i've been telling people for a while that the first we'll see of autonomous vehicles in any big way isn't in personal Google-style vehicles, but in the long-haul trucking industry.
Now I know that's true, because it's the only physically possible way to safely haul away the toxic mess that's the fucking Beta shit being sprayed everywhere like something out of a low-budget slashbeta horror flick.
According to the Census Bureau, there're about 115 million households in the US. Target has basically admitted that the theft amounts to their entire database.
I'd like to think that this would mean the end of the credit reporting rackets; how can anybody even pretend any more that that data is meaningful when this sort of fraud is taking place? But I also wanted to think that the Snowden revelations would have meant the end of the NSA, so clearly I'm not somebody anybody is paying or should pay attention to.
So? Everybody participating n the Stanford Prison Experiment knew it was an experiment, too.
That's the most important lesson learned from the famous psychology experiments of the '50s and '60s: that those sorts of experiments were important to do once, and they should never be done again except in extraordinary and the most carefully controlled of circumstances. The ethical review boards were brought into existence explicitly to ensure that those sorts of experiments were never performed again unless for truly justifiable reasons.
I fail to notice any overwhelming, transcendental purposes in these mockeries of psychological research that warrant their execution.
I can't believe that people still think that these trolley car "thought experiments" are telling them anything novel about human moral instincts.
All they are are less-visceral variations on Milgram's famous work. An authority figure tells you you must kill either the hot chick on the left or the ugly fatty on the right and that you mustn't sound the alarm or call 9-1-1 or anything else. And, just as Milgram found out, virtually everybody goes ahead and does horrific things in such circumstances.
Just look at the videos in question. The number of laws and safety regulations and bad designs of the evil-mad-scientist variety in each scenario are innumerable. They take it beyond Milgram's use of a white lab coat to establish authority and into psychotic Nazi commander territory. In the real world, the victims wouldn't be anywhere near where they are. If they were, there wouldn't be any operations in progress at the site. If there were, there would be competent operators at the controls, not the amateur being manipulated by the experimenter; and those operators would be well drilled in both standard and emergency procedures that would prevent the disaster or mitigate it if unavoidable -- for example, airline pilots trained to the point of instinct to avoid crashing a doomed plane into a crowded area.
The proper role of the experimenter's victims ("subjects") is to yell for help, to not fucking touch critical safety infrastructure in the event of a crisis unless instructed to by a competent professional, to render first aid to the best of their abilities once help is on the way, and to assist investigators however possible once the dust has settled.
Yet, of course, the experimenter is too wrapped up in the evil genius role to permit their victims to even consider anything like that, and instead convinces the victims that they're bad people who'll kill innocents when ordered to. Just as we already knew from Milgram.
How any of this bullshit makes it past ethics review boards is utterly beyond me.
The correct accounting would be that you should be charged retail rates for what you draw out of the grid, but reimbursed only at wholesale rates for what you feed into the grid, like any other power producer who feeds into the grid is paid.
If you had read the second half of my post, you would have learned two facts.
First, for the annual surpluses, that's exactly what happens: I get paid wholesale rates. But not just any wholesale rates; I get paid Palo Verde off-peak average rates for some period of time, less a transmission fee. That's basically the cheapest power there is.
Second, you would have learned that I'm generating the most of my power during the highest peak demands, when they're not only charging customers the highest but oftentimes paying more than they're charging their customers to meet peak demands. (They make up for it during other hours, of course, but we're discussing the time periods when I'm putting more in than I'm taking out.) And and at night when I have my highest draws from the grid, that's when their cheapest baseload generators are idling.
Put those two together, and, even if it weren't for the annual surplus that they credit my account for at bargain-basement wholesale rates, they'd still be profiting hugely from me. Even though it's a kWh-for-kWh credit swap, the kWhs they get from me are the most expensive there are (maximum peak green-generated) and the kWhs I get from them are the cheapest there are (overnight nuclear-generated baseload).
Because they are usually required to pay customers a lot more for feed-in power than they can generate it for, with no allowance for their internal cost overheads, etc.
Absolutely false -- horribly false.
On a day-to-day and month-to-month accounting basis, my utility (Salt River Project in Arizona) gives me a kWh-for-kWh credit. If I generate 20 kWh during the day, use 15 kWh during the day, and another 5 kWh during the night, I have net zero usage.
Surpluses are carried over day-to-day and month-to-month. If I have a net debit at the end of the month, I'm charged the regular rate for that electricity. If I have a surplus, it's carried over to the next month.
Once a year, in the spring, if I have a net surplus, SRP credits my account and resets the surplus to zero. And I generate about half again as much as I consume -- enough to power my not-yet-purchased electric vehicle -- so they credit me a fair amount every year. It's enough to pay the basic connection fee for about half the year, in fact, so I only even pay that for about six months per year.
