Heck, Diebold even did this as a method of programming - you ask for election results it'd pull from a different(duplicate) data set than if you pulled for a specific district or region.
There are so many reasons that I want votes to be on human readable paper ballots for recount purposes. Use the machine to help make the vote if you must, but the paper is the final authority.
Machine breaks? Unload the ballots and hand out #2 pencils.
Better possibility: Absentee ballots are often filed with the assistance of political operatives working on behalf of the candidate or party. Rawl had such assistance, Green did not.
Also a possibility, thanks.
Given reports about Green, you would expect that anything north of 3% of the vote would be a surprising result.
Maybe 'party assisted votes' are less in number than you think?
The widespread ignorance of the race in the electorate at the time of the election (e.g. the party candidate having less than 5% name recognition) parallels a problem with down-card elections. We vote for our judges, but really now, who knows anything about these candidates.
Yeah, the big problem here for the party was that Rawl apparently didn't campaign at all. On Judges - in my area the voting is only to confirm their continued employment, and it takes a judge behaving very badly to lose that.
The example you gave, of a 50% false positive rate, indicates a totally useless test. But if we can take for granted TFA's assertion that the test has a 10% false positive rate, it provides very useful information in cases under suspicion.
I don't know; A rape exam with a 50% false positive rate isn't much good. On the other hand, I can see a test with a 50% FP rate being useful if it's also got a near 0% false negative rate and is essentially free to perform.
Effective cost of a test = Cost/(FalsePositiveRate*FalseNegativeRate)
but it *is* strong enough to motivate an investigation to search for method, motive, and opportunity.
For one thing, if we can't figure out how they jiggered it, a determination of jiggering doesn't do much good in fixing the problem.
Well, I could see doing more security/sanity checks on psychologists before you let them practice; perhaps even before we start teaching them how to bend minds.
Still, such people are actually pretty rare. My doc wasn't terrible by any means. I went because my parents wanted me to - I was, and still am, an extreme introvert.
Oh, and psychologists are a symptom of us actually taking MORE care of it's members; previously we often shunned or even killed those who were mentally ill.
At 44 cents per 'megawatt-hour', that's 44 cents per 'thousand kwh', or.044 cents per kwh. Eliminating the subsidies would raise my ~$100/month electric bill by 44 cents.
It's just not that significant, on the scale of things.
While an 11 point swing is interesting, it's not the smoking gun that TFA makes it out to be - absentee ballots are not an independent sample of an electorate. They're well known to have statistically different compositions than the general populace, in various ways.
Possibilities off the top of my head:
1. Wealthier - they're traveling 2. Military - stationed outside the state 3. More politically motivated - they're outside their area; actually willing to go through the hassle of voting absentee 4. More likely to hit the websites up over the election?
But if you're interested in one *particular* campaign, because that campaign has other irregularities which indicate possible fraud, then a statistical test with a 10% P-value is worthy of note.
I'm still hesitant, because of some of my readings on forensic evidence. Basically, they were cherry picking who they tested, they made a test look more infallible than it actually was, suppressing knowledge of false positives. The specific one I remember involved 'penetration exams' on minors, used to send dozens of suspected child rapists to prison. Thing is, when they finally got around to performing the examination test on children with no suspicion of rape; something like 50% came up positive. Then they found about created memories and that one psychologist who was messed up herself and basically considered ALL fathers child molesters, who proceeded to mess up kids to get them to testify against daddy.
I'm not saying whether this campaign was tampered with or not. I'm for good science. Given the description of the test, it may be a good indicator of whether you need to investigate further. But until they have a testable theory of how the election was tampered with, or at least more evidence, I hesitate to call it jiggered.
I heard it on NPR when they were talking about this story.
As physicsphairy mentioned, the percentages vary wildly; basically, the less knowledgeable/caring a person is about a particular election, the more likely they are to vote for the first name on the list. And it also mostly shows up in elections where they can't go 'party line' off of the sheet.
POTUS? They generally know. State Rep, for the party that's 95% likely to lose the ultimate election? That's a bit different.
a few US companies might lose their monopolies is stupid.
