paying my electric bill is an investment I profit on because it frees up capital for other investments which pay much better than investing in solar. If it takes 30,000 to get rid of that $150/mo bill, then the ROI on the 30,000 is like 25 years. I would be much better served to take my 30,000 and invest it in fixed income at 5%, over those same 25 years I'll have 60,000+. If I buy the solar system, I have a system that has aged to its life, and is in need of replacement, I don't have 30,000 because I haven't saved nearly that much on my electric bill. I have to take out another loan to re-purchase the cells for the next 25 years... it is a zero sum game.
On the other hand, if I keep buying energy from pacificorp from the nice coal plant down the street, I keep paying 150/mo. I have 30,000 invested at 5%/yr. that is $1500/yr... which more than covers the costs for coal production. If I can improve my investment returns, I will have even more money.
The only way out of this is if we increased solar efficiency by 100%+ or decreased costs by 50% (neither of which I see happening any time soon), then instead of 1KW for 30,000, I can get 2KW for 30k, now instead of just breaking even, I am making $150/mo through net metering (which I was taking into account before... In the winter months I will produce about 50% of the solar energy as in summer months because of a) position of my roof and b) shorter days, the system I designed that would cost 30,000 would just barely satisfy my needs) so I cut my ROI in half. Now in 12 years I have paid off my system, and I'm now "making" $300/mo, which I can save up for 13 years to repurchase cells.
At current costs and efficiency, solar just can't cut it.
My point is this, you can't finance it at the individual level. I have tried. I could get a home equity loan to finance it, but at current interest rates and a 10 year term, well I'd be paying $350/mo to save 150. Even after the loan is paid back, I'd still need another 20+ years before I would be realizing any "profit". Further what if I want to move? I'm not going to be able to sell installed solar for what I paid for it. It won't add 30k in value to my house, because it isn't worth 30k in any sort of ROI scenario. An investment is worth what it produces. If you are an investor and you buy a cash flow for more than 10 times the cash flow, you are an idiot. Unless it is growing really fast (like greater than 100%) which solar is not.
Example: I am an investor, I have 100 million dollars. I can spend that on Google in 2002 through Venture Capital, or I can build a solar plant. Based on your numbers I could build ~100MW solar plant for 100 million (you cited 600 million for 500MW, so I'm giving some wiggle room on your side). As an aside do your numbers include the cost of the land? That can power @ 1KW/home 100,000 homes? Ok, so figuring $150/mo 6 months out of the year, and $75/mo in the winter (yes I'm using my extremely limited sample of 1 for those numbers, I have no idea what the "average" electric bill is) that is 1350/yr/home.
1350 * 100,000 = 135,000,000. Right now I know your numbers cited in your article are wrong. If the math really worked out like this, and there was less than 1 yr ROI on a solar plant, it would have been done by now. The market would have done this already.
So now for the real numbers. To generate 1KW of electricity from solar, retail is 30K+. so, 100,000KW (100MW) is 3 billion dollars. Granted they wouldn't be doing it retail, but say the mark up on retail is 100% (IE wholesale is 15k), if the markup is more than that, again, everyone would be producing solar panels, because it is a hideously profitable business. Even if the wholesale->retail markup is 100%, 100MW still costs 1.5 billion, not 100 million. Lets say the markup is 200%, so its 10k for 1KW wholesale. Well, you still have 1 billion for 100MW, and that is just the panels! That doesn't include labor, that doesn't include transformers, that doesn't include land, or anything else. That is the panel that sits on the ground. Now then, you can generate a 135 million revenue stream from something that costs at least 1 billion, and because so much is stripped out of that 1 billion dollars it will be much more than that. Labor alone will be at least as much as the solar panels, so you're at 2 billion right there. Now with interest on your initial loan to do the thing in the first place you are looking at a 20 year + ROI. And the cells all have to be replaced at 25 years, so you're looking at another 1 billion+ in year 25, you just barely paid off your debt, much less paying for people to actually manage the system.
Of course there is another problem with this scenario. The revenue from solar energy will only grow as fast as oil prices increase. If we deployed 100% solar, what do you think would happen to oil prices, coal prices? Natural gas prices? Yes that's right they would plummet. Guess what would happen then? Gas would be back at $1/gallon. Who would pay $3 for ethanol? Who would pay an extra 10k for an electric only car? No one. The problem is none of the renewable energy sources compete with oil unless oil is > $70/barrel, and we have the catch 22 that if we deploy 100% renewables, it will drive the price of oil down, and you will get even less return on your solar plant (IE, the nat gas fired plant down the street can give you.02 kwh electricity now, because nat gas has dropped 80% in price). You now have to sell your electricity for.02/kwh, which means your ROI just went from 20 years to > 60 years.
