1. Install TLS-enabled SMTP daemons to "opportunistically" encrypt as much email as possible. 2. Use PGP/GPG when practical 3. Use SSH for all remote accesses and file transfers (aren't you already?) 4. Install and use IPSEC (e.g., FreeSWAN) if possible 5. If you use IMAP or POP, install SSL-encrypted versions of their clients and servers 6. Set up your own SMTP servers (with TLS enabled) instead of relying on your ISP's servers 7. Support https on all your web servers, even for open data.
And anything else that will help make the encrypted haystack just a little bigger.
My letter to Zittrain
on
SSSCA Editorials
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2002 00:41:38 -0800 From: Phil Karn To: zittrain@law.harvard.edu Subject: Your NYT editorial Reply-to: karn@ka9q.net
Jonathan,
I was very interested to read your editorial on the SSSCA in the New York Times. I strongly oppose the SSSCA, so I certainly agree with your points about how much useful innovation has come from the openness of the personal computer.
But I think you severely damage your own argument with statements like this:
Users may buy a trusted PC even if it won't show a digital video lent
by a friend, because it will act less like a temperamental computer
and more like a crash-free super-VCR ?
There is absolutely no reason to believe that a "closed" PC architecture would be any more reliable than an open one. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence for exactly the opposite. If openness implies unreliability, then why is Linux so stable while Windows constantly crashes? Why is Linux so rarely affected by worms and viruses while many thousands of Windows machines are still trying to propagate countless variations of the Code Red email worm?
By tempting consumers frustrated with unreliable Microsoft software with the false promise of "reliability", you are playing right into the hands of those who promote the SSSCA.
Regards,
Phil Karn
Re:So when it broke the first time...
on
Hack in Space
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Yup. Believe it or not, spacecraft do have fuses. Obviously they can't be replaced when they blow, but by blowing they can isolate a failed module that might otherwise kill the entire spacecraft.
Did the researchers control for sleep apnea and other common sleep disorders in their studies? Untreated, sleep apnea causes people to sleep much longer than normal and can also cause heart attacks. Perhaps the long-sleepers who died young were simply suffering from sleep apnea?
Actually, "marine" or "deep cycle" batteries and regular car starting batteries store roughly equal energy per unit weight, as they're both based on the same lead-acid chemistry. Typical wet-cell batteries hold about 48 Wh/kg.
The difference is in the construction of the plates. Car starting batteries have thin plates that maximize surface area and hence the peak power they can produce for a short time when fully charged. But repeated deep (full) discharging of a car starting battery will quickly destroy it, so you don't want to pull out that full 48 Wh/kg unless it's a real emergency.
Deep cycle batteries have thicker plates to tolerate repeated deep discharging. That lets you pull out a greater percentage of the battery's stored energy at the expense of not being able to do it as quickly as with a starting battery.
There's another possibility. Lead-acid batteries exhibit a phenomenon called the "coup de Fouet" (French for "crack of the whip"). When you start to discharge a fully charged Pb-A battery, the terminal voltage initially drops and then recovers after a few percent of the battery's capacity has been discharged. The voltage then resumes a slow decline as the battery discharges further.
This is not necessarily what's going on, but I thought I'd mention it. It's even more likely that the external batteries were mostly discharged, and connecting them to the device simply allowed them to be topped off by some fully charged batteries hidden inside the device. The open-terminal voltage of a healthy, charged "48V" Pb-A pack at room temperature is typically 52-53V, and an external pack voltage of 48.9V would indicate a pack that was mostly discharged (or had some weak cells). Parallel it with a fully charged pack inside the device at 52-53V, and it would be entirely reasonable to expect enough charge to transfer from the internal pack to the external one to bring the latter's terminal voltage up to the 51V range.
Judging from the size and shape of the device and its reported performance, I think it quite reasonable to file this "invention" in the "hidden battery" subcategory of perpetual motion frauds.
No, the digits of Pi are not a source of "practically random" data, because I can represent them with the expression "pi".
To be random, a sequence has to be completely unpredictable and expressible in nothing less than the sequence itself. That's why compressing truly random data is impossible.
I am a Cornell grad, and in fact H.C. Torng was my undergraduate advisor for much of that time.
