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I've seen the Pipistrel Alpha Electro in action. Almost silent, quick-change battery packs. Cute as hell.

And short legs: an hour plus reserve in the air. If it was good for two hours I'd be interested in getting checked out in one and renting it for local flights. Four hours and I'd look thoughtfully at my bank account. Here in B.C. it would plug in to hydro dams, so its carbon footprint is nil.

...laura

In socialist BC, canada. Our power is a government run company. Takes a lot of the safety issues away from cheapskate corporations.

And yet the rates are still cheap. Imagine that!

My concern is where all the extra electricity will come from with mass adoption.

Places like this -

https://www.bchydro.com/energy...

I wonder how many homes are on one 'collector': bchydro

Most, if not all, electricity contracts which are required to receive service have clauses in them that allow the utility to access their property. Here is the one for British Columbia.

9.5. Access to Premises
BC Hydro's agents and employees shall have, at all reasonable times, free access to the equipment supplied with Electricity, and to BC Hydro's meters, wires and apparatus on the Customer's Premises, for the purpose of reading meters and testing, installing, removing, repairing or replacing any of BC Hydro's equipment, and to ascertain the quantity or method of use of service and the amount of Electricity consumed. If access to meter rooms or other locations where BC Hydro equipment is installed is restricted, the Customer shall supply BC Hydro with lockbox keys or other keys or means of access as may be necessary to provide BC Hydro with ready access to those locations. In no case will BC Hydro accept keys to private residential Premises.
If free access to BC Hydro's equipment on the Customer's Premises is denied or obstructed in any manner, including by debris, unsafe walkways or other means of access, or the presence of animals, and the Customer does not remedy the problem upon being requested by BC Hydro to do so, service may be suspended and not reconnected until the problem is corrected;

Basically if the property owner does not let BC Hydro install a smart meter (it falls under "replacing any of BC Hydro's equipment") the electrical service can be cut off. No access, no electricity.

BC Hydro has run Power Smart for decades to encourage people to update appliances and make other changes that reduce power consumption. This, along with upgrading efficiency in existing power facilities, allowed them to delay huge capital outlays for constructing new capacity for decades. This is despite a burgeoning BC population and increased variety in electronic appliances, although those two factors are finally outstripping their efforts from increased generation and customer efficiency and requiring them to increase capacity though new generating plants.

The twice-a-day is from BCHydro's web site. "Smart meters are active for an average of one minute per day. Residential smart meters are active for a total average of one minute per day, which includes the relay of information that may be required for data transmission and coordination between meters. In fact, the exposure to radio frequency from a smart meter – over its entire 20-year life span – is equal to a single 30 minute cell phone call." BC Hydro FAQ

Vancouver (all of BC) uses no nuke, and no coal (at least not for power). We're about 90% hydroelectric. http://www.bchydro.com/about/our_system/generation.html

The poor Power Factor rating of CFLs means that the power grid must provide more energy to start them. The consumer may save money at home, but unless the power factor of CFLs can be improved, the electrical grid itself will have to be upgraded if we all switch to CFLs.

But there's no "if" because governments have already legislated the elimination of incandescent bulbs!

An explanation of the power factor (search for the heading "Power
Factor and Switching")
http://irc.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/pubs/cp/lig3_e.html

More summaries of problems:
http://www.cours.polymtl.ca/inf1040/2008automne/Olivier_CanadianReviewDec2007.pdf
http://sound.westhost.com/articles/incandescent.htm

Current research:
http://qnc.queensu.ca/story_loader.php?id=49db90a6e3e3d

Search for "power factor":
http://www.bchydro.com/powersmart/technology_tips/buying_guides/lighting/compact_fluorescent_lamps.html

Here, you'll see that the "requirement" for "Energy Star" labelling is
a power factor of only 0.50!
http://oee.nrcan.gc.ca/residential/business/manufacturers/specifications/compact-flour.cfm?attr=12

you're going to have to build more nuclear power plants.

why?

Why is that? If we conserve enough, couldn't we use existing hydroelectric power sources (like we do already http://www.bchydro.com/)?