Compare that to the 100 million I put in google in 2002. I have > 3 billion dollars cash today, and no debt.
You got me there, I've been in the UK a number of times, but never even rode in a taxi. All trains and the tube, except for a couple of break downs on the tube, always seemed like a much easier way to get around than here in the US where going to the grocery store is a 20-25 minute drive depending on traffic. I'd much rather wait 5 minutes for the tube, and have it only take 10-20 minutes to get there...
Re:But what about the carbon dioxide?
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Driving on Starch
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It is zero emission the same way that ethanol or bio diesel is zero emission. Yes the reaction produces CO2, but it is the CO2 that the plant just pulled in during the last year (or 10) while it was being grown. It is not putting CO2 that has been trapped for millions of years into the atmosphere the way fossil fuels are.
Sorry to reply twice, I would like to say that I telecommute to work 2-3 days a week, and I really think that is the best/easiest way that the US could cut emissions from cars.
Unfortunately, cars really aren't our biggest problem. only 25% of our emissions are from cars, if we got rid of cars altogether it wouldn't comply with this agreement. If we cut our car emissions by 50% (telecommuted 50% of the time, got twice the gas mileage we do now whichever) it would only cut our emissions by 12.5%. That leaves almost 40% still to be cut. The largest polluter we have is our electric generation complex. It needs to be all nuclear or a lot of wind/solar needs to be brought online. Either way, its gonna cost billions and be more expensive than coal is, so there will be a lot of pressure against it.
yes, it will fit on the roof, but it still costs 30k+ to do it. If it takes 30k for me to go out and produce my own electricity, it will probably cost the grid twice as much as they have to worry about redundancy, and they have other regulations they have to comply with.
So, either everyone in the US has to have 30k laying around to DIY electric production, or the huge for profit corps have to spend at least the same amount (times however many customers they are servicing) and purchase a bunch of land to boot and it simply won't be competitive with coal, nat gas, or nuclear.
I saw a special on your texas wind farms a couple weeks ago. the only reason it is cheaper is because they got huge subsidies on the installation of the wind farms (subsidies President Bush put through as Governor.. go figure?!).
Unfortunately, and I'm being serious here, the same rules don't apply in england, france, germany or any of the EU countries.
The US is simply a much larger country than any in the EU. To take family vacations it almost always means a 10+ hour car trip. try putting 6 people in a car that gets 50MPG+. Not going to be fun. And you'll get a bunch of tickets for not having a seat belt for each person in the car. From london its what a 3-4hr drive to anywhere in the country? Heck its a 1.5 hour train ride to Paris. 3 hours doesn't even get me out of my state.
Now, mass transport would be great, I love trains, unfortunately the US has nothing like Eurostar. The only remaining passenger train company in the states gets more than 50% of its revenues from subsidies, and the tax payers will not agree to give one more cent to a company bleeding so much red.
Planes for 6 people (worse than the car ride in terms of carbon) are prohibitively expensive, buses (while probably being net gain for carbon) cost > $100/person for a ride of 10 hours, so $600 for 6 people. And then I have to rent a car once I get where I'm going because unless you are in a city center there is no mass transit in cities. Now I'm not trying to defend that, it is simply the reality especially in the western US. Or I can pay about $200 for gas in the SUV and off we go.
Raising taxes on that gas would cause 1 thing. Lots of unhappy people who can no longer afford vacations at all. Further, it would be great if cars were free and I could have a nice little car to jet around the city, and then have a decent sized car for trips. Unfortunately, that isn't the case, so most US families have 1 car for city driving and 1 for trips, and the person who is responsible for the kids takes the big SUV all over the city. Again, I'd be happy to keep the SUV parked 99% of the time, but I can't afford 3 cars.