I guess the next time somebody from Cornell calls asking for money, I'll have to say that they obviously don't need mine given how much they have lying around to throw at lawyers instead of teaching facilities.
I've also had failures in both the IBM 60GB and the 76GB models. IBM replaced the 60GB unit, but I never put it back into service as I had already replaced it with a new IBM 76GB drive. And then it too started to fail in the very same way!
The symptoms were the same in both cases. Bad spots first appeared in a few sectors. The problem didn't seem to spread very quickly, but I've learned the hard way to take immediate action when this sort of thing happens.
After pulling the faulty 60GB drive, I ran IBM's disk diagnostic utility. It confirmed the error, so I allowed it to clear the disk. Then it checked clean. That worked OK for a while, then some errors recurred. At that point, I got an RMA and shipped it back to IBM.
I'm now at the same point with the 76GB drive, although instead of shipping it back to IBM I simply set it aside and replaced it with a pair of Western Digital 100GBs in a software RAID-1 configuration. Hopefully now I can sleep a little better.
The real irony? I originally bought IBM (and paid a premium) specifically because they seemed to have a reputation for reliability. Sigh.
How about SSH? It's already one of the most widely used encryption packages out there, second only to the SSL-equipped web browser. It's so easy to install and so utterly transparent to use that there's no excuse for it not to be in universal use on BSD/UNIX/Linux systems.
No, they don't. Most of Green Mountain's power is bought from independent suppliers who are already fully dispatched. Most of these are wind turbines; very little is solar.
Personally, I think you're better off taking the premium you'd spend on Green Mountain and investing it in your own PV or wind system. Then you don't have to subsidize their annoying ad campaign.
You say that's not nearly enough money to buy a meaningful PV system? Well, that should tell you something.
Actually, time-of-use (TOU) meters have been around for some time, and SDG&E is on record as favoring their widespread use. I have one on my house, which features both an EV charger and a grid tied photovoltaic system.
Under the SDG&E EV-TOU-2 tariff, there are three rate periods. In the summer, I sell a lot of electricity in the afternoon when the sun is shining and I'm away from home, and I get top dollar for it. I then apply that to the power I buy at night at a lower rate. This turns the grid into a "battery" that is more than 100% efficient.
These meters do have drawbacks. The main one is that the rates are still based on monthly averages, albeit three rather than one. We need "interval" meters, where every 15 minute period throughout the month has its own rate. These are common for large businesses. And we also need cheap and reliable controllers that will automatically cut off home appliances when the real-time prices exceed some homeowner-specified limit.
My PV system also has batteries, and on occasion the difference between on and off-peak rates does get large enough for battery selling to make economic sense. Bear in mind that the rate difference must cover not only the energy losses in the system, but also battery wear. For my commodity golf-cart batteries I estimate depreciation at about $0.12/kWh. This is a lot, but occasionally the rates do justify it. Unfortunately I don't have an easy way to automate this yet.
Even more unfortunately, the PX prices for the past few days have been right at the $250/MWh price cap for every hour of the day! We didn't see that even last summer, and it tends to make battery selling a losing prospect again.
All of the commercial inverters designed for grid-tie operation have numerous safety features designed to avoid feeding power back into a dead grid. IEEE 929 and a new UL standard, UL 1741, document the requirements.
Basically, the inverter will automatically disconnect from the grid when any of the following things happen:
Inverter overload (which would happen if you tried to power your whole neighborhood).
Grid voltage above or below a nominal range
of 106-132 VAC.
Grid frequency outside a nominal range of 59.3-60.5 Hz.
When power comes back, the inverters wait until it has been stable for a while (5 minutes under UL 1741) before going online.
The utilities' big fear (real or not) is "islanding", where one or more inverters continue to power a neighborhood because the load is within their capacity. Sometimes they hold up rather contrived examples of induction motors acting as electrical flywheels, regulating frequency and voltage and preventing these mechanisms from working.
If distributed generation ever becomes widespread, I think these rules will have to be revisited and better control mechanisms implemented. In an underfrequency situation (when the rotary generators are slowing down because of overload, with grid collapse imminent), the very last thing you want is to trip a good chunk of your generating capacity just because it uses one of these inverters.
