Slashdot Mirror

Half a cent per gallon is 7,727 times MORE per gallon than a Los Angeles resident typically pays if they manage to stay in Tier 1 pricing all year.

According to your link, water is $4.832 per HFC (748 gallons), which is $0.00646 per gallon. That's more than half a cent.

Also, tiered pricing is unfortunate in the way that it rewards the wealthy (who generally use the most water) for conserving a gallon of water more than it rewards the poor for doing the same thing.

Half a cent per gallon is 7,727 times MORE per gallon than a Los Angeles resident typically pays if they manage to stay in Tier 1 pricing all year. For facts concerning Los Angeles water rates see: https://www.ladwp.com/ladwp/fa... .

You are orders of magnitude off in understanding pricing in the water commodity market. Not that RO can't be done, just about every golf course and condo Cabo San Lucas BSC MX is watered via reverse osmosis. However, the valuations of each of those condos is in the millions per 1,000 sq ft so the investment makes sense for the developers. When the average home price in California picks up a couple more digits, RO will make perfect sense.

I can see this subscribed to by small businesses with data heavy uploads (film production companies, ad agencies etc).

LA Department of Water and Power already sells dark fiber lease and bandwidth transport services, lots of people use it in Hollywood.

    I suspect they were calling more than just that one location. I'd name the area, but I wouldn't want to offend LADWP. :)

    Really, that was a good measure to know where emergency resources were available when they didn't have the available capacity.

    If my knowledge of power plants is correct, it takes some time to spin one up to full capacity (like 12 to 24 hours), so if there is a spike in usage, they may not be prepared. For example, an unexpected hot day may require more power because people are running their air conditioners for longer duty cycles. An unexpected outage at one of their plants could hurt the situation also.

    In calling up non-company resources, the average consumer would be completely unaware that it happened, and they power company still makes money. To the best of my knowledge, any power fed back into the grid is paid on at wholesale rates, but it's still sold to customers at full retail rates.

    I believe they've changed that for residential customers though, but I may be mistaken. I know some areas of the US are paying on full retail rates for surplus energy made through alternative means, such as solar, wind, and generators. If you set up your home properly at either rate, you can bring your residential cost down to almost nothing by supplying your own residence during the day and providing power to the grid, and using on-grid off-peak pricing at night. For many people, the power requirements at night are low, where they only have their HVAC and refrigerator running at lighter duty cycles, but all the lights and other electronics are turned off.

Hm, at first I thought a 100W assumed load was kind of big, but let's have a look-see here:

My server is a PIII 600, 2 harddrives, video card, 2 NICs, and some other crap. According to my UPS, it, along with my cable modem and 8 port 10/100 hub, draw 32% of UPS capacity at idle, and when compiling a kernel ... (wait for it while the test finishes...) 32% of UPS capacity again (yay for confusing and possibly unreliable tests.)

I have an APC Back-UPS ES 350, which has a 200W peak capacity, so 200W*32% = 64W. Let's say the cable modem and hub together draw 14W, which is not unreasonable, then the computer itself draws 50W.

Now, power is included in my utilities, but let's see how much this'd cost if it weren't. I live in Westwood, Los Angeles, CA and here LADWP wants .07288 dollars / KWh (http://www.ladwp.com/ladwp/cms/ladwp001710.jsp) for residential service (which is the most expensive.) The server's on 24/7 all year, so 24 hours/day * 365 days/year * 64W * .07288 cents / KWh = $40/year.

Now, the server was free and so discounting all the time I spent installing and configuring Gentoo Linux on it, its cost is essentially $40/year until something breaks.

Let's say I wanted to get a simple Linksys router to do NAT and firewalling (whilst the server will also crunch numbers, serve pages, store photos and music, and so on...), and I pick the WRT54G which goes for around $60 on Froogle and ignore shipping costs. The spec sheet (ftp://ftp.linksys.com/datasheet/wrt54gv2_ds.pdf) says it draws 12W, but we know its going through a powerbrick and those can be pretty inefficient, so let's assume it really draws 15W +/- 5W at the plug. Now then, its total cost is $60 + $9/year +/- $3/year.

The Almighty Buck Wants to Know: when will the standalone unit be worth it? Well, the break-even point will come when their costs will be equal over time, so at 40 dollars / year * x years = 60 dollars + 9 dollars / year * x years, the standalone will start saving me money in about 2 years. It turns out that because of the high per year cost of the server, the relatively small variations in the cost of the standalone per year are pretty much irrelevant.

OK, this has been pretty exhausting, but let's consider some more possibilities:
1. If the Linksys was made in China, what were the environmental costs of manufacturing it? Of obtaining the plastics necessary to make it? Pretty much everything is cheaper in China, so what'd the cost of the unit be if it were made in the US or EU?
1b. If I couldn't get the unit made in China, would it still be worth it to buy it? I'd guess that it might take quite a few more years for it to be worth it.
2. What if the power brick dies in a year or two? Maybe the warranty's only a year and I'll have to get a whole new unit.

Now, this is all fine and dandy, so yeah, it looks like the Linksys'd be the way to go if all I wanted was NAT/firewall/routing, but here are two more points:

1. I have an older 486 that probably draws half as much as the PIII. It now takes 4 years for the investment to pay off, and that's a long time when you're 24 like I am.
2. I pay ~$500 / month in rent; these costs we're talking about minimizing are really pretty insignificant compared to the cost of living. Right about half my budget goes into rent.

According to this page on the LA DWP's site, only 10% of the DWP's power comes from "large hydroelectric" sources. Even if Hoover Dam is the only such source, that's nothing like "Most of DWP's power".

