The recent spike in oil prices is probably a passing mania, many investment strategists say. But they warn that if oil remains near record levels next year, it would hurt most domestic stocks, with the notable exception of energy companies, NY times reported.
On the deck of a deep-water drill ship in the Gulf of Mexico. Some investment strategists say they think current high oil prices are temporary.
“The market clearly is not pricing in $100 oil and the economic restraint on growth that would be implied in that,“ said Stuart A. Schweitzer, the global markets strategist at JPMorgan Private Bank, a unit of JPMorgan Chase. In the New York futures market, the price of a barrel of oil settled Friday at $88.71, down from $98.18 the previous week.
If oil prices were to hover around $100 next year, Mr. Schweitzer said, that would have negative implications for the stock market. Investors would probably be advised to rotate from cyclical stocks to more defensive industries that tend to fare well in a weak economy.
An example of cyclical stocks that could be among the most vulnerable would be those of companies that make products whose purchases can be postponed, like new automobiles and vacations. A better bet might be health care and consumer staples, like food and beverages, which generally hold up well when times are tough.
Mr. Schweitzer also said higher gasoline prices might spell even more trouble for the hard-pressed home builders. “Most new development today takes place in outlying suburbs,“ he said, “so that could be yet another drag on the home-building stocks.“
Some energy experts say American consumers have not even begun to feel the pain at the pump from the rapid rise in crude oil prices.
“Higher gas prices are right around the corner,“ said Dan Pickering, an analyst at Tudor, Pickering & Company, an energy stock research firm in Houston. He estimated that gas prices could climb to $3.50 a gallon early next year.
Higher pump prices and home heating bills could put a big strain on American consumer spending, which accounts for about 70 percent of gross domestic product, said David Wyss, the chief economist of Standard & Poor’s.
Mr. Wyss said most retailers would probably lose business. “Consumers tend to trade down“ if their wallets are pinched by higher energy prices, he said. Although Wal-Mart might pick up some shoppers who would ordinarily have gone to Macy’s, he said, that probably would not be enough to offset losses in Wal-Mart’s core customer base.
One exception might be some of the luxury stores, Mr. Wyss said, especially those in big cities that can attract foreign tourists eager to exploit the weak dollar. Tiffany might do just fine, even with higher energy costs, he said. “High-end customers are not going to be as hurt by gasoline prices.“ But, he added, “they are more likely to stay away if they’re nervous about what’s happening in the stock markets.“
In much of the country, Mr. Wyss said, high gasoline prices next summer would probably hurt the big hotel and restaurant chains. “That would have less impact on McDonald’s, because they are everywhere,“ he said, but many family-oriented restaurant chains could lose business if families took fewer road trips.
Automakers might suffer if gasoline prices remained above $3 a gallon, “especially the American manufacturers, because they don’t make enough relatively fuel-efficient cars and trucks,“ he said.
Mr. Wyss recently raised his forecast for the average oil price in 2008 from $75 to $85, a level that, he said, would not be as bad for the economy as an average price of $100. Of course it would be even better for consumers if oil fell back to $70 a barrel, roughly its average price this year, he said, “but it would not be a windfall. You just wouldn’t have the negative effects.“
Many experts attribute the recent price spike to a combination of speculation and over-reaction and say crude oil prices could deflate just as rapidly.

Most photovoltaic devices that are manufactured in quantities large enough to be considered for use in producing electricity have efficiencies in the range of 10 percent.

