Adam V’s Tumble Blog

In February, First Solar tooted its horn about breaking the $1-per-watt barrier for making solar modules in the last months of 2008. This week, the company said costs had fallen again to 93 cents per watt, down 5% in three months and down 28% in a year. (The full presentation is here.)

First Solar executives also say to expect more falling costs. By 2014, it expects to drive down cost per watt to make solar modules to fall to between 52 and 63 cents by 2014. The biggest driver of the lower costs is better efficiency, it said. Production per fabrication line is expected to nearly double over the next five years.

Driving down costs is critical for First Solar, which faces competition from low-cost Chinese solar makers and a public that won’t want significant subsidies to last forever. In other words, if it can’t drive down cost of modules and installation over the next few years, the game might be over.

via WSJ.

The Prius’s reputation as a “green” car is completely undeserved. The culprit is its nickel metal hydride battery.

The nickel is mined in Sudbury, Ontario, and smelted nearby, doing damage to the local environment. The smelted nickel is shipped to Wales, where it is refined. Then it is sent to China to be made into nickel foam. Then it goes to Japan, where it is made into a battery. Then it goes into cars, some of which are shipped to the United States and some of which go to Europe. All of that seaborne transport consumes a lot of fossil fuel.

via washingtonpost.com.

Change of pace. In the last week I’ve had an idea clawing at the back of my head, and it’s clear the thing isn’t going to leave me alone until I do something with it. I don’t usually blog about my little programming projects (with the exception of the Terrain Project) because I like to imagine this site has some sort of focus, but the choice here is for me to blog about this or leave the site fallow for a week. So I’m blogging it. Perhaps you’ll find it entertaining anyway.

via Twenty-Sided

By a 5-4 vote in a case from West Virginia, the court said that a judge who remained involved in a lawsuit filed against the company of the most generous supporter of his election deprived the other side of the constitutional right to a fair trial.

via NPR

As anyone who has lusted over the technical specifications for Canon’s new Digital Rebel XSi knows, the capabilities of the average point and shoot camera are severely limited. Using the CHDK firmware hack, the features of Canon point and shoot cameras can be significantly expanded, allowing for ultra-high speed photography, very long exposures, time lapse photography, and RAW capture. This How-To provides a guide to our experiences using the CHDK firmware, and shows just how easy it is to get more out of a point and shoot than ever thought possible.

via Hack a Day.