Indeed, many blackouts (such as the big one in San Francisco) involved generator underfrequency trips. Most utilities now trip their loads automatically in underfrequency conditions to try to stablize the grid as a whole.
Anyone in California with a power monitor might want to log the grid frequency over the next few days, just in case. Just make sure you have a UPS on the monitor...
Chernobyl is a design that would never have been allowed in the US. Just look at the differences:
Chernobyl has no containment building. Western reactors all have massive steel/concrete containments.
The Chernobyl design uses graphite moderation because the Soviets' plants were used to produce plutonium-239 for weapons as well as to generate electricity. This particular design has a "positive void coefficient" that causes it to be highly unstable at low power levels. When steam voids form, the reactor power goes up, making the problem worse. This is exactly how the accident happened.
This behavior was well known to the reactor designers, who understood it and wrote rules to avoid these unstable operating regimes. Unfortunately, it was a surprise to the reactor operators who were conducting an unauthorized test at the time.
Western power reactors don't breed weapons-grade plutonium. (They do produce plutonium, but it's not weapons-grade. It's contaminated with heavier isotopes -- above 239 -- that make it useless for weapons.) So they can use water moderators, and this completely avoids the positive void coefficient problem. If a void does form, moderation is lost and reactor power decreases automatically.
The analogy to the Ford Pinto is an apt one, but it's not nearly strong enough. Not only did the "Chernobyl Pinto" have an unprotected gas tank, it lacked seat belts. And the brakes didn't work at low speeds. Hitting the brake pedal instead gunned the engine to several hundred times its normal full-power rating and caused the steering wheel to fall off.
Yup, it's really true. I'd been hearing that 97% figure from the California Air Resources Board ever since I got interested in EVs, so I eventually did my own calculation. The results are on my web site. I show that the precise numbers depend on the specific pollutant in question (e.g., carbon monoxide is reduced by 99.9% while sulfur dioxide is reduced by "only" about 95%). But the 97% figure is a good rule of thumb. That's based on the current mix of electric power generation in California. Last I looked, nuclear was about 16% of the total. (Personally, I wish it were more.)
The electric car I used for comparison is the
GM EV1. This is not a "tiny little car crawling along at 5 mph"; it's a sports car that does 0-60 in under 8 seconds, with a top end of 80mph. I use mine for nearly all of my driving.
As for EVs making more power available for other uses, I tried to explain that in my first note. Here's an example. Suppose that by driving an EV1 for 100 miles I cause a generating plant to emit 2.8 grams of nitrogen oxides. If I had driven those 100 miles in an average gasoline car, I would have emitted 249 grams of nitrogen oxides, nearly 100 times as much. Now suppose I could sell that emission "credit" to the power plant operators. That would let them produce nearly 100 times as much energy as it would take to charge my car.
This is not just an abstract idea. There are power plants shut down right now because they have run out of nitrogen oxide emission credits.
The motor & inverter in my 1999 Gen II NiMH GM EV1 is something more like 90+% efficient. Transmission from power plant to my home is more like 95% efficient.
The actual measurements I've conducted on my EV1 show an AC energy consumption of about 400 Wh/mile, with hilly (San Diego) driving and frequent use of the electric windshield defogger.
To the extent that the electricity shortages are caused by emissions limits on power plants, the greater use of EVs could significantly increase available electric power in the state. That's because the emissions of a power plant attributable to charging an EV are about 97% lower per mile than even late model gasoline cars.
The problem is inconsistent regulation. While power plants account for only a small fraction of emissions in the state, their total emissions are limited by regulation while those of cars (which produce far more of the total) are not. Sure, cars have to met per mile emissions limits, but there is no limit on how many cars can be in the state or how many miles/year people can drive them.
What we need is a way for individuals to get emission credits by driving EVs (or, more specifically, by not driving gasoline cars) and to sell them to the power plants.
The reason is not primarily environmental protests, but economics. Nuclear power plants have not been profitable to operate. The extreme complexity of the
systems makes them difficult and expensive to maintain, and they are often offline as a result. Also, the cost of constantly upgrading safety systems to the latest
standards was economically ruinous
Actually, the data I've seen (from the NRC) says that nuke plants are only slightly more expensive to run than coal plants. Nuclear operations and maintenance is considerably more expensive, but that is almost completely offset by the cheaper fuel.