Who says they have monopolies NOW? I think there's two issues here: 1. Due to loss of US competetion, certain products HAVE to be sourced from foreign countries; without the US contendor we have to deal with increased costs and waits. 2. Due to loss of US competition, we 'miss out' on a upcoming technological field. That means that we're out of the running, money going out of the USA, lower economy, etc...
If they want the US to look into alternative energy try getting the government to sign and ratify the Kyoto Protocol.
You mean the one where basically none of the countries with serious goals under it are compliant?
. Just the 7 listed on the front page have a combined equity of around $400 billion and yet they aren't willing to use that to fund it themselves.
Do they really have that equity? Is it tied up in their current business?
Personally, I think it's a pure money grab; but there are likely underlying reasons. Many countries ARE subsidizing their green energy companies, sometimes quite hugely.
Personally, I look forward to the day that solar water heaters come standard on homes below the mason-dixon line, when a selling point in new developments are the solar electric panels that reduce utility electric down to near nothing for the average user.
The problem I have is that ancillary install costs tend to outweigh the electricity produced. They tend to run around a dollar per watt for a retrofit. Mounting brackets, wiring, inverter, etc... Which is why I concentrate on new builds.
Solar scales down well, wind scales up well - a big turbine is much more efficient, provides power more stably, and costs less per watt for both install and maintenance. Even then, the industry is so heavily subsidized it can be hard to find costs - but I tend to get figures around $1-2 per watt there. Not bad.
It goes without saying that if you have no artificial light available that waiting until your eyes adjust to the darkness gives you better vision.
Here's another experiment for you. Select a night of that's close to full moon. Obtain a million candle-power flood.
Wait until full night, then go looking around a forest. Then turn that flood on. You can see what the flood illuminates real good, right?
Now look at somewhere other than what the flood is lighting. Can't see a thing, can you?
Headlights are like that flood - except they're fixed directly ahead. Less useful on a winding road.
With headlights: =====
Your vision is good, but only for a short distance straight in front of you.
Without headlights, night-vision adjusted --- ----- -------- ----- ---
I may not see close quite as well, but I'm actually able to see further and wider without my lights on because I'm depending on ambient, not the hugely bright lights that only cover a few hundred meters in front of me, if that.
If you truly believed this wasn't stupid, tell me, do you drive at night without your headlights on? No?
In my case the difference is that I drive in the USA, which has stupid amounts of lighting at night. Which presumably isn't the case here.
This was exactly my thought.......how much oil revenue from Iraq has gone back to Iraq? George Bush doesnt seem to be starving or living in poverty does he. The easy way to find out who benfits is to see which members of the US government have investments in mining corps and bingo......the benficiary is there....oh yeah and their off shore bank accounts. Im not saying the current government is as corrupt as the last but????????? And another thought........why have the Pentagon been prospecting in a country that isnt their own and they are at war there......isnt that illegal.
Interesting viewpoints.
how much oil revenue from Iraq has gone back to Iraq?
Quite a bit; they've set up oil leasing much like the USA. The companies involved keep quite a bit of the profits, but my understanding is that the profits from oil is running a lot of Iraq's social programs.
why have the Pentagon been prospecting in a country that isnt their own and they are at war there......isnt that illegal.
No, it isn't illegal, and prospecting is one way to help the Afghani economy, which is one of the primary things we're trying to rebuild there. It's simple enough, in my mind: Somebody with a full time job and a future to look forward to isn't likely to become an insurgent.
You start training/hiring Afghanis to be miners, the Miners will marry, have children, send their kids to school, buy clothing, build houses, etc... It becomes a positive circle.
Personally, don't need a camera, but I would like: 1. The phone to be bigger. I'm thinking 50% bigger than a blackberry. 2. Be mostly touchscreen, but still have some actual buttons 3. Drop rated. I'm mean to phones. 4. BIG battery - part of the bigger size 5. Larger antenna - I hang out in low signal areas 6. Bluetooth - won't normally use the phone's microphone/speakers, but use a BT headset most of the time.
Interesting. But keep in mind that people pay a 30-year mortgage to either keep the house or sell it. Either way, the improvements will stay.
The break-even for my example is 37.5 years. Using a simple interest formula I'd pay $750 in interest at 5% to save that $400. It's not break even, it's negative. When energy rates rise again, I'll recalculate.