But.
Rather than crediting me at the $0.12 / kWh typical residential retail rate, or the $0.25+ / kWh they purchase peak summer power (which is when I'm generating most of my surplus electricity), they pay me about $0.02 / kWh.
By my rough back-of-the-envelope calculations, they're now profiting from me almost as much as I used to pay them in total. As in, what used to be their gross receipts from me is now their net.
What business wouldn't be thrilled with such a business model?
So, do please stop spreading the lies of the Koch Brothers. The poor widdle utilities aren't being hurt by the solar meanies -- quite the opposite. They're making money from us, hand over fist.
They're just a bunch of greedy sick fucks who want to roast the goose that's laying the golden eggs, is all.
I live in the Valley of the Sun, and most of the southern half of my roof is covered in solar panels. I generate about half again as much electricity as I consume. This is by design; the plan is to get an electric vehicle in the not-too-terribly-distant future, and my excess generation capacity is enough that I should be able to drive for basically free. And the whole thing will pay itself off in about seven years total; if you remember the Rule of 70, that works out to about a 10% annual rate of return on my investment.
My utility provider is SRP; it was APS who was taking Koch Brothers money to fuck over their customers.
I've got a really good thing going for myself, obviously, but SRP is also making a nice profit off of me. My peak generation coincides with peak demand here. At the same time as they sell my electricity to my neighbors at $0.14 / kWh, they're paying twice that to spool up diesel generators...and they're paying me about $0.02 / kWh for my surplus. And I've signed over all my green credits to them, as well. Sweet deal for both of us, and I'm glad for it to be that way -- that's how good business profits are supposed to work.
If, however, APS's original proposal went into effect and SRP adopted it or something similar for themselves...well, at that point, I'd tell them to fuck off, get a battery system, and drop off the grid entirely. Changing the equation like that would wipe out any financial advantage I get from my investment and hugely profit the utility -- and, remember, I'm already far and away the most profitable customer they have on the block. It would really suck to have to pay again for a battery system; I've got better things I could do with that money. But I'd much rather invest that money in real physical goods that provide me with actual benefits (including, in this case, having the lights stay on should the grid ever go down) than throw gobs of money for no good reason at greedy profiteering corporate CEOs.
I can assure you, if the utilities keep up this sort of thing...well, they'll "protect" their profits for a little while, but it won't be long before people start dropping off the grid in droves. And that will be a bad thing for everybody -- but, most of all, for the utilities.
I most emphatically do have a heat pump, and I generally keep the thermostat set at about 80 during the summer -- and I'm in the middle of the metropolitan Phoenix area.
Unless your roof is mostly shaded, I can only assume that your house has no insulation whatsoever, or very large single-pane windows in direct sun, or other variations on that theme, and that you chill the place to below 70. You're describing needing something on the order of a 50 KW PV installation to reach 100% offset, which is industrial-sized.
Your electricity bills have likely also at least flirted with the four-figure mark, so I wouldn't necessarily feel so much sympathy at reluctance to spend $37K up front to reduce those. However, you'd be a textbook case of somebody who could get far better bang for the buck in efficiency improvements than in generating capacity. Once you're no longer wasting more electricity than an entire Mediterranean village, you won't need anywhere near as large an array to meet your needs.
No, renewables can't meet the demand today, and possibly never will. You have made the classic mistake of assuming your experience is typical of everything everywhere. A typical solar installation is capable only of meeting a normal households power needs part of the time.
Purest bullshit.
I have not quite half my roof covered in solar panels, and I generate 150% as much electricity as I use -- enough to power an electric vehicle that I plan on buying in the next couple years or so.
Granted, I live in Arizona. But if you were to teleport my house to Seattle, I'd only need to cover the rest of the roof to make up the deficit -- and probably not even quite that much.
As for overnight? First, we've got far more than adequate baseload generating capacity to last us for a loooong time. But, more to the point, a Tesla-sized battery would be plenty to keep me going overnight -- and that's an expensive battery designed for a high-performance vehicle; something much more pedestrian would be just fine. Or, much more preferably, the utilities can continue to remain relevant by investing in utility-scale storage, such as pumped hydro or running fuel cells in reverse or even generating hydrocarbon fuels from atmospheric CO2 via Fischer-Tropsch synthesis.
We've already got the infrastructure in place for solar: our rooftops and the existing grid. And we've got the technology; labor and code compliance are the most expensive parts of any solar installation today. And we would have had the money...the $1.5 trillion we've burned blowing up brown people in the past decade would have quite nicely paid for the solarification of America.
What we lack is the moral integrity and courage to tell the Koch Brothers what to shove up their asses, and how far.
