Most people seem to be focused on new battery technologies, which are designed to be small and light-weight - which is not important for solar. These newer batteries also tend to last no more than 3-5 years, and they are made of toxic materials. The lack of reasonable battery storage is one major reason I think solar isn't going anywhere.
These old-tech iron-nickel batteries sound very interesting. That information is more convincing than 99% of the pro-solar propaganda I've read on Slashdot.
The basic cable rate IS set by the government agency that issues the franchise (legally forced monopoly). That's known as the LFA. Until 1996-1999, the FCC mostly set that rate, now it's primarily set by the LFA.
During the period of double regulation, 1992-1999, rates increased at 5.6% per year. Once the FCC stepped aside, that was reduced to 4.6%.
So knowing that having Washington bureaucrats set rates increases them, what reduces rates? Rates are 22%-30% lower in areas with competition.
> Linear time should be expected (if it takes longer per ticket when there are more, thats bad, but non-polynomial, thats just horrid)
If one person is having trouble with the web site, there are x0,000 possible causes, so you start with "what are the symptoms they are experiencing, what browser are they using", etc. If there are a flood of tickets about the web site, a few of which mention "can not resolve host name", you have have a DNS problem. More tickets = more information = less time to fix.
They are asking the government for a rate change, because the government sets the prices. Does that sound like free market to you?
If it WERE free market, customers would probably be charged based on the cost to serve them. If solar customers demand less from the utility, they pay less. It would certainly make you think twice about moving into the country, to some place where you have ten or twenty acres, though - installing and maintaining a mile of towers and lines for each customer would be expensive.
People can certainly do that. Having priced such systems a couple of times, I don't know why anyone who has access to utility power would spend huge piles of money on batteries that only last a few years, though. Maybe if there was a law forcing their neighbours to PAY them to waste money on expensive, toxic batteries.
The token connection fee, $2 or whatever, isn't significant. Get a cost quote to build power poles and run lines out to this guy's ranch and tell me $2 makes any difference whatsoever to the discussion.
If the connection fee were a) significant and b) based on the actual cost to run utilities to that particular customer, then you'd have a point. That, and if the utility were not forced to buy power they can't use. In some areas, utilities have to shunt power to ground, throwing it away, on sunny days - but they still have to buy the solar power they have no use for and have to pay to dispose of it.
TFS said they used an "aircraft", which I guess means "airplane". We better watch out - next thing you know, the sheriff's office will have helicopters and be able to hover, watching someone for a while. With an airplane, they can only watch for a couple minutes before they've flown by.
You are absolutely right. You should start sending me that $500 / month you're saving for retirement. In 20 years, I'll send the exact same amount back. There is no reason you should be getting that gain from your mutual fund.
Oh, I forgot. You're clueless, so you're probably not saving for retirement, but rather expecting the government to take the money I save and give it to you. Anyway, just loan me $1,000. I'll pay you back in 20 years. The interest rate? What do you mean interest rate? Why would you expect a return?
That WOULD be fair, for everyone to cover their share of the cost, what it actually costs to provide service to them. It's not politically possible, though, because residential bills would jump much higher. For years now, residential rates have been heavily subsidized by business customers. Outside of cities, it can cost hundreds of thousands to run lines several miles to serve a few households that have acreage. Suzy the barrel racer isn't going to pay $50,000 for the power to her house and barn.
Making it fair (everyone pays their own costs) would result in 500 happy companies for every 100,000 pisses off households (voters).
Did you click "reply" on the wrong post, because it doesn't sound like you read mine.
Let's pretend for a moment that solar can actually work on a large scale, maybe some new solar panel comes out that's 500% efficient. So most companies install solar panels. Therefore, the power company doesn't have to generate ANY power around noon. They save boatloads of money, right? They don't need to generate that peak power. (Not on sunny days, anyway, they still need to maintain the capacity.)
Okay, so the utility is now spending less. They are also billing most customers $0. They have zero revenue. Explain to me how you run a large utility without any money.
They say they want to start working out a solution BEFORE it becomes a big problem.
A solar customer could sell lots of power to them around noon, and use about the same amount at night. This customer would have an electric bill of $0, because they put as much energy into the grid as they took out. In 10 or 20 years, if a million customers are doing that, you have the power company trying to run on a budget of zero - no money to pay salaries, no money to fix equipment, etc. Obviously that doesn't work, the power company would go broke and noone would have power, except while it's sunny. They don't want to wait until that happens to address the problem, a problem which probably will occur if nothing is changed.