The present system requires that power be sold at the highest price being offered by any
generator, no matter how inefficient or badly-run. If A is offering power at 10 cents per KWH and B is offering it at 25 cents per KWH, both A and B are paid 25 cents per KWH.
Not quite. Here's how the market actually works.
For each hour on each market ("day-ahead"
and "hour ahead"), the buyers and sellers submit bids. For each megawatt-hour, the buyers give the maximum they're willing to pay, and the sellers give the minimum they're willing to accept.
The buyer's bids are then sorted in descending price order, and the seller's bids are sorted in ascending price order. Cumulative supply and demand curves are drawn, and where they cross determines both the power level and the price for everybody in the state for that hour. (Actually, this happens only when the grid is not congested, but it usually is. In that case, secondary bidding takes place that causes the prices to diverge around the state depending on where the supply and demands are located.)
So it's not the case that the price is the highest one asked by any generator. Nor is it the lowest one offered by any user. It's somewhere in between.
In theory, generators have an incentive to not ask too high a price: if there is sufficient generation available elsewhere at a lower price to meet the load, none of the generators who ask a higher price will get any business.
Similarly, there's an incentive for a buyer to not bid too low, as he risks not getting his needs met.
The problem right now is just as it's been stated many times: supply is tight, so the generators can ask any price and get it.
And demand is extremely inelastic, meaning the buyers (the big distribution utilities) have to offer top dollar or risk not getting what they need.
And the generators are controlled by only a few entities, each of which has significant "market power". It is now entirely possible for a generating company who owns several plants to shut one down and allow the resulting price spike to increase his revenue from the remaining plants by more than the revenue lost from the plant that was shut down.
There are disturbing indications that this is exactly what is happening. State investigators tried to visit three plants that were shut down for "necessary maintenance". They were allowed into one, but were denied access to two others.
Yup. I expect people are going to start wondering if nuclear power is really so bad after all. It'll be in hushed and whispered tones at first, but sooner or later somebody famous will get up the courage to bring up the issue in a major forum.
As Churchill might have said, nuclear power is the absolute worst way to generate electricty... except for all the others.
The Home Power "guerilla solar" stuff is just plain silly. By reinforcing the image of alternative energy folks as lawbreaking extremists, it can only work against the growth of distributed generation. In California and many other states, the utilities are required to let you net meter. And the only "hoop" I had to jump through with SDG&E was to place a labeled disconnect switch for my PV system inverter near my breaker panel. Big deal.
Not quite. These fuel cells run on natural gas, and that too is in short supply in California. The price on my last SDG&E gas bill was above $1/therm, and everybody expects it to go much higher.
Except Shannon isn't physics, it's mathematics.
(The paper was titled "A Mathematical Theory of
Communication" -- emphasis added). Theories in physics are always
subject to revision based on new experimental
evidence, but theorems in mathematics remain proven forever; they hold as long as their basic
assumptions are true.
Nonsense. The EV1 passed NHTSA crash tests like any other car. It has crumple zones, seat belts and air bags. The PbA model uses absorbed glass mat (AGM) batteries -- nothing comes out even if you drill a hole in them.
EV1s have already been in a few collisions, and they've done pretty well at protecting their occupants and not exploding.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Install TLS-enabled SMTP daemons to "opportunistically" encrypt as much email as possible.
2. Use PGP/GPG when practical
3. Use SSH for all remote accesses and file transfers (aren't you already?)
4. Install and use IPSEC (e.g., FreeSWAN) if possible
5. If you use IMAP or POP, install SSL-encrypted versions of their clients and servers
6. Set up your own SMTP servers (with TLS enabled) instead of relying on your ISP's servers
7. Support https on all your web servers, even for open data.
And anything else that will help make the encrypted haystack just a little bigger.
Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2002 00:41:38 -0800
From: Phil Karn
To: zittrain@law.harvard.edu
Subject: Your NYT editorial
Reply-to: karn@ka9q.net
Jonathan,
I was very interested to read your editorial on the SSSCA in the New
York Times. I strongly oppose the SSSCA, so I certainly agree with
your points about how much useful innovation has come from the
openness of the personal computer.