Flickering depends on the type of ballast that's being used to drive the flourescent light:

Ballasts are electrical devices that convert line current into the proper voltage, amperage, and waveform to operate fluorescent lamps. The mix of ballasts has been shifting steadily toward more efficient equipment over the past 10 years. High-efficiency electronic ballasts now represent just over half of new ballast sales in the U.S. and are expected to continue to grow in market share. Electronic ballasts are the best choice in most applications today, both as replacements for magnetic ballasts in existing fixtures and in new installations.

There are two basic categories of full-size fluorescent ballasts ( Figure 1 shows both types).

Magnetic ballasts provide output power to the lamp at line frequency (60 cycles per second in North America and 50 cycles per second in many other regions of the world).

Electronic ballasts use semiconductor technology to convert incoming 60-cycle power to drive the lamps with high-frequency current of 20,000 cycles per second or more. Electronic ballasts are more efficient in a number of ways. Most notably, they waste less power internally than magnetic ballasts, saving 3 to 8 watts per ballast. Their higher frequency drives lamps about 10 percent more efficiently than do 60-cycle magnetic ballasts. And those electronic ballasts with dimming capability save energy in multiple ways, from lumen compensation that eliminates the need to overlight spaces when the lamps are new to the tens of percentage points in savings that come from reducing electric light levels when daylight is available.

- http://www.ladwp.com/energyadvisor/EA -12.html

Flickering depends on the type of ballast that's being used to drive the flourescent light:

Ballasts are electrical devices that convert line current into the proper voltage, amperage, and waveform to operate fluorescent lamps. The mix of ballasts has been shifting steadily toward more efficient equipment over the past 10 years. High-efficiency electronic ballasts now represent just over half of new ballast sales in the U.S. and are expected to continue to grow in market share. Electronic ballasts are the best choice in most applications today, both as replacements for magnetic ballasts in existing fixtures and in new installations.

There are two basic categories of full-size fluorescent ballasts ( Figure 1 shows both types).

Magnetic ballasts provide output power to the lamp at line frequency (60 cycles per second in North America and 50 cycles per second in many other regions of the world).

Electronic ballasts use semiconductor technology to convert incoming 60-cycle power to drive the lamps with high-frequency current of 20,000 cycles per second or more. Electronic ballasts are more efficient in a number of ways. Most notably, they waste less power internally than magnetic ballasts, saving 3 to 8 watts per ballast. Their higher frequency drives lamps about 10 percent more efficiently than do 60-cycle magnetic ballasts. And those electronic ballasts with dimming capability save energy in multiple ways, from lumen compensation that eliminates the need to overlight spaces when the lamps are new to the tens of percentage points in savings that come from reducing electric light levels when daylight is available.

- http://www.ladwp.com/energyadvisor/EA -12.html

I presume that this was the case in the UK (by your address and the term "rails"), but I don't think it was ever the case in the US. There were company imposed restrictions on what "official" equipment could be hooked up to phone lines, but those have long since been removed.

WHOA! Sorry dude, you still need approval under certain circumstances. Quoting:

Rules:
Governing Water and Electric Service November 1996
Los Angeles Department of Water and Power As Established September 4, 1983 and Amended by Resolution
PART 2-E DESCRIPTION OF ELECTRIC SERVICE
D. Alternating Current
Frequency, Voltage, and Phase
Single-phase loads with a service ampacity of 600 amperes or less at 240/120 volts normally will be supplied through one main meter. Where such service ampacity is in excess of 600 amperes, approval must be obtained from the Department regarding metering requirements and related facilities, including switches and circuits.

(1) Any single-phase motor having locked-rotor current not exceeding 46 amperes, and full-load running current not exceeding 12 amperes, may be operated at 120 volts.
(2) Single-phase, 240-volt motors installed for residential air conditioning shall be limited so that the arithmetical sum of the locked rotor currents of all motors in a particular unit shall not exceed 450 percent of the similar sum of full-load currents nor a total of 150 amperes.
(3) Single-phase motors of five hp or more may be connected to a service supplying lighting only upon special permission from, and in the manner specified by, the Department.
Single-phase commercial cooking and heating loads and other miscellaneous single-phase power loads may, at the option of the Department, be supplied through a three-phase service at 240 volts. However, approval for such service shall be obtained in advance if none of the individual loads to be supplied is three-phase.

Just when you thought it was all under control.....
......The latest elements in the EMC Compliance requirement.
In order to limit the ever increasing harmonic distortion imposed on the public mains supply the Harmonics and Flicker standards are to be introduced.
As from Jan 1st 2001, compliance with these Harmonics and Flicker standards becomes a mandatory part of the EMC Directive.
This applies to all products within the scope of these standards.

LA's got cheaper real estate, cheaper cost of living, and plenty of qualified geeks looking for work since it seems all the studios are cleaning house on their Interactive Media divisions.

Come to LA, where you can run your servers 24-7 without risk! Who gives a fat rats ass if you run SETI on all the workstations after 5pm? We got POWER, bay-bee! Los Angeles is power self-sufficient and is even selling power to PG&E and SCE! Oh yeah, if you don't like the City of Los Angeles' business tax regs, Burbank and Glendale also have municipal utilities that supply 100% of their own power needs!

Brought to you by the committee to uplift the LA Geek Community.

----
http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!

My take on this is that CA massively fucked up deregulation, by establishing perverse incentives to reduce capacity and/or manipulate pricing, combined with strong disincentives to establish new capacity. The ISO is trying mightily to keep the network running, but customers are getting crappy service.

I'm a pretty serious capitalist, but I must say that the LA Dept. of Water and Power is looking pretty good right now (their role in Tank Girl notwithstanding!)