Basically, if a simple no interest payoff isn't within 12 years, it's not generally that good of a deal. If it's not within 15 years, you're going to have to look hard at it.
I'm saying that if you calculate a nearly break-even proposition on a long-term improvement, then you've already calculated that you won't be losing huge sums in the process.
Which is why I do SOME improvements. My 'no-interest' payoff needs to be within 12 years though. My capital discount rate tends to be 5%
When I build my own house it's unlikely to be a true 'passive', but it should be close.
Personally, my calculations point out to needing more a 75-80% reduction in price to break even for most people.
Part of the problem is that ancillary equipment alone tends to run you $1-2 per watt.
The inverter, wiring, mounts to hook the panels to a roof, to name the primary ones.
Now, as with anything, as you drop the price, it becomes more economical to more people. First to people in remote areas not hooked to the grid, then to people in southern climates coupled with high electricity costs(california, for example). Then you work your way down. North Dakota, combining cheap electricity with high energy usage being concentrated in the months with the least solar energy, not so much.
A true, efficient, national grid would help, but it's like the England study.
It would actually be cheaper and more efficient to run a set of high voltage cables to Africa, rent some land, and put the solar panels in plants there, then to put them on roofs in England.
North Dakota would be better off renting land in Nevada and running some long power lines... But then, realistically we're back to 'upgrade the national grid' and go national with distribution.
I actually measured energy usage when I replaced my TV.
Oddly enough, my 32" decade old energy star CRT TV used both less energy total AND per square inch of screen than my brand new 42" Energy Star rated TV.
The only time The CRT used more power is that it used about half a watt when 'off' but plugged in compared to not measurable for the LCD.
Wow, was mostly just wailing on people who harp *exclusively* on reducing power demand.
This is perfectly within our means, provided big oil and auto makers are unsuccessful at stonewalling these initiatives (which they are desperately trying to do through their mostly Republican congress critters). The auto-industry relies on planned obsolesence, which is much more difficult to hide using simple electric engines that can last for decades.
I agree with the electric motor - the things just shouldn't quit. Might actually help out the custom interior people; cheaper to refurbish the inside than to replace the whole vehicle.
Still got a lot of work to do on the batteries though.
Personally, I love nuclear, agree with fixing up the grid, and think the problems with EVs can be fixed, but I think that most of the work still remains in the lab, not in deployment. IE subsidies aren't going to help as efficienty as research grants.
but you may have more cash on hand each month from having a power bill 4x lower.
I'll note that what I was trying to say was that, at some point, adding more insulation doesn't make financial sense.
If you're spending $200 more a month on a 20-30 year note, when you drop your electricity bill by $300, obviously it was worth it.
On the other hand, would it be worth it if you tried to drop it to $0? Probably not, at that point it'd probably cost you another $400/month for that level of improvement.
Lowering your monthly expenses in the form of Capital investments is a good long term strategy.
Very true. But when I'm paying $900 a year to heat my house, $0 to cool it, does it really make sense to put $15k of improvements in to drop my heating bill to $500?
Actually situation is likely even more against small turbines, not only is bigger cheaper to build, it is cheaper to maintain.
Getting similar figures can be difficult as well; finding out how much a big turbine will cost can be difficult, while small turbine prices are easier, they're for the turbine only, not including install costs.
I seem to remember the small turbine I looked at costing so much that even applying an assumed production factor of 70% of faceplate, at 5% cost of capital I'd be better off investing and buying electricity at retail with the interest.
Meanwhile, a large turbine seems to install for around $1-2/watt, and only take a couple decades to pay off.
One benefit to having a LARGE turbine next to town is that it'd drop the losses from the power plant a couple hundred miles away.
920 kwh/month nation wide for a 'US residential utility customer'. Tennessee was highest at 1302, Maine lowest at 521 kwh/month.
I still wonder if I have something using way more power than it should, but I've gone around with the meter and haven't found anything.
Looks like I overestimated household usage a bit.
10k miles is 2k kwh/year. Figure 4k kwh/year for the EVs, up against the 11,040/year for current average usage, you're looking at a 36% increase in electricity usage from the Electronic vehicles.
