new tools at their disposal. I think the main thing to come out of it was the fact that there is going to be more flexibility in how developers can generate revenue. Clearly the current model is not terribly attractive for producers of material suitable for subscription. Magazines and newspapers are now likely to embrace the opportunities along with games developers who could in future charge for extra levels and the like.

We will also get the use of landscape keyboard when typing emails and SMS. Stereo bluetooth will also be available.

According to Apple iPhone 3.0 should be with us this summer. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a new handset following on soon after. Let’s hope there is a better camera and video calling. What would you like to see?

Netbooks have really taken off over the last 18 months. Netbooks being relatively low-tech, with small screens and slower processors have been able to drive prices down across the notebook space.

Of course netbooks are really only good surfing the net, checking email and a bit of word processing. They won’t be able to cope if you want to be able to edit video and pictures.

It’s interesting to compare machines that run on windows or the linux operating system. The Linux system being free means that that is an instant cost saving of say $100. Combine that with the free open office software package and you are all set to do just about everything you should want to do on a netbook.

It appears more people are also buying a netbook in addition to their main computer as they are so convenient for taking on the road.

Bloodhound SSC

Britain has held the world land speed record for the last 25 years and has been involved in the record attempt for the last 100 years. In 1997 Richard Noble and his team built a car that broke the sound barrier - that’s 763 mph. What an incredible feat of engineering. How do you manage to keep something travelling that fast flat on the ground?

Well if that wasn’t enough the team have got together again with the plan to build a new car that will break the 1000 mph barrier! Whereas the last car used two jet engines to get it to Mach 1 the new car will require a rocket in addition to a jet engine. The new car will be called Bloodhound SSC and you can find out more about it here.

Apparently a big motivation for this project is the fact that Britain is producing less engineering graduates each year which has obviously has significant implications for the economy. The team are going to spend a significant amount of time devoting their resources to educational projects to inspire young Brits.

I’m really excited about this project. I rather geekily joined their supporters club and made a donation. This has it all. cutting edge tecnology, attempting to do the impossible, a touch of British eccentricity and what will surely be a very cool shiny car. Good luck.

New Silver iPod Shuffle

So Apple have just announced a new iPod shuffle. It looks great and now has 4Gb of storage. It appears to be about half the size of the second generation model and only comes in black or grey. The most interesting addition is the use of voice technology so you can find out which track you are listening to, select a playlist from a list, etc. I have an iphone and have been thinking for a while that the addition of voice technology would be really useful for when you are listening to your music but have your phone in your pocket and you want to find out what you are listening to. Hopefully they will release this software onto the iphone soon as well. From the website it looks like a great new product as you always expect from Apple. It’s about double the price of the second generation shuffle though so that might put a few poeple off. I would really like one to take to the gym.