From the standpoint of a photovoltaic (PV) owner/user/purchaser, efficiency boils down to the question of how large the solar collector array has to be to get the job done.
According to Eartland.org, if the efficiency is low, larger (or more) collectors are required. If the efficiency is higher, fewer or smaller solar collectors will be required.
What, exactly, is efficiency? Simply, it is the ratio of the electrical power produced (in watts) to the input solar power (sunlight, but expressed also in watts) striking the solar collector, the ratio usually being expressed as a percentage.
Most photovoltaic devices (solar cells and PV cells) that are manufactured in quantities large enough to be considered for use in producing electricity have efficiencies in the range of 10 percent. That is, just one-tenth of the power in the sunlight becomes electrical power.
In bright noontime sunlight, a one-square-meter surface facing the sun is exposed to somewhat less than 1,000 watts of solar power in the form of light. At 10 percent efficiency, a PV collector of that size will produce about 100 watts of electricity.
To produce the 1,200 watts required for a hair dryer requires the full output of 12 square meters of PV collector. Of course, the output will be lower when the sun is low in the sky (because the sunlight is passing through much more atmosphere), not directly facing the collector, or blocked by clouds. At night, there will be no production whatsoever.
Overall, you will be lucky to produce a year-round average of 20 watts from a single square meter of PV collector.
Forget about politics and economics. The reasons PV cell efficiency is so low are physical, involving the solar spectrum and properties of materials.
All of our sources of electricity--batteries, generators (turned by hydropower, steam engines, gas turbines, or your automobile engine), and solar cells--energize electrons. Our lamps, motors, TVs, computers, and all other electrical devices extract that energy.
There is always an energy source (water behind a dam, coal, wind, natural gas, petroleum, nuclear fission, sunlight, etc.), a mechanism for energizing electrons (generator, PV cell, etc), and a method of delivery (wires).
The goal of photovoltaics is to produce lots of power, and to do it cheaply and reliably. The Carter administration predicted we would get 1.4 trillion kilowatt hours (kWh) annually from PV, equivalent to an astounding 160 billion watts of around-the-clock power, by 2020.
The American Physical Society (APS) studied the problem of photovoltaics and concluded, “It is unlikely that photovoltaics will contribute more than about 1 percent of the US electrical energy produced near the end of the [20th] century.“
As it happened, solar electric systems produced a whopping 0.013 percent of our electricity in 2000, only 1 percent of the upper limit expected by the APS and a microscopic fraction of the Carter administration’s estimate for 2020.
It was not politics, the low price of coal, the low price of petroleum, or a lack of research money that made PV fail to meet the lofty goals envisioned during the oil crises of the 1970s.
The amount of money that could be made by manufacturing cheap, reliable, highly efficient solar cells is absolutely stupendous.
Hence there was and is a lot of research money available from both public and private sources, yet PV remains expensive and inefficient.
After decades of intense research, large-scale PV makes sense only in places that have no other source of electricity.
Let us take a look at the mechanism of PV cells. Typical cells are made of a single wafer of silicon with two adjacent areas containing tiny amounts of impurities to make what is called p-type and n-type semiconductors.
A photon (a “particle“ of light) strikes the p-type semiconductor and energizes the electron, sending it into the adjacent n-type semiconductor, leaving a hole behind.
A natural electric field in the p-n junction between the two types of semiconductor keeps the electron from directly going back to refill the hole, and allows that electron to pass through the external circuit, doing something useful.
Electrons return to the p region through an external circuit where they accomplish something useful as the process as a whole creates electricity.
However, the voltage produced by a single PV cell can’t even run a household light bulb.

I was wondering how the world will react if there was a worldwide breakdown of electrical power. Not that I would want it to happen of course, but this is an electrical engineer’s nightmare, and I happened to have it. Let me narrate this from a general perspective, mtulode.com reported.
Imagine, one fine day, it’s snowing outside and you wake up feeling cold. You wonder why the heater is not working. Then, as you get up and are about to get ready for the day, you notice that the light in the bathroom does not turn on. The reality hits that there has been a power outage. What do you do?
Well, nothing much but just continue with the everyday routine as it’s supposed to be. But there is a serious problem. No electricity. You can’t use the microwave to heat up anything, nor can you use the stove.
So, you drink the cold milk or juice out of the fridge. Upon entering a building, you will sit in a dark classroom. Straining your eyes, and after struggling for a long time, you want to check your e-mail. But guess what? The computers are all out of action. This is not the end of it. You cannot use your credit cards anywhere, so you cannot buy anything like gas in your vehicle. Life sure becomes difficult, doesn’t it?
Credit card companies will be under a loss, and businesses everywhere would pretty much come to a halt. Trading would also come to a halt, and the stock market would go crazy. Factories will be hit hard, and production of goods will come to a standstill.
Communication will be affected, and cell phones wouldn’t work; the lack of communication would create chaos whose magnitude is beyond comprehension. It will also lead to lack of movement of people worldwide. The air industry would be hit, and the planes wouldn’t fly.
Transportation of goods will stop, and then, if the trend continues for a long time and the power is not restored, people around the world would probably resort to the oldest profession of man: farming. Hunting would probably be more practical for all the meat lovers out there.
As time goes by, there would be a mass migration of people southwards as people living in the higher latitudes will find it difficult to survive in the cold for very long. The world would pretty much go back to the stone-age if a situation like this ever happened.
It is imperative that enough steps are taken to ensure the availability of power throughout the year and on a consistent basis. Security is a big issue, and until now we have found that it has been pretty adequate. It would be foolish to even think of reducing our dependence on electric power, as we cannot imagine or comprehend a world without it.
Let us not watch TV tonight; we will turn down the heat in our homes and we will sleep with our jackets on. This is something we cannot do.
These fears apart, life sure is going to become difficult with the increase in the demand for more energy. The population increase has led to demand of more consumer goods and, consequently, more industries requiring tremendous amounts of electric power.
Nearly 50 percent of electric energy in the United States comes from coal-based power plants; the amount of pollution caused and its contribution to the greenhouse effect would be massive.
We have exhausted most of the hydro-power that could have been utilized and the addition of new hydro power plants would not be a significant increase. Solar power is still in its infancy for large scale production.
More nuclear plants would be needed. That has its own risk factor associated with it regarding handling of radioactive elements and disposing of the nuclear waste.
You may think that the addition of more wind-based power plants would solve the problem of pollution and also that of energy. Speaking from an electrical engineer’s point of view, it’s not so.
Wind turbines have the potential to generate electricity, but not on a consistent basis. You don’t want your TV to blackout when the football game is on and turning back up after the goal.
Praveen Kumar