> Meanwhile, the partner who spearheaded the push got sufficient bonuses (from AA) to compensate him for the lack of any future career. > He was on their executive board by the end of it pulling in a fat, fat bonus every year based exclusively on his Enron relationship.
Does this supposed person have a name? Any citation for any of that?
I started to mention that and link to a study that measured soil C, but the rude AC didn't merit it. As you said, growing corn for food kernels and tilling the rest in is fine. The amount of carbon that comes out of the soil is roughly equal to the amount that's in the leaves and stalks, so tilling those back in makes food production roughly carbon neutral. If you take those tillings to make cellulistic ethanol, then the soil carbon is reduced. The carbon that was in the soil ends up in the air.
Of course none of this occurs on other planets, which are also warming, but that's another discussion.
Unfortunately, no. You may be aware that the air is 79% nitrogen, yet fertilizer is mostly nitrogen, because plants take nitrogen from the soil , not from the air. Corn does the same with carbon. That's one reason that corn is a stupid way to produce ethanol and switchgrass is a better choice.
There are two major reasons it DOES matter, as explained in TFA. First, much of the CO2 is not from burning the ethanol, but from producing it. Imagine if the tractors, stills, etc. burned four gallons if diesel to produce on gallon of ethanol. Every gallon of ethanol you put in your car caused four gallons of diesel to be burned. That's the concept, though of course it's not quite that simple.
Secondly, it isn't the total amount of carbon that matters. There is always the exact same amount of carbon on the planet, modulo meteorites. The problem with fossil fuels is that they take carbon out of the ground and put it into the atmosphere. It's carbon in the atmosphere that's the problem. Corn ethanol does the exact same thing - carbon from the ground goes into the corn. When you burn it, that carbon ends up in the atmosphere - just like burning gasoline.
> So I'm still wondering what the regulation is meant to do, apart from limiting the number of PE's, or software engineers, that can apply for certain lucrative jobs.
I'm glad that someone more qualified than I has reviewed and safety of the bridges I drive on every day. Just like M.D. lets me know that a doctor meets qualifications, PE does the same - it indicates that the person I'm trusting to make life-safety decisions is somewhat qualified to do so. That is the purpose.
I'm a "small government" guy - my posts here show that. I don't like the new requirements in Texas for a locksmith license. (I briefly worked as a locksmith.). I do, however, see the purpose in defining who is qualified to sign off on the safety of a new stadium, or a high rise building. I'm glad they don't allow someone like me to decide if the new stadium is safe or not.
It's been done for over 100 years, millions of head of cattle fed, and not one has gotten sick. In the same time period, tens of thousands of cattle have gotten sick from grazing on the wrong type of wildflower. Technically, there is some minute risk, but it's a lot less risky than flowers.
Something tells me you are entirely unfamiliar with agriculture. Go spend 10 minutes in any kind of ag facility and then tell me what the FDA should be doing is jacking around with something that's proven safe. You might become a vegetarian for a while after you see your foods rolling around in it's own poop, but you'll definitely realize that feeding human-grade grain to cattle is NOT what anyone should be worried about.
Most engineering graduates aren't PEs - you don't need the credential to work as an engineer. It indicates a certain level of professionalism, so people can choose to hire a PE. Of course in some life-safety situations there might be a regulation saying you can't do X (build a highway bridge) until a PE signs off the design.
It's not like a union where it's illegal to hire people that have identical qualifications. It pretty much just defines the label "Professional Engineer" to mean someone who has passed the test etc. to show they are qualified. If you want to hire an untested engineer, you're free to do so, and most people do exactly that.
* I'm not currently a PE, nor an expert in the field, so I may be mistaken about something in this post and I welcome any corrections.
I called the Texas licensing board asking how this is supposed to work and the person who answered pretty much said "yeah, you're screwed, unless you've been working as some other type of engineer".
I'd really like to talk to you about just how you went about getting licensed, and under what conditions you'd sign off on someone else. If you're nearby, maybe I can buy you lunch sometime. I can be reached at deepmagicbeginshere AT gmail.
If a someone burns a gallon of 90% gas, 10% ethanol, they've only burned 0.9 gallons of gas. Yay, less gas burned! That's the win.