Given that light bulbs aren't generally a major expense when it comes to electricity, and energy star appliances typically only save 10-20% electricity over non-energy star, I repeat my statement: We NEED additional electricity generation systems, especially if we want to get off of gasoline.
The only reason they're making everything 3D is so people can't cam it anyway,
What do you mean can't cam it? All you need is the appropriate polarized lens. Well, two cams and the polarized lenses if you want to get the 3D effect. Probably takea a lot of post processing at that point, but you could do it.
Personally, I figure they're making things 3D as a gimmick to get people to go to the theater.
Between bigger widescreen TVs and blue-ray, they were losing a lot of their business to people willing to wait to watch it on their 'home theater'. $3k for a 3D capable LCD TV is still quite a price leap for most people.
Investing in insulation is ten times cheaper than buying energy. a passive house has been build in very cold climates.
Investing in insulation is only 10X cheaper than buying energy if you don't already have a significant amount of insulation.
Let's take a house, generic. Let's disregard doors, windows, or perhaps we assume that we upgrade them as well.
The house, with NO insulation, costs Y energy to keep warm. With X insulation, it costs Y. If X is 1000 and Y is 1000/year, With 2X insulation, cost is Y/2, That next 1000 makes Y 500, and your payoff of the extra insulation is 2 years. With 4X insulation, cost is Y/4, the marginal return on the second 2X amount of insulation(costing 2000) is 250, payoff is 8 years. With 8X the insulation, cost is y/8, or 125 saved. For 4k cost. With a 32 year payoff without cost of capital, you're better off investing in the energy company; a decent return will pay your remaining bill perpetually.
Now, yes, the formula is more complicated - 8X the money spent on insulation won't actually get you 8X the insulating values, especially in a refit scenario - you have to make the walls thicker at that point, and maybe even raise the roof. There are practical limits on windows and doors, especially when you open them. There's also a certain amount of 'free' heat that is generally available. Every person is like 100 watts just sitting there. You need a certain amount of fresh air flow.
And I say this as a libertarian survivalist type who likes the idea of not being dependent upon the grid. I just acknowledge that there are costs that don't make financial sense. Call it being warped by my upbringing - both my parents are accountants. I was doing cost of capital analysis before I knew what it was called.;)
Not only that, I love how people say that we can simply reduce usage over building new power plants, then turn around and rave how electric cars are going to solve all of our problems.
The 'average' household uses something around 700-1400 kwh a month. The 'average' electronic vehicle gets about 5 miles to the kwh, and the average vehicle is driven around 10-15k miles a year. Don't forget that the average household is 2 cars today.
So, you're looking at probably around a 22% increase in electricity usage if people go to EVs. You just can't reduce energy usage that much via other means, especially when you also have 5% growth in population/households on top of it.
Still, I salute the inventer in the op, because he's, well, actually addressing the problem. The moment I can make solar panels make sense in a cost-benefit analysis is when I recommend all my relatives in Florida get them.
I'm moving to Alaska(work), so they'd probably still have to come down in price another 50% before they'd make sense for me.
Until I was informed of my exciting new opportunity, I was looking at a wind turbine for the small town I live in - because a turbine big enough to power a town costs a lot less per watt of capacity, and by reaching higher has steadier wind, resulting in lower costs when you factor the cost of the turbine into the cost per kwh it produces. Small $10k turbine = 5k kwh per year, expensive. $1M turbine = 1M kwh per year, much better. These figures are example only. Actual production is so location dependent it's hard to put proper figures on.
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Heck, Diebold even did this as a method of programming - you ask for election results it'd pull from a different(duplicate) data set than if you pulled for a specific district or region.
There are so many reasons that I want votes to be on human readable paper ballots for recount purposes. Use the machine to help make the vote if you must, but the paper is the final authority.
Machine breaks? Unload the ballots and hand out #2 pencils.
Better possibility: Absentee ballots are often filed with the assistance of political operatives working on behalf of the candidate or party. Rawl had such assistance, Green did not.
Also a possibility, thanks.
Given reports about Green, you would expect that anything north of 3% of the vote would be a surprising result.
Maybe 'party assisted votes' are less in number than you think?