First, I haven't run the numbers for the UK, but I suspect your estimates are likely overly pessimistic. Remember that solar PV still works on cloudy days; just not as well. You Brits might have to install more panels per person than those of us in more temperate climes, and you might need to supplement further with other sources.
But...you may be on an island, but you're hardly cut off from civilization. Germany, whose entire country is worse for solar than the gloomiest parts of the Continental US, is going gangbusters with solar. And I'm sure, once they've finally got some surplus, they'd be delighted to sell it to you -- as would the French and Spaniards and Italians...and, with a sufficiently advanced grid, even the Saudis. And you have "neighbors" to the west who have more geothermal power than they know what to do with already.
Besides. Nobody ever guaranteed that the future would be better than the past. It might become prohibitively expensive to live in Britain, with or without solar. Then again, it might become prohibitively expensive to live anywhere else, either. Such is life...and death.
Of course, I'm not advocating for genocide nor throwing up our hands. As I've repeatedly noted in this thread, I've gone solar, myself, and I've also already noted how the money we burned blowing up Iraq and Afghanistan would have been just about enough to switch the US entirely over to photovoltaics.
I'm just not at all optimistic that we're going to make a wise choice. I hope we will, but it's looking quite likely that we'll instead see economic and population crashes as a result of resource depletion and widespread pollution (such as the collapse of the oceanic fish stocks we're already witnessing). And, of course the wars that will inevitably accompany such chaos.
I really, really don't want to see that happen, but I can't honestly say that I see a realistic path forward that avoids that sort of thing.
I've done the next best thing; I've covered my roof in solar panels, and I'm generating half again as much electricity as I use -- enough to power the electric vehicle I plan on getting in the next couple years. It's far and away the best financial investment I've ever made, with a guaranteed nearly-risk-free ROI in the 10% range.
I don't have any interest in getting into the construction and roofing business. But the contractor who installed my system, American Solar Electric, is quite profitable. If you're a qualified tradesman in Arizona and need a great job, I can put you in touch with them....
Again, no need to turn existing undeveloped areas into glass-covered parking lots; we've already got all the space we need on our rooftops.
But, for reference, it's an area smaller than Texas.
And, again again, we're already 80% there with the smart grid, which already needs to deal with plants going offline and coming back online. And solar is quite predictable at the timescales that utilities need to deal with; and we've got plenty of baseload capacity to tide us over as we ramp up utility-scale storage.
Indeed, had we invested that trillion and a half dollars we just blew up in Iraq and Afghanistan in solar power infrastructure, we'd already be there....
Wind definitely has its place in the energy production mix of today and the future. However, as with hydroelectricity, it's just displaced solar and can't even come close to matching more direct solar energy harvesting (especially photovoltaic and solar thermal) on a global scale.
I wouldn't at all want to discourage somebody from harvesting wind power, and there're lots of situations where it'd be stupid to not do so. But, as incredibly wonderful as it is as a niche player, it's still a niche player. Wind by itself is never going to quench our thirst for energy.
Of course, I was writing in the inclusive "we" -- that is, "we" as a society.
I've covered my roof in solar panels; I'm generating about half again as much electricity as I'm using, enough to power the electric car I hope to buy in the next couple years. I'm fully aware that some of us are doing all we can to do right by ourselves and the planet.
But, sadly, collectively, we're doing precisely diddly and squat (to any appreciable rounding margin). In no small part, of course, because of the parasites you mention.
As Tom has most recently turned his attention to, the real problem is overpopulation, especially coupled with population growth. And I suspect he's about as pessimistic as I am at our chances of making it through this without an unprecedented crisis, if at all.
A five-year payback time is equivalent to a 14% annual rate of return on your investment. Are you really so rich and / or foolish that you can afford to turn your nose up at a guaranteed 14% return on your investments?
First, we've already got more than enough baseload generation capacity for the indefinite future. We don't need to tear down what's already in place.
Second, I shit you not, we've already figured out how to store electricity. There're things called, "batteries," and you might even have one within arm's reach as you read these words; your next car might have one big enough to power your house for a day or so. Dams can be run in reverse during the day and drained again at night. Fuel cells work just as well backwards as forwards. Solar thermal plants are typically designed so they collect enough heat during the day to keep the turbines running through the night. Caverns can be pressurized. Or, if you're really feeling extravagant, you can, as I mentioned, use Fischer-Tropsch to generate hydrocarbons from CO2.
Is any of this as cheap as sticking a straw in the ground and sucking out crude oil? Well, actually, once you consider the cost of the externialities of oil production, it's a hell of a lot cheaper.
But, hey. You're apparently delighted to pay for the Koch Brothers's lives of luxury with your children's futures, so don't let any of this stop you.
