twhicks,

It's not just about the teams, although a dynasty in any town helps sales. It's also about the individual stars: Kobe, LeBron, Duncan, Jordan, Barkley, etc. Now you can sell jersies and t-shirts with your latest star on it.

BTW - I think Cleveland being able to select LeBron is just payback for the Cavs having to deal with Michael "Don't look at me too hard or you'll get a foul" Jordan back in the 90s. Plus you get the local-kid-makes-good angle for a feel-good back story.

I've always thought the NBA wasn't "fixed", just very tilted. If there's an obvious NBA favorite in a game, the opposing team will have to perform a lot better to win. 50-50 odds become 60-40. But the most egregious example I could remember was a Laker-Pacers game in the finals with no-calls on one end and phantom calls on the other favoring - you guessed it - LA.

It was disgusting seeing all of the ESPN analysts toeing the company line last night. "You can't believe a word he said..." even though he came clean BEFORE being charged. These accusations are NOT new. Donaghy's lawyer submitted yesterday's statement as a reminder of what he provided investigators previously. He'd not bringing this up only at sentecing. The NBA could have avoided all this since this was filed only after the NBA reversed course and after months of claiming no injury filed a request for an injury award of $1,000,000.00 (to the penny) in damages related to their internal investigation - with no documentation at all.

The real problems solar power needs to deal with are:

1. Power density

2. What to do at night

wrt 1, the energy density is not merely a convienence issue. As can be seen from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Us_pv_annual_may2004.jpg, the average solar energy per day received by a properly tilted solar panel in the US is about 5 kWh/m^2/day. To charge an 75kW (100hp) electric vehicle for 2 hours of operation each day, you would need 30m^2 of PV panel if they were 100% efficient. If we use absolute best (laboratory) efficiencies available of 20%, that's 150m^2 or a PV panel measuring 57 feet by 28 feet. If you used Nanosolar's 6% efficiency, that's 52 ft by 104 ft (slightly less than 1/8 of an acre).

Now let's replace that 600MW powerplant with 20% efficient PVs. Over 24 hrs, that 600MW powerplant can produce 14.4Gwh/day. Using the 5 kWh/m^2/day, at 20% efficiency, that's 1 kWh/m^2/day. To match the energy delivered per day from the 600MW powerplant, we would need 14.4 million square meters or 5.6 square miles.

Let's compare PVs to other distributed (as opposed to central) power sources. A 5 kWe diesel genset has a footprint of about 4ft x 3ft. A 5 kWe PV panel @ 20% efficiency would have a footprint of 19ft x 14ft. A quick search found a 4ft x 3ft solar panel (Sanyo HIP-200BA3 200W Solar Panel) that is rated at 200W - 4% of the power from the same sized diesel genset.

Siting for all power ranges much above a few tens of watts becomes a major concern for PVs.

wrt 2, if you want power at night, you need to make more energy than you need during the day and then store the excess energy for use at night. That, for the most part, means batteries. At 200 Wh/kg, to store enough energy for 0.5 kWe of power at night, you need to store 500W x 12 hrs = 6000 Wh of energy - that's 30 kg or 66 lbs of batteries.

I don't have the solution, but until these 2 issues are solved, PVs are impractical for producing more power than what is needed to run a laptop.

I think you overestimate the impact of electric vehicles on the demand for electricity. Most of the charging will be done at night when the demand on the existing grid is the lightest.

According to http://www.autobloggreen.com/2007/01/07/detroit-auto-show-its-here-gms-plug-in-hybrid-is-the-chevy-v/, the Volt will use a 120 kW motor and a battery pack with a capacity of 16 kWh. If the Volt replaced all the Toyota Camrys (Camries?) sold in one year in the US (about 500K), that would mean a total combined battery capacity of 8,000 MWh. If these cars are charged every day, that's 2.92 Million MWh In 2006 electricity generated in the US totaled about 4 Billion MWh (http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epates.html). So that 2.92 Million MWh/yr of battery capacity needed to charge 500,000 Chevy Volts each day is only 0.07% of the 2006 generating capacity. Now, if all of the passenger vehicles in the US - approx. 240 million - were Volts, they would represent 35% of the US's total electricity generation. However, the electrical generating capacity is about 1 Billion MW (http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat2p2.html). If run 24/7, that 1 Billion MW of capacity could produce 8.76 Trillion MWh indicating that the vast majority of the 4 Billion MWh of electricity use is at peak times (average load of 0.05%). Even if all the cars in the US became Chevy Volts overnight, if they are charged at night, they should have nearly zero impact on demand for overall capacity.

The bonus here is that CO2 emissions, even if coal-fired or natural-gas-fired powerplants produce the needed electricity, would be drastically reduced. This is because the well-to-wheels efficiency of an EV is 3-4 times that of an gasoline internal combustion engine.