I’m excited to announce the launch of the Down to a Science T-Shirt Shop. Shirts range from $18-$20 and I’ve even included a few special items. Proceeds from the shirts will go right back into DtaS advertising (unfortunately NOT the all important “Kish Beer Fund”).

Look for more special items all the time, including science branded reusable shopping bags, messenger bags, and hoodies.

I will continue to add products all the time. If you have suggestions/questions about the shirts, drop me a line.

Frost & Sullivan is reporting that polysilicon shortages that have slowed the solar PV industry will end in 2008. The expectation is the 4 top polysilicon producers will add 17,000 tons of capacity this year, a jump of almost 50% in production. Compare that with the total demand of 26,000 tons in 2004. Shows how much this industry is booming….in fact, the expectation is solar will eat up almost 50% of the output of high purity silicon by 2009.

That’s an important step for the solar industry gaining more political and economic power…a great sign for the industry’s growth.

The Presentation (Flash is required)
To move to the next slide, click on the right side of the current slide. Click on the left side to go back.

Videos from the Solar Power event are up on the website. As always, you can watch snippets of the video on YouTube as well.

In addition, check out Sunpower’s Solar savings calculator to see how much you could potentially save with a solar installation. Only takes about 5 minutes.

With the continued federal deficit and expense redistribution from the war to homeland security, physical sciences are feeling the pinch. The Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) is getting the brunt of money cut, missing out on $23 million of requested funding. In response, SLAC is laying off 125 of it’s 1600 employees and shutting down its PEP-II collider in March.

The PEP-II collider was scheduled to be shut down in September, but this was still quite a jolt. Here’s a picture of DtaS’ recent tour of SLAC, perhaps tours will be the only thing going on at this facility in the future.

A question came up at the solar talk on Tuesday…there is confusion on standard power conversions. What does it mean when a power plant is 15 MW? How about my PG&E bill that rates everything in kw h?

In science class, energy is generally labeled in Joules (sometime kilojoules - KJ or megajoules - MJ). Energy is time independent…it’s just energy.

But we never hear about Joules in normal life. We always hear about Watts (sometimes kW - kilowatt, MW - megawatt).

1 Watts = 1 Joule/second.

So when you hear about a 100 W bulb, that means it ’s using 100 Joules of energy per second. A 15 MW plant (that number represents peak output) can produce 15 million joules per second.

Now to your electric bill. You get billed on a kw*h (kilowatt hour) basis.

1 kw* h= 1000 watts hour= 1000 (Joules/second) * hour = 1000J/sec * 60 sec/1 min * 60 min/hour = 3,600,000 Joules.

So your electric bill actual does state how much energy is being used. Just with a bastardized unit of measure.