You're suggesting we should build brand-new dedicated infrastructure out in the middle of nowhere. That's what our current mined energy sources do, and it's silly.
We already have all the structures we need, and then some. They're called, "roofs," and they're conveniently located anywhere and everywhere that a human is likely to be and want to use energy. As an added bonus, they're on top of these other structures called, "walls," which -- I shit you not! -- are already wired into the grid.
Of course the other "problem" with rooftop solar generation is that the owner of the building is the one who's earning the profits from producing power, as opposed to a centralized megacorp owned by the Koch Brothers or one of their compatriots, and we just simply can't have that, now can we? Homeowners becoming profitable and partially-self-sustaining small businesses? Why, that's positively un-American!
You only need to cover a half a percent of the Earth's surface with off-the-shelf 15% efficient PV panels to provide all of humanity all of its energy needs. If we covered all residential rooftops in the States with PV panels, we'd generate about as much electricity as the industrialized world needs -- and that's just residential rooftops just in the US.
To suggest that solar somehow isn't enough is just laughable. Hell, with the kind of abundance that solar offers, we've got far more than enough available to distill CO2 out of the atmosphere and turn it into hydrocarbons -- an incredibly energy-intensive process -- and use those hydrocarbons as our storage and transportation mechanisms just as we do today.
What we don't have is the willingness to invest our hydrocarbon inheritance in bootstrapping ourselves into such an energy-wealthy society. Instead, we'd rather squander our inheritance on monster SUVs and petroleum-based fertilizer to feed dozens of billions of people.
Here's some perspective from somebody who can actually do the math:
If anybody still needs evidence that we're past peak oil, this is it.
Re-read that summary: two tons of sand have to be hauled away to the processing center just to get a single barrel of oil.
And remember Deepwater Horizon? The rig that went kablooie in the Gulf? The wellhead was a mile below the surface of the ocean, and the top of the deposits were seven miles below bedrock.
Long gone are the days when you had to be careful with your pickaxe in Texas lest you set off a gusher. We're now washing two tons of sand per barrel of oil just to feed the habit.
Oh, sure. There's still lots of oil left in the ground. About half as much as there was at the start of the industrial revolution, in fact. But it's all the nasty low-quality expensive shit that we would have laughed and turned up our noses at in the '70s. But not today.
Worst of all, we're now consuming oil at a faster rate than ever before in history. The only way we could keep the remaining half of reserves to last another century is if we decreased production by 2% - 3% annually, same as it used to grow. Can you imagine a century's worth of that kind of contraction?
No?
Then get ready for price shocks and the crash to end all crashes as we run out of what little is left in mere decades, and not that many.
Can we please stop giving air to this obnoxious blowhard who's openly and actively campaigning for a full-on totalitarian police state?
I mean, really. It's one thing to offer up a controversial opinion every now and again to foster click-throughs, but the level of obscene absurdity this Haselton putz has taken it to is out of hand.
If/. is really dedicated to giving voice to somebody who thinks KGB- and Stasi-style policing are a good idea especially at a time when the NSA is running amok and our police have already been militarized, that'll be the straw that finally pushes me away.
Yes, Nazis and Nazi-wannabes like Haselton have the right to freedom of expression, even when they're advocating for those rights to be denied everybody else. But I'll not help magnify their voices. And if/. will, I'll exercise my freedom of association and stop associating with/.
It's very, very expensive to move out of your home and then back in again, even to the same home. But if you don't -- for whatever reason -- have the money to pay the rent, that may well be your only choice.
If you're expecting to have the money but your boss's accounting department is simply incompetent, you might be able to plead with your landlord. Or maybe not.
But whether staying at home or moving out is cheaper is irrelevant to the question when the rent check comes due.
That money is being wasted isn't the fault of the agencies that are shutting down. It's the fault of the Republicans who're holding the entire country hostage in a blatantly un-Constitutional attempt to repeal majority-supported legislation. They've tried dozens of times to repeal the legislation through the normal legislative process and failed miserably each time; now, they're determined to wreck the national economy (with the shutdown) and possibly even the global economy (with the default) if the majority doesn't give in to their demands. They've shot multiple prisoners already (don't forget the ongoing sequester!) and are now threatening to blow up the whole building.
In a modern democracy, their actions would long ago have resulted in the dissolution of the government and a new round of elections. And the Obama administration's support for the NSA wiretapping would also have triggered elections. Such a shame we live in a place that's rested so much on its laurels and is now so far behind the times.
Slashdot Mirror
i've been telling people for a while that the first we'll see of autonomous vehicles in any big way isn't in personal Google-style vehicles, but in the long-haul trucking industry.
