The USA federal government offers up to a $2000 tax credit (and for any meaningful solar PV system you are likely to qualify for the full amount).
Some states also offer incentives. I live in California where the rebate was at $2.60 per installed watt (which is enough to cover roughly a third of the total installed price) last year. They've messed with the rules this year to base it on actual power generated, rather than expected energy output... but it is still a pretty hefty chunk of change.
While some might think that this goes against the usual USA plan of tax breaks for Hummers, it still fits in with the Republican philosophy of tax breaks for the rich... only home owners with enough spare cash (or borrowing capacity) can take advantage.
The local utility (Pacific Gas & Electric) here in California runs a "Net metering" system where they will credit you for the cost of surplus power when you have it... but they reconcile the books each year on the anniversary of the system installation. If at that point you owe them money, then you have to pay. If they owe you money, well tough luck for you. You can't even use any excess balance to cover non-power related monthly charges (meter reading etc.).
This has several effects on the economies of solar installation:
1) If your goal is simply to make a large reduction in your power bill, then you can install a system that across a year will generate a large percentage of your energy. There is no need to pay for a storage system (batteries, or as in the article an electrolysis system with hydrogen storage tanks and fuel cells). You can simply rely on running the meter backwards on sunny summer days when you have excess power, and running in forwards at night and in the winter. From the point of view of you the user, this is 100% efficient storage of power (as opposed to batteries, fuel cells etc. which will have some losses, so you'll need a larger solar grid to generate enough extra power to cover those losses).
2) It does not make short term[1] economic sense to get completely off the grid. The first few hundred kWh each month (at what they call the "baseline" rate) are cheap enough that solar is not competitive today). Predicting your exact energy requirements across a year sounds hard, and if you install too much capacity, you get no direct economic benefit from the excess capacity. Allegedly in the next year or so there should be good LED light-bulbs that will radically reduce energy needs for domestic lighting. OLED big screen TVs will be hugely more energy efficient that plasma screens. Compueters are using less power in newer processors. Etc. So the right amount of capacity today might be too much in the near future.
My solar PV install was attached to the grid in November last year. The installers predict that it will cover its after-rebate cost in about eleven years. http://solar.sippelhouse.com/ for some graphs of how it is performing.
[1] If Al Gore is right, the long term value will be higher... but only if enough other people also do this.
DoofusOfDeath wrote:
"so that we don't have to wrestle with companies like nVidia (ok, Intel) or ATI (ok, AMD) to get decent open-source drivers"
Yes AMD bought ATI, and so far I haven't seen any change in their policies w.r.t. open source drivers.
Contrary to all the rumours after the AMD/ATI merger, Intel still haven't bought nVidia, so I don't understand the parenthetical "ok, Intel" after nVidia.
Intel are releasing open source drivers for their graphics chips http://intellinuxgraphics.org/ (and have been for some time now).
"The pages are generally exact replicas of the original web page and generally pull graphics (*.jpg, *.gif, etc.) from the legitimate web site."
The owners of the original sites should regularly rename the real image files, and replace the old files with images that would help inform the potential victim that they were on a scam site.
Next step is that the phishers no longer link to the image files, but copy them instead... but this gives the real site owner another legal tool (copyright infringement) to shut down the phishing site plus a clear legal path to extract money from the phisher.
So this was a great idea by SFLC to remind the Supreme Court that
the larger issue of whether software should be allowed to be patented at all,
but it is a very long shot. Chief Justice Roberts is on record as saying that
he prefers to keep rulings as narrow as possible:
"If it is not necessary to decide more to dispose of a case, in my view it is necessary not to decide more."
Slashdot Mirror
Some states also offer incentives. I live in California where the rebate was at $2.60 per installed watt (which is enough to cover roughly a third of the total installed price) last year. They've messed with the rules this year to base it on actual power generated, rather than expected energy output ... but it is still a pretty hefty chunk of change.
While some might think that this goes against the usual USA plan of tax breaks for Hummers, it still fits in with the Republican philosophy of tax breaks for the rich ... only home owners with enough spare cash (or borrowing capacity) can take advantage.
This has several effects on the economies of solar installation:
1) If your goal is simply to make a large reduction in your power bill, then you can install a system that across a year will generate a large percentage of your energy. There is no need to pay for a storage system (batteries, or as in the article an electrolysis system with hydrogen storage tanks and fuel cells). You can simply rely on running the meter backwards on sunny summer days when you have excess power, and running in forwards at night and in the winter. From the point of view of you the user, this is 100% efficient storage of power (as opposed to batteries, fuel cells etc. which will have some losses, so you'll need a larger solar grid to generate enough extra power to cover those losses).
2) It does not make short term[1] economic sense to get completely off the grid. The first few hundred kWh each month (at what they call the "baseline" rate) are cheap enough that solar is not competitive today). Predicting your exact energy requirements across a year sounds hard, and if you install too much capacity, you get no direct economic benefit from the excess capacity. Allegedly in the next year or so there should be good LED light-bulbs that will radically reduce energy needs for domestic lighting. OLED big screen TVs will be hugely more energy efficient that plasma screens. Compueters are using less power in newer processors. Etc. So the right amount of capacity today might be too much in the near future.
My solar PV install was attached to the grid in November last year. The installers predict that it will cover its after-rebate cost in about eleven years. http://solar.sippelhouse.com/ for some graphs of how it is performing.
[1] If Al Gore is right, the long term value will be higher ... but only if enough other people also do this.
"so that we don't have to wrestle with companies like nVidia (ok, Intel) or ATI (ok, AMD) to get decent open-source drivers"
Yes AMD bought ATI, and so far I haven't seen any change in their policies w.r.t. open source drivers.
Contrary to all the rumours after the AMD/ATI merger, Intel still haven't bought nVidia, so I don't understand the parenthetical "ok, Intel" after nVidia.
Intel are releasing open source drivers for their graphics chips http://intellinuxgraphics.org/ (and have been for some time now).
The owners of the original sites should regularly rename the real image files, and replace the old files with images that would help inform the potential victim that they were on a scam site.
Next step is that the phishers no longer link to the image files, but copy them instead ... but this gives the real site owner another legal tool (copyright infringement) to shut down the phishing site plus a clear legal path to extract money from the phisher.
"If it is not necessary to decide more to dispose of a case, in my view it is necessary not to decide more."
See more of his philosophy at http://www.economist.com/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story _id=8413080
So, while it would be nice to see the Supreme Court invalidate software patents, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for them to do so.
BCPL was one of the sources of inspiration for the programming language 'B', and its successor 'C'. Next in the series ought to be 'P'.
Two of the products on the list run Linux ... isn't that open source?