The widespread ignorance of the race in the electorate at the time of the election (e.g. the party candidate having less than 5% name recognition) parallels a problem with down-card elections. We vote for our judges, but really now, who knows anything about these candidates.
Yeah, the big problem here for the party was that Rawl apparently didn't campaign at all. On Judges - in my area the voting is only to confirm their continued employment, and it takes a judge behaving very badly to lose that.
The example you gave, of a 50% false positive rate, indicates a totally useless test. But if we can take for granted TFA's assertion that the test has a 10% false positive rate, it provides very useful information in cases under suspicion.
I don't know; A rape exam with a 50% false positive rate isn't much good. On the other hand, I can see a test with a 50% FP rate being useful if it's also got a near 0% false negative rate and is essentially free to perform.
Effective cost of a test = Cost/(FalsePositiveRate*FalseNegativeRate)
but it *is* strong enough to motivate an investigation to search for method, motive, and opportunity.
For one thing, if we can't figure out how they jiggered it, a determination of jiggering doesn't do much good in fixing the problem.
Well, I could see doing more security/sanity checks on psychologists before you let them practice; perhaps even before we start teaching them how to bend minds.
Still, such people are actually pretty rare. My doc wasn't terrible by any means. I went because my parents wanted me to - I was, and still am, an extreme introvert.
Oh, and psychologists are a symptom of us actually taking MORE care of it's members; previously we often shunned or even killed those who were mentally ill.
That would be a good step.
Here in the USA, Coal is the #1 energy producer; coal is also subsidized. It's also #2 lowest subsidized, only above Natural Gas for major production.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/servicerpt/subsidy2/pdf/chap5.pdf
At 44 cents per 'megawatt-hour', that's 44 cents per 'thousand kwh', or .044 cents per kwh. Eliminating the subsidies would raise my ~$100/month electric bill by 44 cents.
It's just not that significant, on the scale of things.
While an 11 point swing is interesting, it's not the smoking gun that TFA makes it out to be - absentee ballots are not an independent sample of an electorate. They're well known to have statistically different compositions than the general populace, in various ways.
Possibilities off the top of my head:
1. Wealthier - they're traveling
2. Military - stationed outside the state
3. More politically motivated - they're outside their area; actually willing to go through the hassle of voting absentee
4. More likely to hit the websites up over the election?
But if you're interested in one *particular* campaign, because that campaign has other irregularities which indicate possible fraud, then a statistical test with a 10% P-value is worthy of note.
I'm still hesitant, because of some of my readings on forensic evidence. Basically, they were cherry picking who they tested, they made a test look more infallible than it actually was, suppressing knowledge of false positives. The specific one I remember involved 'penetration exams' on minors, used to send dozens of suspected child rapists to prison. Thing is, when they finally got around to performing the examination test on children with no suspicion of rape; something like 50% came up positive. Then they found about created memories and that one psychologist who was messed up herself and basically considered ALL fathers child molesters, who proceeded to mess up kids to get them to testify against daddy.
I'm not saying whether this campaign was tampered with or not. I'm for good science. Given the description of the test, it may be a good indicator of whether you need to investigate further. But until they have a testable theory of how the election was tampered with, or at least more evidence, I hesitate to call it jiggered.
I heard it on NPR when they were talking about this story.
As physicsphairy mentioned, the percentages vary wildly; basically, the less knowledgeable/caring a person is about a particular election, the more likely they are to vote for the first name on the list. And it also mostly shows up in elections where they can't go 'party line' off of the sheet.
POTUS? They generally know. State Rep, for the party that's 95% likely to lose the ultimate election? That's a bit different.
a few US companies might lose their monopolies is stupid.
Who says they have monopolies NOW? I think there's two issues here:
1. Due to loss of US competetion, certain products HAVE to be sourced from foreign countries; without the US contendor we have to deal with increased costs and waits.
2. Due to loss of US competition, we 'miss out' on a upcoming technological field. That means that we're out of the running, money going out of the USA, lower economy, etc...
If they want the US to look into alternative energy try getting the government to sign and ratify the Kyoto Protocol.
You mean the one where basically none of the countries with serious goals under it are compliant?