Now I know that's true, because it's the only physically possible way to safely haul away the toxic mess that's the fucking Beta shit being sprayed everywhere like something out of a low-budget slashbeta horror flick.
Fuck the Beta,
b&
According to the Census Bureau, there're about 115 million households in the US. Target has basically admitted that the theft amounts to their entire database.
I'd like to think that this would mean the end of the credit reporting rackets; how can anybody even pretend any more that that data is meaningful when this sort of fraud is taking place? But I also wanted to think that the Snowden revelations would have meant the end of the NSA, so clearly I'm not somebody anybody is paying or should pay attention to.
Cheers,
b&
So? Everybody participating n the Stanford Prison Experiment knew it was an experiment, too.
That's the most important lesson learned from the famous psychology experiments of the '50s and '60s: that those sorts of experiments were important to do once, and they should never be done again except in extraordinary and the most carefully controlled of circumstances. The ethical review boards were brought into existence explicitly to ensure that those sorts of experiments were never performed again unless for truly justifiable reasons.
I fail to notice any overwhelming, transcendental purposes in these mockeries of psychological research that warrant their execution.
Cheers,
b&
I can't believe that people still think that these trolley car "thought experiments" are telling them anything novel about human moral instincts.
All they are are less-visceral variations on Milgram's famous work. An authority figure tells you you must kill either the hot chick on the left or the ugly fatty on the right and that you mustn't sound the alarm or call 9-1-1 or anything else. And, just as Milgram found out, virtually everybody goes ahead and does horrific things in such circumstances.
Just look at the videos in question. The number of laws and safety regulations and bad designs of the evil-mad-scientist variety in each scenario are innumerable. They take it beyond Milgram's use of a white lab coat to establish authority and into psychotic Nazi commander territory. In the real world, the victims wouldn't be anywhere near where they are. If they were, there wouldn't be any operations in progress at the site. If there were, there would be competent operators at the controls, not the amateur being manipulated by the experimenter; and those operators would be well drilled in both standard and emergency procedures that would prevent the disaster or mitigate it if unavoidable -- for example, airline pilots trained to the point of instinct to avoid crashing a doomed plane into a crowded area.
The proper role of the experimenter's victims ("subjects") is to yell for help, to not fucking touch critical safety infrastructure in the event of a crisis unless instructed to by a competent professional, to render first aid to the best of their abilities once help is on the way, and to assist investigators however possible once the dust has settled.
Yet, of course, the experimenter is too wrapped up in the evil genius role to permit their victims to even consider anything like that, and instead convinces the victims that they're bad people who'll kill innocents when ordered to. Just as we already knew from Milgram.
How any of this bullshit makes it past ethics review boards is utterly beyond me.
Cheers,
b&
If you had read the second half of my post, you would have learned two facts.
First, for the annual surpluses, that's exactly what happens: I get paid wholesale rates. But not just any wholesale rates; I get paid Palo Verde off-peak average rates for some period of time, less a transmission fee. That's basically the cheapest power there is.
Second, you would have learned that I'm generating the most of my power during the highest peak demands, when they're not only charging customers the highest but oftentimes paying more than they're charging their customers to meet peak demands. (They make up for it during other hours, of course, but we're discussing the time periods when I'm putting more in than I'm taking out.) And and at night when I have my highest draws from the grid, that's when their cheapest baseload generators are idling.
Put those two together, and, even if it weren't for the annual surplus that they credit my account for at bargain-basement wholesale rates, they'd still be profiting hugely from me. Even though it's a kWh-for-kWh credit swap, the kWhs they get from me are the most expensive there are (maximum peak green-generated) and the kWhs I get from them are the cheapest there are (overnight nuclear-generated baseload).
Cheers,
b&
Absolutely false -- horribly false.
On a day-to-day and month-to-month accounting basis, my utility (Salt River Project in Arizona) gives me a kWh-for-kWh credit. If I generate 20 kWh during the day, use 15 kWh during the day, and another 5 kWh during the night, I have net zero usage.
Surpluses are carried over day-to-day and month-to-month. If I have a net debit at the end of the month, I'm charged the regular rate for that electricity. If I have a surplus, it's carried over to the next month.
Once a year, in the spring, if I have a net surplus, SRP credits my account and resets the surplus to zero. And I generate about half again as much as I consume -- enough to power my not-yet-purchased electric vehicle -- so they credit me a fair amount every year. It's enough to pay the basic connection fee for about half the year, in fact, so I only even pay that for about six months per year.
But.
Rather than crediting me at the $0.12 / kWh typical residential retail rate, or the $0.25+ / kWh they purchase peak summer power (which is when I'm generating most of my surplus electricity), they pay me about $0.02 / kWh.