But I think you severely damage your own argument with statements like
this:
Users may buy a trusted PC even if it won't show a digital video lent
by a friend, because it will act less like a temperamental computer
and more like a crash-free super-VCR ?
There is absolutely no reason to believe that a "closed" PC
architecture would be any more reliable than an open one. Indeed,
there is plenty of evidence for exactly the opposite. If openness
implies unreliability, then why is Linux so stable while Windows
constantly crashes? Why is Linux so rarely affected by worms and
viruses while many thousands of Windows machines are still trying to
propagate countless variations of the Code Red email worm?
By tempting consumers frustrated with unreliable Microsoft software
with the false promise of "reliability", you are playing right into
the hands of those who promote the SSSCA.
Regards,
Phil Karn
Yup. Believe it or not, spacecraft do have fuses. Obviously they can't be replaced when they blow, but by blowing they can isolate a failed module that might otherwise kill the entire spacecraft.
Did the researchers control for sleep apnea and other common sleep disorders in their studies? Untreated, sleep apnea causes people to sleep much longer than normal and can also cause heart attacks. Perhaps the long-sleepers who died young were simply suffering from sleep apnea?
The difference is in the construction of the plates. Car starting batteries have thin plates that maximize surface area and hence the peak power they can produce for a short time when fully charged. But repeated deep (full) discharging of a car starting battery will quickly destroy it, so you don't want to pull out that full 48 Wh/kg unless it's a real emergency.
Deep cycle batteries have thicker plates to tolerate repeated deep discharging. That lets you pull out a greater percentage of the battery's stored energy at the expense of not being able to do it as quickly as with a starting battery.
There's another possibility. Lead-acid batteries exhibit a phenomenon called the "coup de Fouet" (French for "crack of the whip"). When you start to discharge a fully charged Pb-A battery, the terminal voltage initially drops and then recovers after a few percent of the battery's capacity has been discharged. The voltage then resumes a slow decline as the battery discharges further.
This is not necessarily what's going on, but I thought I'd mention it. It's even more likely that the external batteries were mostly discharged, and connecting them to the device simply allowed them to be topped off by some fully charged batteries hidden inside the device. The open-terminal voltage of a healthy, charged "48V" Pb-A pack at room temperature is typically 52-53V, and an external pack voltage of 48.9V would indicate a pack that was mostly discharged (or had some weak cells). Parallel it with a fully charged pack inside the device at 52-53V, and it would be entirely reasonable to expect enough charge to transfer from the internal pack to the external one to bring the latter's terminal voltage up to the 51V range.
Judging from the size and shape of the device and its reported performance, I think it quite reasonable to file this "invention" in the "hidden battery" subcategory of perpetual motion frauds.
No, the digits of Pi are not a source of "practically random" data, because I can represent them with the expression "pi".
To be random, a sequence has to be completely unpredictable and expressible in nothing less than the sequence itself. That's why compressing truly random data is impossible.
Phil
I am a Cornell grad, and in fact H.C. Torng was my undergraduate advisor for much of that time.
I guess the next time somebody from Cornell calls asking for money, I'll have to say that they obviously don't need mine given how much they have lying around to throw at lawyers instead of teaching facilities.
Phil
The symptoms were the same in both cases. Bad spots first appeared in a few sectors. The problem didn't seem to spread very quickly, but I've learned the hard way to take immediate action when this sort of thing happens.
After pulling the faulty 60GB drive, I ran IBM's disk diagnostic utility. It confirmed the error, so I allowed it to clear the disk. Then it checked clean. That worked OK for a while, then some errors recurred. At that point, I got an RMA and shipped it back to IBM.
I'm now at the same point with the 76GB drive, although instead of shipping it back to IBM I simply set it aside and replaced it with a pair of Western Digital 100GBs in a software RAID-1 configuration. Hopefully now I can sleep a little better.
The real irony? I originally bought IBM (and paid a premium) specifically because they seemed to have a reputation for reliability. Sigh.
Phil
How about SSH? It's already one of the most widely used encryption packages out there, second only to the SSL-equipped web browser. It's so easy to install and so utterly transparent to use that there's no excuse for it not to be in universal use on BSD/UNIX/Linux systems.
Phil
How come you aren't in jail for fraud?