However, people don't drive 1 gallon to work, they drive X miles to get to work. Since the blend has lower mpg, more of it is burned on the same trip. For easy math, let's look at a 33 mile trip, in a car that gets 33 mpg on gas. Using 100% gas, that trip will burn 1 gallon of gas. That's a key number:
33 mile trip = 1 gallon of pure gas
With the blend, the mpg will be about 10% lower, or 30 mpg. Therefore, it will take 1.1 gallons of blend to make the trip.
33 mile trip = 1.1 gallon of blend
Let's divide that blend into its components:
33 mile trip = 1 gallon of gas + 0.1 gallon of ethanol
So what have we saved. In the first instance, we burned one gallon of gas. In the second instance, we burned one gallon of gas, plus.1 gallon of ethanol. We've saved nothing. We have, however, increased the cost of food by wastefully burning corn that could have been eaten.
> By your reasoning, we had been using asbestos for 4500 years, so surely if there was something inherently unsafe about it, we would have known about it 4400 years ago.
Asbestos was a curiosity until about 1900, when it started to be used a lot. Pliny wrote about the dangers of it 1800 years earlier, in 80 AD. Other people probably knew about the danger earlier, but Pliny's writings are the oldest we still have available for reading on the subject.
The FDA has in fact said there have been no problems, ie the rule is not necessary, but they felt like making some new rules just in case. GP doesn't assume anything - the FDA agrees with his assertion as to the facts. They just feel that they have nothing better to do, so they might as well come up with some new rules. GP believes that new rules need justification.
> Yeah, those CPAs auditing Enron did a bang-up job of it, didn't they?
The 100-year old firm that audited Enron was worth over nine BILLION dollars at the time. It's now worth a few thousand, because nobody will ever hire them. The market executed them.
Arthur Anderson was a 100-year old brand worth $9.3 billion. Because they violated the public trust, they are now worth about $0. The company still exists, but noone will buy from them.
Sony, on the other hand, is still selling electronics after rooting their customers' computers wholesale. Electronics company does something unethical - they have a PR problem for a few months. CPA does something unethical - the market executed them.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people seem to be focused on new battery technologies, which are designed to be small and light-weight - which is not important for solar. These newer batteries also tend to last no more than 3-5 years, and they are made of toxic materials. The lack of reasonable battery storage is one major reason I think solar isn't going anywhere.
These old-tech iron-nickel batteries sound very interesting. That information is more convincing than 99% of the pro-solar propaganda I've read on Slashdot.
The basic cable rate IS set by the government agency that issues the franchise (legally forced monopoly). That's known as the LFA. Until 1996-1999, the FCC mostly set that rate, now it's primarily set by the LFA.
During the period of double regulation, 1992-1999, rates increased at 5.6% per year. Once the FCC stepped aside, that was reduced to 4.6%.
So knowing that having Washington bureaucrats set rates increases them, what reduces rates? Rates are 22%-30% lower in areas with competition.
> Linear time should be expected (if it takes longer per ticket when there are more, thats bad, but non-polynomial, thats just horrid)
If one person is having trouble with the web site, there are x0,000 possible causes, so you start with "what are the symptoms they are experiencing, what browser are they using", etc. If there are a flood of tickets about the web site, a few of which mention "can not resolve host name", you have have a DNS problem. More tickets = more information = less time to fix.
They are asking the government for a rate change, because the government sets the prices. Does that sound like free market to you?
If it WERE free market, customers would probably be charged based on the cost to serve them. If solar customers demand less from the utility, they pay less. It would certainly make you think twice about moving into the country, to some place where you have ten or twenty acres, though - installing and maintaining a mile of towers and lines for each customer would be expensive.
People can certainly do that. Having priced such systems a couple of times, I don't know why anyone who has access to utility power would spend huge piles of money on batteries that only last a few years, though. Maybe if there was a law forcing their neighbours to PAY them to waste money on expensive, toxic batteries.
The token connection fee, $2 or whatever, isn't significant. Get a cost quote to build power poles and run lines out to this guy's ranch and tell me $2 makes any difference whatsoever to the discussion.
If the connection fee were a) significant and b) based on the actual cost to run utilities to that particular customer, then you'd have a point. That, and if the utility were not forced to buy power they can't use. In some areas, utilities have to shunt power to ground, throwing it away, on sunny days - but they still have to buy the solar power they have no use for and have to pay to dispose of it.