By my rough back-of-the-envelope calculations, they're now profiting from me almost as much as I used to pay them in total. As in, what used to be their gross receipts from me is now their net.
What business wouldn't be thrilled with such a business model?
So, do please stop spreading the lies of the Koch Brothers. The poor widdle utilities aren't being hurt by the solar meanies -- quite the opposite. They're making money from us, hand over fist.
They're just a bunch of greedy sick fucks who want to roast the goose that's laying the golden eggs, is all.
Cheers,
b&
I live in the Valley of the Sun, and most of the southern half of my roof is covered in solar panels. I generate about half again as much electricity as I consume. This is by design; the plan is to get an electric vehicle in the not-too-terribly-distant future, and my excess generation capacity is enough that I should be able to drive for basically free. And the whole thing will pay itself off in about seven years total; if you remember the Rule of 70, that works out to about a 10% annual rate of return on my investment.
My utility provider is SRP; it was APS who was taking Koch Brothers money to fuck over their customers.
I've got a really good thing going for myself, obviously, but SRP is also making a nice profit off of me. My peak generation coincides with peak demand here. At the same time as they sell my electricity to my neighbors at $0.14 / kWh, they're paying twice that to spool up diesel generators...and they're paying me about $0.02 / kWh for my surplus. And I've signed over all my green credits to them, as well. Sweet deal for both of us, and I'm glad for it to be that way -- that's how good business profits are supposed to work.
If, however, APS's original proposal went into effect and SRP adopted it or something similar for themselves...well, at that point, I'd tell them to fuck off, get a battery system, and drop off the grid entirely. Changing the equation like that would wipe out any financial advantage I get from my investment and hugely profit the utility -- and, remember, I'm already far and away the most profitable customer they have on the block. It would really suck to have to pay again for a battery system; I've got better things I could do with that money. But I'd much rather invest that money in real physical goods that provide me with actual benefits (including, in this case, having the lights stay on should the grid ever go down) than throw gobs of money for no good reason at greedy profiteering corporate CEOs.
I can assure you, if the utilities keep up this sort of thing...well, they'll "protect" their profits for a little while, but it won't be long before people start dropping off the grid in droves. And that will be a bad thing for everybody -- but, most of all, for the utilities.
Cheers,
b&
Please stop giving air to this ignorant blowhard.
Just stop.
Now.
KTHXBAI
b&
I most emphatically do have a heat pump, and I generally keep the thermostat set at about 80 during the summer -- and I'm in the middle of the metropolitan Phoenix area.
Unless your roof is mostly shaded, I can only assume that your house has no insulation whatsoever, or very large single-pane windows in direct sun, or other variations on that theme, and that you chill the place to below 70. You're describing needing something on the order of a 50 KW PV installation to reach 100% offset, which is industrial-sized.
Your electricity bills have likely also at least flirted with the four-figure mark, so I wouldn't necessarily feel so much sympathy at reluctance to spend $37K up front to reduce those. However, you'd be a textbook case of somebody who could get far better bang for the buck in efficiency improvements than in generating capacity. Once you're no longer wasting more electricity than an entire Mediterranean village, you won't need anywhere near as large an array to meet your needs.
Cheers,
b&
No, renewables can't meet the demand today, and possibly never will. You have made the classic mistake of assuming your experience is typical of everything everywhere. A typical solar installation is capable only of meeting a normal households power needs part of the time.
Purest bullshit.
I have not quite half my roof covered in solar panels, and I generate 150% as much electricity as I use -- enough to power an electric vehicle that I plan on buying in the next couple years or so.
Granted, I live in Arizona. But if you were to teleport my house to Seattle, I'd only need to cover the rest of the roof to make up the deficit -- and probably not even quite that much.
As for overnight? First, we've got far more than adequate baseload generating capacity to last us for a loooong time. But, more to the point, a Tesla-sized battery would be plenty to keep me going overnight -- and that's an expensive battery designed for a high-performance vehicle; something much more pedestrian would be just fine. Or, much more preferably, the utilities can continue to remain relevant by investing in utility-scale storage, such as pumped hydro or running fuel cells in reverse or even generating hydrocarbon fuels from atmospheric CO2 via Fischer-Tropsch synthesis.
We've already got the infrastructure in place for solar: our rooftops and the existing grid. And we've got the technology; labor and code compliance are the most expensive parts of any solar installation today. And we would have had the money...the $1.5 trillion we've burned blowing up brown people in the past decade would have quite nicely paid for the solarification of America.
What we lack is the moral integrity and courage to tell the Koch Brothers what to shove up their asses, and how far.
Cheers,
b&
First, I haven't run the numbers for the UK, but I suspect your estimates are likely overly pessimistic. Remember that solar PV still works on cloudy days; just not as well. You Brits might have to install more panels per person than those of us in more temperate climes, and you might need to supplement further with other sources.
