Sustainability Class

Just thought you might want to know what I was doing in school.




yes we really did watch this in one of my classes.

Mountain House

OK so here's the deal, a while back some couples in our ward put on a preparedness night for us, and one of the things they had introduced to us was this Mountain House food, they had opened, and prepared I would say 8 of the main entrees and they were all very very good, I mean surprisingly good for something that was freeze dried and not home made. But here's the better part, they keep on the shelf for an astronomical amount of time. What they had brought was the standard pouch which will keep on the shelf for 8 years, however I have found on there web site that they offer what is called a #10 size can, and they are said to keep for 25 years. Now that's the kind of food storage that I can keep up with. Yes they are expensive but if you break it down they are a pretty standard price for a meal, and one that keeps for a long time.

anyway check them out here they've got tons of variety to choose from.

Happy food Storaging!

Grades

Grades are in, and I'm a bit surprised by the results, I really thought I did worse when I screwed up my final exam. But I'll just consider it an early Christmas gift.

So It runs down like this A-,A,A,A-,A,A = 3.9 GPA

So there it is.

2.5 weeks from now and it's more Math, and Electric Circuits, and another Renewable energy class. New for this term is Chemistry, Physics and Sustainable Development. I'm not so sure about this sustainable development class, I met the lady who teaches it at the beginning of the year and even she is a bit crunchy for me. Chemistry and Physics however should be pretty fun, I really liked them in High School.

Nanosolar

Their "first shipment"..... well first as in, one to a history museum one on eBay and the rest going to solar farms. But it's a start and hopefully it wont be 2010 before we see these available to consumers, however that's probably the case.

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After five years of product development – including aggressively pipelined science, research and development, manufacturing process development, product testing, manufacturing engineering and tool development, and factory construction – we now have shipped first product and received our first check of product revenue.

We are grateful to everyone who supported us through all these years and the many occasions where there appeared to be mile-high concrete walls in our path; the unusual intensity and creativity of our team deserves all the credit for achieving this major milestone today.

Our product is defining in more ways I can enumerate here but includes:

- the world’s first printed thin-film solar cell in a commercial panel product;

- the world’s first thin-film solar cell with a low-cost back-contact capability;

- the world’s lowest-cost solar panel – which we believe will make us the first solar manufacturer capable of profitably selling solar panels at as little as $.99/Watt;

- the world’s highest-current thin-film solar panel – delivering five times the current of any other thin-film panel on the market today and thus simplifying system deployment;

- an intensely systems-optimized product with the lowest balance-of-system cost of any thin-film panel – due to innovations in design we have included.

Today we are announcing that we have begun shipping panels for freefield deployment in Eastern Germany and that the first Megawatt of our panels will go into a power plant installation there.

As far as the first three of our commercial panels are concerned:

Panel #1 will remain at Nanosolar for exhibit.

Panel #2 can be purchased by you in an auction on eBay starting today.

Panel #3 has been donated to the Tech Museum in San Jose.

[These are obviously not the first three we ever produced – we have produced loads for testing – but these are the first three of what we consider our commercial panels.]

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Its over

So I have just written my last test, and I think I did alright on all of them except for my alternative Energy test. I was thrown off by my bike being stolen and messed everything up on the test, I couldn't get anything right. So I am hoping that my mark going into the exam was high enough to account for my poor performance on the final, which I would know by now, except that my teacher is apparently having some difficulty getting that grade out to us like he promised.

Anyhow by the 20th of December I should know what all my final grades are and my schedule for next term.

So from now until Jan 7th, I'm free...... well..... free to finish all the work that Amy has lined up for me that is.

SOLAR getting good

Big talks have been happening in the last couple days/weeks concerning Solar Panels. A company called nanosolar has apparently perfected their process for making a photovoltaic cell, that's essentially printed, and can be manufactured almost like a large printing press. I cant find a firm number but i have seen some articles state costs at .30 cents a watt which is huge when compared to previous models at $3 a watt and Coal fired power at $1 per watt. Apparently their not the only ones in this game either another company called Ascent Solar Technologies has been keeping pace with nanosolar as far as technological advancements. they also are doing the printing method of course with some variation to the process but for some reason nanosolar is the leader in the game for now.

Nanosolar is unfortunately a private offering still, so all the big wigs like Google are getting on that boat. Ascent is a private company traded on the NASDAQ and looking like $18 a share now.

Also a professor at our school has been watching some program I cant remember which one, but has been saying that there's big things coming from the US Gov in the next day or so that will change this whole Solar game in a major way.

If you can't tell I am super excited, I wonder if this is how Amy feels when she sees pink, cause my heart started beating faster and I couldn't think straight when I first read the original article.

The Manufacturing plant is set to be sending out units by next year, I'm crossing my fingers on this one for sure.

Well gotta go read some more, I was really excited and wanted to share......

updates

Amy was giving me grief about updating my blog so here I am.

School is going pretty good, everything is gearing up to come to a finish for Christmas break, final projects and final exams is pretty well all that is left. If I do good in all my finals (projects and exams) I should come out with an overall A average, English is the only subject that will bring down my mark at this point. Math will be my highest mark by far.... My last exam I scored 110%........ since I know your gonna ask how ..... most of the class couldn't finish the test in time allotted so he made the test out of 5 marks less and offered an extra 5% bonus question that everyone could do on there own time and hand in.

Since I'm talking about school, I was reading an article on celsias.com that said that you can read any of the course ware offered at MIT for free. Here's a link to the MIT site.