. Just the 7 listed on the front page have a combined equity of around $400 billion and yet they aren't willing to use that to fund it themselves.
Do they really have that equity? Is it tied up in their current business?
Personally, I think it's a pure money grab; but there are likely underlying reasons. Many countries ARE subsidizing their green energy companies, sometimes quite hugely.
Personally, I look forward to the day that solar water heaters come standard on homes below the mason-dixon line, when a selling point in new developments are the solar electric panels that reduce utility electric down to near nothing for the average user.
The problem I have is that ancillary install costs tend to outweigh the electricity produced. They tend to run around a dollar per watt for a retrofit. Mounting brackets, wiring, inverter, etc... Which is why I concentrate on new builds.
Solar scales down well, wind scales up well - a big turbine is much more efficient, provides power more stably, and costs less per watt for both install and maintenance. Even then, the industry is so heavily subsidized it can be hard to find costs - but I tend to get figures around $1-2 per watt there. Not bad.
Doh - messed up a bit.
Due to the stylesheets or other html wierdness at my work computer, preview doesn't work right.
Until you hit 'interesting viewpoints', the post was the previous one I replying to.
Troll? interesting mod...
It goes without saying that if you have no artificial light available that waiting until your eyes adjust to the darkness gives you better vision.
Here's another experiment for you. Select a night of that's close to full moon. Obtain a million candle-power flood.
Wait until full night, then go looking around a forest. Then turn that flood on. You can see what the flood illuminates real good, right?
Now look at somewhere other than what the flood is lighting. Can't see a thing, can you?
Headlights are like that flood - except they're fixed directly ahead. Less useful on a winding road.
With headlights:
=====
Your vision is good, but only for a short distance straight in front of you.
Without headlights, night-vision adjusted
---
-----
--------
-----
---
I may not see close quite as well, but I'm actually able to see further and wider without my lights on because I'm depending on ambient, not the hugely bright lights that only cover a few hundred meters in front of me, if that.
If you truly believed this wasn't stupid, tell me, do you drive at night without your headlights on? No?
In my case the difference is that I drive in the USA, which has stupid amounts of lighting at night. Which presumably isn't the case here.
At $10-15 per bulb, it quickly starts adding up when you're talking about people living on less than $2/day.
Personally, I can't help but think that adding like 10 cents for 1-3 meters of wire between the panels and the bulb would help.
This was exactly my thought.......how much oil revenue from Iraq has gone back to Iraq? George Bush doesnt seem to be starving or living in poverty does he. The easy way to find out who benfits is to see which members of the US government have investments in mining corps and bingo......the benficiary is there....oh yeah and their off shore bank accounts. Im not saying the current government is as corrupt as the last but????????? And another thought........why have the Pentagon been prospecting in a country that isnt their own and they are at war there......isnt that illegal.
Interesting viewpoints.
how much oil revenue from Iraq has gone back to Iraq?
Quite a bit; they've set up oil leasing much like the USA. The companies involved keep quite a bit of the profits, but my understanding is that the profits from oil is running a lot of Iraq's social programs.
why have the Pentagon been prospecting in a country that isnt their own and they are at war there......isnt that illegal.
No, it isn't illegal, and prospecting is one way to help the Afghani economy, which is one of the primary things we're trying to rebuild there. It's simple enough, in my mind: Somebody with a full time job and a future to look forward to isn't likely to become an insurgent.
You start training/hiring Afghanis to be miners, the Miners will marry, have children, send their kids to school, buy clothing, build houses, etc... It becomes a positive circle.
Personally, don't need a camera, but I would like:
1. The phone to be bigger. I'm thinking 50% bigger than a blackberry.
2. Be mostly touchscreen, but still have some actual buttons
3. Drop rated. I'm mean to phones.
4. BIG battery - part of the bigger size
5. Larger antenna - I hang out in low signal areas
6. Bluetooth - won't normally use the phone's microphone/speakers, but use a BT headset most of the time.
Interesting. But keep in mind that people pay a 30-year mortgage to either keep the house or sell it. Either way, the improvements will stay.
The break-even for my example is 37.5 years. Using a simple interest formula I'd pay $750 in interest at 5% to save that $400. It's not break even, it's negative. When energy rates rise again, I'll recalculate.