But...you may be on an island, but you're hardly cut off from civilization. Germany, whose entire country is worse for solar than the gloomiest parts of the Continental US, is going gangbusters with solar. And I'm sure, once they've finally got some surplus, they'd be delighted to sell it to you -- as would the French and Spaniards and Italians...and, with a sufficiently advanced grid, even the Saudis. And you have "neighbors" to the west who have more geothermal power than they know what to do with already.
Besides. Nobody ever guaranteed that the future would be better than the past. It might become prohibitively expensive to live in Britain, with or without solar. Then again, it might become prohibitively expensive to live anywhere else, either. Such is life...and death.
Cheers,
b&
Of course, I'm not advocating for genocide nor throwing up our hands. As I've repeatedly noted in this thread, I've gone solar, myself, and I've also already noted how the money we burned blowing up Iraq and Afghanistan would have been just about enough to switch the US entirely over to photovoltaics.
I'm just not at all optimistic that we're going to make a wise choice. I hope we will, but it's looking quite likely that we'll instead see economic and population crashes as a result of resource depletion and widespread pollution (such as the collapse of the oceanic fish stocks we're already witnessing). And, of course the wars that will inevitably accompany such chaos.
I really, really don't want to see that happen, but I can't honestly say that I see a realistic path forward that avoids that sort of thing.
b&
I've done the next best thing; I've covered my roof in solar panels, and I'm generating half again as much electricity as I use -- enough to power the electric vehicle I plan on getting in the next couple years. It's far and away the best financial investment I've ever made, with a guaranteed nearly-risk-free ROI in the 10% range.
I don't have any interest in getting into the construction and roofing business. But the contractor who installed my system, American Solar Electric, is quite profitable. If you're a qualified tradesman in Arizona and need a great job, I can put you in touch with them....
Cheers,
b&
Again, no need to turn existing undeveloped areas into glass-covered parking lots; we've already got all the space we need on our rooftops.
But, for reference, it's an area smaller than Texas.
And, again again, we're already 80% there with the smart grid, which already needs to deal with plants going offline and coming back online. And solar is quite predictable at the timescales that utilities need to deal with; and we've got plenty of baseload capacity to tide us over as we ramp up utility-scale storage.
Indeed, had we invested that trillion and a half dollars we just blew up in Iraq and Afghanistan in solar power infrastructure, we'd already be there....
Cheers,
b&
Wind definitely has its place in the energy production mix of today and the future. However, as with hydroelectricity, it's just displaced solar and can't even come close to matching more direct solar energy harvesting (especially photovoltaic and solar thermal) on a global scale.
I wouldn't at all want to discourage somebody from harvesting wind power, and there're lots of situations where it'd be stupid to not do so. But, as incredibly wonderful as it is as a niche player, it's still a niche player. Wind by itself is never going to quench our thirst for energy.
b&
Of course, I was writing in the inclusive "we" -- that is, "we" as a society.
I've covered my roof in solar panels; I'm generating about half again as much electricity as I'm using, enough to power the electric car I hope to buy in the next couple years. I'm fully aware that some of us are doing all we can to do right by ourselves and the planet.
But, sadly, collectively, we're doing precisely diddly and squat (to any appreciable rounding margin). In no small part, of course, because of the parasites you mention.
b&
As Tom has most recently turned his attention to, the real problem is overpopulation, especially coupled with population growth. And I suspect he's about as pessimistic as I am at our chances of making it through this without an unprecedented crisis, if at all.
b&
A five-year payback time is equivalent to a 14% annual rate of return on your investment. Are you really so rich and / or foolish that you can afford to turn your nose up at a guaranteed 14% return on your investments?
b&
Electricity doesn't care which direction it flows. It's not like water that needs a push to get up a hill.
b&
First, we've already got more than enough baseload generation capacity for the indefinite future. We don't need to tear down what's already in place.
Second, I shit you not, we've already figured out how to store electricity. There're things called, "batteries," and you might even have one within arm's reach as you read these words; your next car might have one big enough to power your house for a day or so. Dams can be run in reverse during the day and drained again at night. Fuel cells work just as well backwards as forwards. Solar thermal plants are typically designed so they collect enough heat during the day to keep the turbines running through the night. Caverns can be pressurized. Or, if you're really feeling extravagant, you can, as I mentioned, use Fischer-Tropsch to generate hydrocarbons from CO2.
Is any of this as cheap as sticking a straw in the ground and sucking out crude oil? Well, actually, once you consider the cost of the externialities of oil production, it's a hell of a lot cheaper.