So you are basically saying that every major home appliance that I could think off off the top of my head is already at its pick except for HVAC and refrigerators due to hitting limits in our current tech base?

Yes, unless you do something unconventional (which would be hard to get people to accept because it requires custom building or the like). For instance, you could reduce a lot of water usage in your house if you re-plumbed your whole house to have a "grey water" system and holding tank. With this, all the dirty water from your sinks and showers/tubs would go to this holding tank, instead of the sewer. Then, the toilets (and irrigation if you have it) would be connected to this tank, so that they'd reuse this dirty water, before it went to the sewer. Some eco-minded people have actually done this, but obviously it's quite rare, and there's debate over the effects of soap and other waste from the sinks/showers on the toilet parts and on the lawn.

Actually, there are improvements and better performing water heaters now. They just aren't required for use in new buildings though. I've liked the idea of those tankless water heaters that only heat water right when you use it. That device is supposed to save alot in water heating costs over a year. (Before I had come across that, the cheapest water heating option was using a solar pre heater, but that was for only part of the year, but that part of the year you'd have near free hot water.)

Yep, these are the only two ways of reducing hot water costs I've heard of. The tankless heaters sound good, except that you need a very high-current power line connected to them (a problem when retrofitting), and for some reason are still quite expensive compared to the tank heaters. Solar heaters are pretty cool, though they seem to have gone out of fashion here in Arizona which is the best climate for them.

You know refrigators could most likely be improved if they were designed to interface with HVAC and dump their waste heat outside the building instead of within the dwealing. (As I understand the basic concept of the refrigator is to move the heat from within the box into the surrounding air of the kitchen. We never really think about it but just having an indoor refrigator is like having a small heater going 24/7. I'd have to look at the numbers of new modern refrigators to see if this is that big of an issue. You know, the same basic concept could be applied to ovens and venting all that waste heat either outdoors or better into some thermal storage medium for winter usage.

You're absolutely right. I've even heard of some eco-friendly houses being built with different refrigerators where the compressor is mounted on top instead of underneath, so that the compressor heat doesn't heat up the space it's trying to cool. It'd make even more sense to exhaust the compressor heat outside, as well as oven heat.

Another thing that would be nice would be an "economizer" for A/C units. This is something found only in commercial units for some reason, which exchanges air with outside air if the outside air is at a more desirable temperature than the inside air. There's lots of times it's cooler outside than it is inside in my house; it's certainly possible to turn off the A/C and open the windows, but you don't get very good circulation that way, and it's a big PITA. I guess they don't include this feature as standard because of cost.

I keep 2 ceiling fans constantly going. You imply that they are as good as they are going to get. I'll buy that except that's why we need the government to come and say to manufactures hey we'd like you to improve by 1-2% or 2-5% per year.

Here's an article I just found about induction motor efficiency: linky
Apparently there is a little room for improvement, but of course it will come at a cost in materials. The graph they show doesn't really show low-power motors like you'd find

Yeah, ok. I'll look more closely. Extraordinary claims and all that. Perhaps 'standard' storage heaters don't have much insulation. Lets say we use 100L of hot water per day. That's 14MJ of heat. What insulation would we need to make the waste heat 34% of the total? 14*0.34/0.66 = 7MJ of heat waste each day through the insulation. The means 87W heat lost, over a 1.5m^2 area, or an R-value of 1.6. That's not an unreasonable insulation level (corresponding to say an inch of fibreglass), so perhaps it is plausible after all. That's also assuming a 100% efficient storage heater (reasonable - condensing units get something like 95%) and a 100% efficient tankless heater (less reasonable). A smaller tank, more water usage or more insulation would reduce this, in the limit you get a continuous flow system.

We also haven't considered the benefit of efficiently heating the house whilst make hot water (cogeneration). If a unit is 94% efficient at heating the water, you can interpret that as 94% efficient at heating the house with the waste heat. I bet you spend more on heating than on hot water.

When our existing sytem dies we'll probably get a condensing continuous flow system (if they make them then) with solar preheat (hey, for $300 I think you'd be mad not to). Until then I'm going to stick with our 1 star gas unit with solar preheat, perhaps wrapping a spare roof bat around the outside.