TFS said they used an "aircraft", which I guess means "airplane". We better watch out - next thing you know, the sheriff's office will have helicopters and be able to hover, watching someone for a while. With an airplane, they can only watch for a couple minutes before they've flown by.
You are absolutely right. You should start sending me that $500 / month you're saving for retirement. In 20 years, I'll send the exact same amount back. There is no reason you should be getting that gain from your mutual fund.
Oh, I forgot. You're clueless, so you're probably not saving for retirement, but rather expecting the government to take the money I save and give it to you. Anyway, just loan me $1,000. I'll pay you back in 20 years. The interest rate? What do you mean interest rate? Why would you expect a return?
That WOULD be fair, for everyone to cover their share of the cost, what it actually costs to provide service to them. It's not politically possible, though, because residential bills would jump much higher. For years now, residential rates have been heavily subsidized by business customers. Outside of cities, it can cost hundreds of thousands to run lines several miles to serve a few households that have acreage. Suzy the barrel racer isn't going to pay $50,000 for the power to her house and barn.
Making it fair (everyone pays their own costs) would result in 500 happy companies for every 100,000 pisses off households (voters).
Did you click "reply" on the wrong post, because it doesn't sound like you read mine.
Let's pretend for a moment that solar can actually work on a large scale, maybe some new solar panel comes out that's 500% efficient. So most companies install solar panels. Therefore, the power company doesn't have to generate ANY power around noon. They save boatloads of money, right? They don't need to generate that peak power. (Not on sunny days, anyway, they still need to maintain the capacity.)
Okay, so the utility is now spending less. They are also billing most customers $0. They have zero revenue. Explain to me how you run a large utility without any money.
They say they want to start working out a solution BEFORE it becomes a big problem.
A solar customer could sell lots of power to them around noon, and use about the same amount at night. This customer would have an electric bill of $0, because they put as much energy into the grid as they took out. In 10 or 20 years, if a million customers are doing that, you have the power company trying to run on a budget of zero - no money to pay salaries, no money to fix equipment, etc. Obviously that doesn't work, the power company would go broke and noone would have power, except while it's sunny. They don't want to wait until that happens to address the problem, a problem which probably will occur if nothing is changed.
> Meanwhile, the partner who spearheaded the push got sufficient bonuses (from AA) to compensate him for the lack of any future career.
> He was on their executive board by the end of it pulling in a fat, fat bonus every year based exclusively on his Enron relationship.
Does this supposed person have a name? Any citation for any of that?
I started to mention that and link to a study that measured soil C, but the rude AC didn't merit it. As you said, growing corn for food kernels and tilling the rest in is fine. The amount of carbon that comes out of the soil is roughly equal to the amount that's in the leaves and stalks, so tilling those back in makes food production roughly carbon neutral. If you take those tillings to make cellulistic ethanol, then the soil carbon is reduced. The carbon that was in the soil ends up in the air.
Of course none of this occurs on other planets, which are also warming, but that's another discussion.
Unfortunately, no. You may be aware that the air is 79% nitrogen, yet fertilizer is mostly nitrogen, because plants take nitrogen from the soil , not from the air. Corn does the same with carbon. That's one reason that corn is a stupid way to produce ethanol and switchgrass is a better choice.
There are two major reasons it DOES matter, as explained in TFA. First, much of the CO2 is not from burning the ethanol, but from producing it. Imagine if the tractors, stills, etc. burned four gallons if diesel to produce on gallon of ethanol. Every gallon of ethanol you put in your car caused four gallons of diesel to be burned. That's the concept, though of course it's not quite that simple.
Secondly, it isn't the total amount of carbon that matters. There is always the exact same amount of carbon on the planet, modulo meteorites. The problem with fossil fuels is that they take carbon out of the ground and put it into the atmosphere. It's carbon in the atmosphere that's the problem. Corn ethanol does the exact same thing - carbon from the ground goes into the corn. When you burn it, that carbon ends up in the atmosphere - just like burning gasoline.
> So I'm still wondering what the regulation is meant to do, apart from limiting the number of PE's, or software engineers, that can apply for certain lucrative jobs.