But, hey. You're apparently delighted to pay for the Koch Brothers's lives of luxury with your children's futures, so don't let any of this stop you.
Cheers,
b&
You're suggesting we should build brand-new dedicated infrastructure out in the middle of nowhere. That's what our current mined energy sources do, and it's silly.
We already have all the structures we need, and then some. They're called, "roofs," and they're conveniently located anywhere and everywhere that a human is likely to be and want to use energy. As an added bonus, they're on top of these other structures called, "walls," which -- I shit you not! -- are already wired into the grid.
Of course the other "problem" with rooftop solar generation is that the owner of the building is the one who's earning the profits from producing power, as opposed to a centralized megacorp owned by the Koch Brothers or one of their compatriots, and we just simply can't have that, now can we? Homeowners becoming profitable and partially-self-sustaining small businesses? Why, that's positively un-American!
Cheers,
b&
You only need to cover a half a percent of the Earth's surface with off-the-shelf 15% efficient PV panels to provide all of humanity all of its energy needs. If we covered all residential rooftops in the States with PV panels, we'd generate about as much electricity as the industrialized world needs -- and that's just residential rooftops just in the US.
To suggest that solar somehow isn't enough is just laughable. Hell, with the kind of abundance that solar offers, we've got far more than enough available to distill CO2 out of the atmosphere and turn it into hydrocarbons -- an incredibly energy-intensive process -- and use those hydrocarbons as our storage and transportation mechanisms just as we do today.
What we don't have is the willingness to invest our hydrocarbon inheritance in bootstrapping ourselves into such an energy-wealthy society. Instead, we'd rather squander our inheritance on monster SUVs and petroleum-based fertilizer to feed dozens of billions of people.
Here's some perspective from somebody who can actually do the math:
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/02/the-alternative-energy-matrix/
Cheers,
b&
If anybody still needs evidence that we're past peak oil, this is it.
Re-read that summary: two tons of sand have to be hauled away to the processing center just to get a single barrel of oil.
And remember Deepwater Horizon? The rig that went kablooie in the Gulf? The wellhead was a mile below the surface of the ocean, and the top of the deposits were seven miles below bedrock.
Long gone are the days when you had to be careful with your pickaxe in Texas lest you set off a gusher. We're now washing two tons of sand per barrel of oil just to feed the habit.
Oh, sure. There's still lots of oil left in the ground. About half as much as there was at the start of the industrial revolution, in fact. But it's all the nasty low-quality expensive shit that we would have laughed and turned up our noses at in the '70s. But not today.
Worst of all, we're now consuming oil at a faster rate than ever before in history. The only way we could keep the remaining half of reserves to last another century is if we decreased production by 2% - 3% annually, same as it used to grow. Can you imagine a century's worth of that kind of contraction?
No?
Then get ready for price shocks and the crash to end all crashes as we run out of what little is left in mere decades, and not that many.
Cheers,
b&
Can we please stop giving air to this obnoxious blowhard who's openly and actively campaigning for a full-on totalitarian police state?
I mean, really. It's one thing to offer up a controversial opinion every now and again to foster click-throughs, but the level of obscene absurdity this Haselton putz has taken it to is out of hand.
If /. is really dedicated to giving voice to somebody who thinks KGB- and Stasi-style policing are a good idea especially at a time when the NSA is running amok and our police have already been militarized, that'll be the straw that finally pushes me away.
Yes, Nazis and Nazi-wannabes like Haselton have the right to freedom of expression, even when they're advocating for those rights to be denied everybody else. But I'll not help magnify their voices. And if /. will, I'll exercise my freedom of association and stop associating with /.
Cheers,
b&
It's very, very expensive to move out of your home and then back in again, even to the same home. But if you don't -- for whatever reason -- have the money to pay the rent, that may well be your only choice.
If you're expecting to have the money but your boss's accounting department is simply incompetent, you might be able to plead with your landlord. Or maybe not.
But whether staying at home or moving out is cheaper is irrelevant to the question when the rent check comes due.
That money is being wasted isn't the fault of the agencies that are shutting down. It's the fault of the Republicans who're holding the entire country hostage in a blatantly un-Constitutional attempt to repeal majority-supported legislation. They've tried dozens of times to repeal the legislation through the normal legislative process and failed miserably each time; now, they're determined to wreck the national economy (with the shutdown) and possibly even the global economy (with the default) if the majority doesn't give in to their demands. They've shot multiple prisoners already (don't forget the ongoing sequester!) and are now threatening to blow up the whole building.
In a modern democracy, their actions would long ago have resulted in the dissolution of the government and a new round of elections. And the Obama administration's support for the NSA wiretapping would also have triggered elections. Such a shame we live in a place that's rested so much on its laurels and is now so far behind the times.
Cheers,
b&