Basically, if a simple no interest payoff isn't within 12 years, it's not generally that good of a deal. If it's not within 15 years, you're going to have to look hard at it.
I'm saying that if you calculate a nearly break-even proposition on a long-term improvement, then you've already calculated that you won't be losing huge sums in the process.
Which is why I do SOME improvements. My 'no-interest' payoff needs to be within 12 years though. My capital discount rate tends to be 5%
When I build my own house it's unlikely to be a true 'passive', but it should be close.
Personally, my calculations point out to needing more a 75-80% reduction in price to break even for most people.
Part of the problem is that ancillary equipment alone tends to run you $1-2 per watt.
The inverter, wiring, mounts to hook the panels to a roof, to name the primary ones.
Now, as with anything, as you drop the price, it becomes more economical to more people. First to people in remote areas not hooked to the grid, then to people in southern climates coupled with high electricity costs(california, for example). Then you work your way down. North Dakota, combining cheap electricity with high energy usage being concentrated in the months with the least solar energy, not so much.
A true, efficient, national grid would help, but it's like the England study.
It would actually be cheaper and more efficient to run a set of high voltage cables to Africa, rent some land, and put the solar panels in plants there, then to put them on roofs in England.
North Dakota would be better off renting land in Nevada and running some long power lines... But then, realistically we're back to 'upgrade the national grid' and go national with distribution.
I actually measured energy usage when I replaced my TV.
Oddly enough, my 32" decade old energy star CRT TV used both less energy total AND per square inch of screen than my brand new 42" Energy Star rated TV.
The only time The CRT used more power is that it used about half a watt when 'off' but plugged in compared to not measurable for the LCD.
Apparently CRTs don't have to use a lot of power.
Wow, was mostly just wailing on people who harp *exclusively* on reducing power demand.
This is perfectly within our means, provided big oil and auto makers are unsuccessful at stonewalling these initiatives (which they are desperately trying to do through their mostly Republican congress critters). The auto-industry relies on planned obsolesence, which is much more difficult to hide using simple electric engines that can last for decades.
I agree with the electric motor - the things just shouldn't quit. Might actually help out the custom interior people; cheaper to refurbish the inside than to replace the whole vehicle.
Still got a lot of work to do on the batteries though.
Personally, I love nuclear, agree with fixing up the grid, and think the problems with EVs can be fixed, but I think that most of the work still remains in the lab, not in deployment. IE subsidies aren't going to help as efficienty as research grants.
but you may have more cash on hand each month from having a power bill 4x lower.
I'll note that what I was trying to say was that, at some point, adding more insulation doesn't make financial sense.
If you're spending $200 more a month on a 20-30 year note, when you drop your electricity bill by $300, obviously it was worth it.
On the other hand, would it be worth it if you tried to drop it to $0? Probably not, at that point it'd probably cost you another $400/month for that level of improvement.
Lowering your monthly expenses in the form of Capital investments is a good long term strategy.
Very true. But when I'm paying $900 a year to heat my house, $0 to cool it, does it really make sense to put $15k of improvements in to drop my heating bill to $500?
Notice I mentioned such analysis when it comes to solar panels?
I use the 100% figure mostly as an example. For one, it's easy to scale.
Due to my using the high end of energy figures, my 22% number is low end. 36% would be closer for a true '100%' replacement.
Still, if you figure on 10% of vehicles being EV, you'd better figure on increasing electricity production 2.2% to cover it.
And when major electricity plants take longer to build than the average car lasts, we need to plan ahead.
Actually situation is likely even more against small turbines, not only is bigger cheaper to build, it is cheaper to maintain.
Getting similar figures can be difficult as well; finding out how much a big turbine will cost can be difficult, while small turbine prices are easier, they're for the turbine only, not including install costs.
I seem to remember the small turbine I looked at costing so much that even applying an assumed production factor of 70% of faceplate, at 5% cost of capital I'd be better off investing and buying electricity at retail with the interest.
Meanwhile, a large turbine seems to install for around $1-2/watt, and only take a couple decades to pay off.
One benefit to having a LARGE turbine next to town is that it'd drop the losses from the power plant a couple hundred miles away.