Personally, I think you're better off taking the premium you'd spend on Green Mountain and investing it in your own PV or wind system. Then you don't have to subsidize their annoying ad campaign.
You say that's not nearly enough money to buy a meaningful PV system? Well, that should tell you something.
During the evening hours yesterday, residential was their single largest chunk, accounting for nearly half of their total load.
Under the SDG&E EV-TOU-2 tariff, there are three rate periods. In the summer, I sell a lot of electricity in the afternoon when the sun is shining and I'm away from home, and I get top dollar for it. I then apply that to the power I buy at night at a lower rate. This turns the grid into a "battery" that is more than 100% efficient.
These meters do have drawbacks. The main one is that the rates are still based on monthly averages, albeit three rather than one. We need "interval" meters, where every 15 minute period throughout the month has its own rate. These are common for large businesses. And we also need cheap and reliable controllers that will automatically cut off home appliances when the real-time prices exceed some homeowner-specified limit.
My PV system also has batteries, and on occasion the difference between on and off-peak rates does get large enough for battery selling to make economic sense. Bear in mind that the rate difference must cover not only the energy losses in the system, but also battery wear. For my commodity golf-cart batteries I estimate depreciation at about $0.12/kWh. This is a lot, but occasionally the rates do justify it. Unfortunately I don't have an easy way to automate this yet.
Even more unfortunately, the PX prices for the past few days have been right at the $250/MWh price cap for every hour of the day! We didn't see that even last summer, and it tends to make battery selling a losing prospect again.
Basically, the inverter will automatically disconnect from the grid when any of the following things happen:
Inverter overload (which would happen if you tried to power your whole neighborhood).
Grid voltage above or below a nominal range of 106-132 VAC.
Grid frequency outside a nominal range of 59.3-60.5 Hz.
When power comes back, the inverters wait until it has been stable for a while (5 minutes under UL 1741) before going online.
The utilities' big fear (real or not) is "islanding", where one or more inverters continue to power a neighborhood because the load is within their capacity. Sometimes they hold up rather contrived examples of induction motors acting as electrical flywheels, regulating frequency and voltage and preventing these mechanisms from working.
If distributed generation ever becomes widespread, I think these rules will have to be revisited and better control mechanisms implemented. In an underfrequency situation (when the rotary generators are slowing down because of overload, with grid collapse imminent), the very last thing you want is to trip a good chunk of your generating capacity just because it uses one of these inverters.
Indeed, many blackouts (such as the big one in San Francisco) involved generator underfrequency trips. Most utilities now trip their loads automatically in underfrequency conditions to try to stablize the grid as a whole. Anyone in California with a power monitor might want to log the grid frequency over the next few days, just in case. Just make sure you have a UPS on the monitor...
Chernobyl has no containment building. Western reactors all have massive steel/concrete containments.
The Chernobyl design uses graphite moderation because the Soviets' plants were used to produce plutonium-239 for weapons as well as to generate electricity. This particular design has a "positive void coefficient" that causes it to be highly unstable at low power levels. When steam voids form, the reactor power goes up, making the problem worse. This is exactly how the accident happened.
This behavior was well known to the reactor designers, who understood it and wrote rules to avoid these unstable operating regimes. Unfortunately, it was a surprise to the reactor operators who were conducting an unauthorized test at the time.
Western power reactors don't breed weapons-grade plutonium. (They do produce plutonium, but it's not weapons-grade. It's contaminated with heavier isotopes -- above 239 -- that make it useless for weapons.) So they can use water moderators, and this completely avoids the positive void coefficient problem. If a void does form, moderation is lost and reactor power decreases automatically.
The analogy to the Ford Pinto is an apt one, but it's not nearly strong enough. Not only did the "Chernobyl Pinto" have an unprotected gas tank, it lacked seat belts. And the brakes didn't work at low speeds. Hitting the brake pedal instead gunned the engine to several hundred times its normal full-power rating and caused the steering wheel to fall off.
The electric car I used for comparison is the GM EV1. This is not a "tiny little car crawling along at 5 mph"; it's a sports car that does 0-60 in under 8 seconds, with a top end of 80mph. I use mine for nearly all of my driving.