The DOE site claims that 94% of the people who installed a solar system thought it a good investment, which runs contrary to your claim that they cause problems.

http://www.bchydro.com/business/investigate/invest igate831.html

Has some interesting observations. It seems that a standard US hot water service is woefully inefficient, which is perhaps where the DOE gets their 'can be as much as' from.

Thanks for this interesting discussion - you made me check my assumptions and they were off a little.

Regarding efficiency, I refer once more to Wikipedia: "In 2002, 5-watt LEDs were available with efficiencies of 18-22 lumens per watt. [...] In September 2003 a new type of blue LED was demonstrated by the company Cree, Inc. to have 35% efficiency at 20 mA. This produced a commercially packaged white light having 65 lumens per watt at 20 mA, [...]".

Here's a fairly useful efficiency table from Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_bulb#Efficiency

It's not really complete or up-to-date though. It doesn't have the light that you mention. Nor does it have T5 fluorescent lights. These are quite common and readily available, and produce about 100 lumens/watt.

Of course, there are a lot of people who can't stand fluorescent lights for one reason or another, but that's a separate matter...

Here are some links on how the grid and customer transformers work.

You can use your existing power transformer so long as you don't exceed its power rating. Here is one utilities regulations.

And of course this hinders centralized control - if a power line needs to be worked on, how do you guarantee that no current is flowing in it?

convert the pole transformers to be dual and rig it so that if you generate excess power, your metering runs backwards

slightest mismanagement can cause blackouts and other system failures

Look. I'm not interested in a argument for its sake. Every time you pull some new reason out of the air that solar can't work I've proved you wrong and uninformed. If you want to learn more, or have informed opinions you want to share, then fine - but I am starting to feel this is going nowhere. (have you learned anything about solar in this process?)

Take a look at where British Columbia, Canada gets its electricity: BC Hydro

"Imagine the chaos if your power company could take money from Sony so that its appliances got a higher quality of juice - and thus worked a tad better - than those of Mitsubishi"

Actually, our local utility, BC Hydro does this already. They have lower rate schedules if you are a customer willing to be interruptible during peak demand. So, some commercial and industrial customers here do indeed have a "higher quality of juice" than others.

• be the right frequency
• be the right voltage
• allow correction to a power factor matching the grid demand

The power factor correction is the one that works against distributed power generation - a large number of small operations is difficult to regulate to match the grid demand. This is one reason why BC hydro, who generates most of its electricity with hydro, operates a natural gas thermal plant in the middle of Vancouver. They need both a source of power and a turbine that they can dial in phase shifts to respond to the back-emf from the users on the grid. Try that with your solar panel!

-AD

My electrical cost in BC was more than half the KWh rate it is in Alberta, somewhere around 4.5 cents/KWh

For what it's worth, the residential rates in BC are $0.0577 per kWH or *at the most* $0.0991 per kWH if you live in the middle of nowhere off the grid.

Residential Rates

Business Rates

It's really to fucking bad the liberals have sold off BCH the way they have. Good bye open gridops, good bye quality of service. I'm moving to Saskatchewan.

My electrical cost in BC was more than half the KWh rate it is in Alberta, somewhere around 4.5 cents/KWh

For what it's worth, the residential rates in BC are $0.0577 per kWH or *at the most* $0.0991 per kWH if you live in the middle of nowhere off the grid.

Residential Rates

Business Rates

It's really to fucking bad the liberals have sold off BCH the way they have. Good bye open gridops, good bye quality of service. I'm moving to Saskatchewan.

more info on wave power in Canada (West Coast) is at BC Hydro Green Energy

• found a relatively airtight cavern
• that is small enough for a significant volume of air to be compressed into
• that was structurally sound for the purpose, and
• that nobody planned on building above.

Personally, I'm a much bigger fan of hydroelectricity than the proposed method in the article. Granted, you'll be displacing wildlife (including people) whenever you build dams, but for the electricity you generate, it's probably one of the cleanest methods available.

--
Do I play Hockey?
Posting at -1 since April 18/01.