I'm glad that someone more qualified than I has reviewed and safety of the bridges I drive on every day. Just like M.D. lets me know that a doctor meets qualifications, PE does the same - it indicates that the person I'm trusting to make life-safety decisions is somewhat qualified to do so. That is the purpose.
I'm a "small government" guy - my posts here show that. I don't like the new requirements in Texas for a locksmith license. (I briefly worked as a locksmith.). I do, however, see the purpose in defining who is qualified to sign off on the safety of a new stadium, or a high rise building. I'm glad they don't allow someone like me to decide if the new stadium is safe or not.
Actually what I do is more heavy wizardry than deep magic. :)
It's been done for over 100 years, millions of head of cattle fed, and not one has gotten sick. In the same time period, tens of thousands of cattle have gotten sick from grazing on the wrong type of wildflower. Technically, there is some minute risk, but it's a lot less risky than flowers.
Something tells me you are entirely unfamiliar with agriculture. Go spend 10 minutes in any kind of ag facility and then tell me what the FDA should be doing is jacking around with something that's proven safe. You might become a vegetarian for a while after you see your foods rolling around in it's own poop, but you'll definitely realize that feeding human-grade grain to cattle is NOT what anyone should be worried about.
Most engineering graduates aren't PEs - you don't need the credential to work as an engineer. It indicates a certain level of professionalism, so people can choose to hire a PE. Of course in some life-safety situations there might be a regulation saying you can't do X (build a highway bridge) until a PE signs off the design.
It's not like a union where it's illegal to hire people that have identical qualifications. It pretty much just defines the label "Professional Engineer" to mean someone who has passed the test etc. to show they are qualified. If you want to hire an untested engineer, you're free to do so, and most people do exactly that.
* I'm not currently a PE, nor an expert in the field, so I may be mistaken about something in this post and I welcome any corrections.
I called the Texas licensing board asking how this is supposed to work and the person who answered pretty much said "yeah, you're screwed, unless you've been working as some other type of engineer".
I'd really like to talk to you about just how you went about getting licensed, and under what conditions you'd sign off on someone else. If you're nearby, maybe I can buy you lunch sometime. I can be reached at deepmagicbeginshere AT gmail.
If a someone burns a gallon of 90% gas, 10% ethanol, they've only burned 0.9 gallons of gas. Yay, less gas burned! That's the win.
However, people don't drive 1 gallon to work, they drive X miles to get to work. Since the blend has lower mpg, more of it is burned on the same trip. For easy math, let's look at a 33 mile trip, in a car that gets 33 mpg on gas. Using 100% gas, that trip will burn 1 gallon of gas. That's a key number:
33 mile trip = 1 gallon of pure gas
With the blend, the mpg will be about 10% lower, or 30 mpg. Therefore, it will take 1.1 gallons of blend to make the trip.
33 mile trip = 1.1 gallon of blend
Let's divide that blend into its components:
33 mile trip = 1 gallon of gas + 0.1 gallon of ethanol
So what have we saved. In the first instance, we burned one gallon of gas. In the second instance, we burned one gallon of gas, plus .1 gallon of ethanol. We've saved nothing. We have, however, increased the cost of food by wastefully burning corn that could have been eaten.
> By your reasoning, we had been using asbestos for 4500 years, so surely if there was something inherently unsafe about it, we would have known about it 4400 years ago.
Asbestos was a curiosity until about 1900, when it started to be used a lot. Pliny wrote about the dangers of it 1800 years earlier, in 80 AD. Other people probably knew about the danger earlier, but Pliny's writings are the oldest we still have available for reading on the subject.
The FDA has in fact said there have been no problems, ie the rule is not necessary, but they felt like making some new rules just in case. GP doesn't assume anything - the FDA agrees with his assertion as to the facts. They just feel that they have nothing better to do, so they might as well come up with some new rules. GP believes that new rules need justification.
> Yeah, those CPAs auditing Enron did a bang-up job of it, didn't they?
The 100-year old firm that audited Enron was worth over nine BILLION dollars at the time. It's now worth a few thousand, because nobody will ever hire them. The market executed them.
Compare Sony and their root kit.
Arthur Anderson was a 100-year old brand worth $9.3 billion. Because they violated the public trust, they are now worth about $0. The company still exists, but noone will buy from them.
Sony, on the other hand, is still selling electronics after rooting their customers' computers wholesale. Electronics company does something unethical - they have a PR problem for a few months. CPA does something unethical - the market executed them.