As for EVs making more power available for other uses, I tried to explain that in my first note. Here's an example. Suppose that by driving an EV1 for 100 miles I cause a generating plant to emit 2.8 grams of nitrogen oxides. If I had driven those 100 miles in an average gasoline car, I would have emitted 249 grams of nitrogen oxides, nearly 100 times as much. Now suppose I could sell that emission "credit" to the power plant operators. That would let them produce nearly 100 times as much energy as it would take to charge my car.
This is not just an abstract idea. There are power plants shut down right now because they have run out of nitrogen oxide emission credits.
The motor & inverter in my 1999 Gen II NiMH GM EV1 is something more like 90+% efficient. Transmission from power plant to my home is more like 95% efficient. The actual measurements I've conducted on my EV1 show an AC energy consumption of about 400 Wh/mile, with hilly (San Diego) driving and frequent use of the electric windshield defogger.
To the extent that the electricity shortages are caused by emissions limits on power plants, the greater use of EVs could significantly increase available electric power in the state. That's because the emissions of a power plant attributable to charging an EV are about 97% lower per mile than even late model gasoline cars.
The problem is inconsistent regulation. While power plants account for only a small fraction of emissions in the state, their total emissions are limited by regulation while those of cars (which produce far more of the total) are not. Sure, cars have to met per mile emissions limits, but there is no limit on how many cars can be in the state or how many miles/year people can drive them.
What we need is a way for individuals to get emission credits by driving EVs (or, more specifically, by not driving gasoline cars) and to sell them to the power plants.
Actually, the data I've seen (from the NRC) says that nuke plants are only slightly more expensive to run than coal plants. Nuclear operations and maintenance is considerably more expensive, but that is almost completely offset by the cheaper fuel.
Not quite. Here's how the market actually works.
For each hour on each market ("day-ahead" and "hour ahead"), the buyers and sellers submit bids. For each megawatt-hour, the buyers give the maximum they're willing to pay, and the sellers give the minimum they're willing to accept.
The buyer's bids are then sorted in descending price order, and the seller's bids are sorted in ascending price order. Cumulative supply and demand curves are drawn, and where they cross determines both the power level and the price for everybody in the state for that hour. (Actually, this happens only when the grid is not congested, but it usually is. In that case, secondary bidding takes place that causes the prices to diverge around the state depending on where the supply and demands are located.)
So it's not the case that the price is the highest one asked by any generator. Nor is it the lowest one offered by any user. It's somewhere in between.
In theory, generators have an incentive to not ask too high a price: if there is sufficient generation available elsewhere at a lower price to meet the load, none of the generators who ask a higher price will get any business. Similarly, there's an incentive for a buyer to not bid too low, as he risks not getting his needs met.
The problem right now is just as it's been stated many times: supply is tight, so the generators can ask any price and get it. And demand is extremely inelastic, meaning the buyers (the big distribution utilities) have to offer top dollar or risk not getting what they need.
And the generators are controlled by only a few entities, each of which has significant "market power". It is now entirely possible for a generating company who owns several plants to shut one down and allow the resulting price spike to increase his revenue from the remaining plants by more than the revenue lost from the plant that was shut down.
There are disturbing indications that this is exactly what is happening. State investigators tried to visit three plants that were shut down for "necessary maintenance". They were allowed into one, but were denied access to two others.
As Churchill might have said, nuclear power is the absolute worst way to generate electricty... except for all the others.
The Home Power "guerilla solar" stuff is just plain silly. By reinforcing the image of alternative energy folks as lawbreaking extremists, it can only work against the growth of distributed generation. In California and many other states, the utilities are required to let you net meter. And the only "hoop" I had to jump through with SDG&E was to place a labeled disconnect switch for my PV system inverter near my breaker panel. Big deal.
Not quite. These fuel cells run on natural gas, and that too is in short supply in California. The price on my last SDG&E gas bill was above $1/therm, and everybody expects it to go much higher.
Except Shannon isn't physics, it's mathematics. (The paper was titled "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" -- emphasis added). Theories in physics are always subject to revision based on new experimental evidence, but theorems in mathematics remain proven forever; they hold as long as their basic assumptions are true.
EV1s have already been in a few collisions, and they've done pretty well at protecting their occupants and not exploding.