Geothermal requires production of geothermal fluids from a relatively small number of production wells and re-injections wells.

I just returned from a trip to California, where I attended a conference called the Geothermal Finance and Investment Summit. The conference was in San Jose, at the south end of San Francisco Bay. Why San Jose? San Jose is in the heart of Silicon Valley. And Silicon Valley is, as you know, ground-zero of modern high tech entrepreneurship in the US. The highways of the South Bay region are lined with office buildings bearing the names of many astonishing business success stories of the modern era, from Intel and Cisco Systems, to Yahoo, Sun Microsystems, Adobe and many more.
According to dailyreckoning.com, over the past 30 years or so, a lot of investors laid a lot of money on a lot of tables. Those investors took a lot of risk on long shot ideas. And when some of those long shot ideas worked, they worked big. Microchips and mega-code have changed the world, literally bringing modernity to billions of people. And literally bringing billions of people to modernity. So what does high tech have to do with geothermal power? Well, it goes to show that when some ideas and industries come along at just the right time, there is almost no stopping them.
And so it may be with the application of geothermal power, an idea whose time is upon us. Geothermal is not, of course, software and data routing. It is not “high tech“ as the computer geeks like to define it. In fact, mankind has been using geothermal energy sources for several millennia.
Ancient tribes congregated near hot springs and geysers on every inhabited continent. The Romans built baths near thermal springs from Scotland to Turkey. Italy has been producing electricity from geothermal sources since 1903, and Iceland is today entirely electrified with geothermal power after a 25 year national effort. So geothermal energy is an old idea, and a well-established means of mining heat from the deep earth. But the modern idea - the idea whose time has come--is to extract energy from the heat of the earth’s interior on a massive scale, and use it to obtain steam to turn a turbine and generate electricity. When people realize the potential, they will in all likelihood demand access to geothermal energy for many reasons. Let’s think through some of the industrial implications of this.
Most electricity generated in the world today comes from burning coal, natural gas or uranium in one form or another. Each of these forms of electric generation has been around for a while, and so each has its historical advantages, its legacies and problem sets.
Geothermal, in comparison, requires production of geothermal fluids from a relatively small number of production wells and re-injections wells. Geothermal does not impact the landscape at anything approaching the scale of drilling that is necessary to fulfill a natural gas requirement over many years. And geothermal fields can last for many decades. By comparison with natural gas, the geothermal fuel - heat from the earth--is essentially free.
Nuclear power has its own requirements for massive infrastructure. A typical nuke plant covers a square mile or more, with associated security systems and gigantic containment structures that can withstand a direct hit from a crashing airliner if not an exploding cruise missile. Nuke plants are staffed with small armies of highly trained security and technical personnel, and require a continuing supply of uranium fuel. The uranium fuel requires a mine for the ore, plus upgrading and processing facilities, and other stages of high-security fuel-handling and treatment through the end of the cycle where radioactive waste must be contained for hundreds of thousands of years. By comparison, geothermal power is a relatively simple level of proven technology.
Byron King