Not quite that much, as average households are not the only users of electricity.
The figures I used for that number is actually for housholds only; I have all electric appliances except for building heat and use ~1000 kwh a month.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/ask/electricity_faqs.asp#electricity_use_home
920 kwh/month nation wide for a 'US residential utility customer'.
Tennessee was highest at 1302, Maine lowest at 521 kwh/month.
I still wonder if I have something using way more power than it should, but I've gone around with the meter and haven't found anything.
Looks like I overestimated household usage a bit.
10k miles is 2k kwh/year. Figure 4k kwh/year for the EVs, up against the 11,040/year for current average usage, you're looking at a 36% increase in electricity usage from the Electronic vehicles.
Given that light bulbs aren't generally a major expense when it comes to electricity, and energy star appliances typically only save 10-20% electricity over non-energy star, I repeat my statement: We NEED additional electricity generation systems, especially if we want to get off of gasoline.
The only reason they're making everything 3D is so people can't cam it anyway,
What do you mean can't cam it? All you need is the appropriate polarized lens. Well, two cams and the polarized lenses if you want to get the 3D effect. Probably takea a lot of post processing at that point, but you could do it.
Personally, I figure they're making things 3D as a gimmick to get people to go to the theater.
Between bigger widescreen TVs and blue-ray, they were losing a lot of their business to people willing to wait to watch it on their 'home theater'. $3k for a 3D capable LCD TV is still quite a price leap for most people.
Investing in insulation is ten times cheaper than buying energy. a passive house has been build in very cold climates.
Investing in insulation is only 10X cheaper than buying energy if you don't already have a significant amount of insulation.
Let's take a house, generic. Let's disregard doors, windows, or perhaps we assume that we upgrade them as well.
The house, with NO insulation, costs Y energy to keep warm.
With X insulation, it costs Y. If X is 1000 and Y is 1000/year,
With 2X insulation, cost is Y/2, That next 1000 makes Y 500, and your payoff of the extra insulation is 2 years.
With 4X insulation, cost is Y/4, the marginal return on the second 2X amount of insulation(costing 2000) is 250, payoff is 8 years.
With 8X the insulation, cost is y/8, or 125 saved. For 4k cost. With a 32 year payoff without cost of capital, you're better off investing in the energy company; a decent return will pay your remaining bill perpetually.
Now, yes, the formula is more complicated - 8X the money spent on insulation won't actually get you 8X the insulating values, especially in a refit scenario - you have to make the walls thicker at that point, and maybe even raise the roof. There are practical limits on windows and doors, especially when you open them. There's also a certain amount of 'free' heat that is generally available. Every person is like 100 watts just sitting there. You need a certain amount of fresh air flow.
And I say this as a libertarian survivalist type who likes the idea of not being dependent upon the grid. I just acknowledge that there are costs that don't make financial sense. Call it being warped by my upbringing - both my parents are accountants. I was doing cost of capital analysis before I knew what it was called. ;)
Not only that, I love how people say that we can simply reduce usage over building new power plants, then turn around and rave how electric cars are going to solve all of our problems.
The 'average' household uses something around 700-1400 kwh a month.
The 'average' electronic vehicle gets about 5 miles to the kwh, and the average vehicle is driven around 10-15k miles a year.
Don't forget that the average household is 2 cars today.
So, you're looking at probably around a 22% increase in electricity usage if people go to EVs. You just can't reduce energy usage that much via other means, especially when you also have 5% growth in population/households on top of it.
Still, I salute the inventer in the op, because he's, well, actually addressing the problem. The moment I can make solar panels make sense in a cost-benefit analysis is when I recommend all my relatives in Florida get them.
I'm moving to Alaska(work), so they'd probably still have to come down in price another 50% before they'd make sense for me.
Until I was informed of my exciting new opportunity, I was looking at a wind turbine for the small town I live in - because a turbine big enough to power a town costs a lot less per watt of capacity, and by reaching higher has steadier wind, resulting in lower costs when you factor the cost of the turbine into the cost per kwh it produces. Small $10k turbine = 5k kwh per year, expensive. $1M turbine = 1M kwh per year, much better. These figures are example only. Actual production is so location dependent it's hard to put proper figures on.