If it were a perfect world and there was mass transit between and inside every US city, then this all would be a moot point. This infrastructure simply doesn't exist in the US. In London and Paris you can jump on the subway and get anywhere in the city. You can do the same in NY, Boston, and to a much lesser extent LA. But 95% of US cities > 1 million people don't even have a subway, some don't even have bus systems. Further, in the UK, and France at least, you can get almost anywhere whenever you want on a train. Nothing would make me happier than if this were to come about in the US. Unfortunately, I really don't see it happening any time soon. Even cities that are trying to deploy mass transit do it very poorly. I don't know why, but every attempt I've seen has caused many more problems than it has solved, and it has lost millions if not billions of dollars.
The US is very bad at central planning, maybe its a result of the cold war, I think its just because we have always been more independent, but we really suck at it. The only solution then is abundant cheap energy (Nuclear would be great) so we can have clean cars running on hydrogen. Unfortunately since the environmentalists have shut down nuclear as an option, our only other option would be a breakthrough in renewable energy, and I really don't see that happening either, we've tried to make solar good, and it just never gets any better (ok, maybe someone finds something and makes it.5% more efficient, but we need a doubling or tripling to 30-45% efficiency)
I completely agree. Nuclear would be great. As I stated in my post, it will never happen. The same environmentalists that want reduced emissions fight nuclear tooth and nail as well.
Ok, so Greenpeace leaked that the US is against this "communique" but they don't specify anything in the communique except that it requires reducing emissions. What are the specifics? Does it single the US out in any way? Does it put broader or more strenuous penalties on the US? Neither of these things would surprise me coming from Germany. There are a million things that the US could be objecting to. Not including third world countries in the agreement, singling out coal power production for special penalties, maybe it specifies per capita caps (the US uses more energy per capita than anyone else). My point is, without seeing the actual communique, this is just Greenpeace making headlines. It is more of the same from the environmentalists: "Here's something scary and bad, but we won't give you the actual facts, just take our word for it, the US sucks".
Further, if the G8 did reduce emissions by 50% by 2050 (below 1990 levels... um... ok, so we reduce our energy consumption by 50% and don't completely destroy our economy how?). Even if we come up with a huge breakthrough on the energy production front, and we manage to reduce emissions by that much, China and India will both be producing 5-10 times more emissions than they are today, and today China and India are producing almost as much as the US. They aren't covered by this agreement at all. So net result is, global warming still just as much of a problem and the developed world has no economy left, or wasted hundreds of billions converting over to clean power.
The problem with agreements like this is that you can't know, say the G8 (including US) signs this agreement, and now its 2048, and no one has made fusion work, wind power is still too costly, and too sporadic, wave power doesn't pan out, solar power is still only 15% efficient, nuclear power because of local regulations is not an option... And we have this global treaty that on Jan 1 2050 requires us to pay huge penalties or turn off half our economy.... There is not a good solution to the energy problem, and you don't commit yourself to something extremely detrimental to your economy, way of life, people in general hoping for a massive breakthrough. And that is exactly what this is hoping. We would need a seriously massive breakthrough on some renewable energy front (nuclear, solar, wind, whatever) to comply with this regulation. There is nothing that seems to be on the horizon which would allow us to comply. Hydrogen cars? Great but hydrogen takes energy to produce, so now we're burning more coal. Electric cars, same problem. The only solution is to go completely nuclear. But thanks to these same environmentalists, that is 100% impossible in the US. It will not happen.
The only other possibility is to start spending billions if not hundreds of billions buying up huge swathes of land to put up wind farms or solar panels, and then there is still huge amounts of regulation, law suits, all sorts of things that will happen with that. I wanted to take my house off the grid, but it is impossible for 99% of americans to pull this off, because solar panels to power even a modest home cost > 30k. Very few people have that money sitting around, and even if they did, they would be stupid to spend it on something that will at most save them 100-150/mo on their electric bill. 30+ year ROI is not considered a good investment anywhere.
I think that line quite sums up what is being said by the GP. Americans have decided to stop being widget scientists. Now, the whyfore of the pricing situation you have presented is because these widgets used to cost $30, then globalization came along, and now we have chinese and indian widget scientists who will work 80 hour weeks for $15/month. So the chinese firm can sell a widget for $3.85. The american firm has no choice, outsource and get those cheap widget scientists, or go out of business trying to sell a $30 widget.
However, some of the stuff that goes on is just blatant greed. IBM making billions in PROFIT (after all the costs are accounted for) will still screw their employees in favor of sending stuff to china or india, or they will just keep payscales down because they can and its such an "honor" to work for IBM. This is where there are issues. These are jobs and markets where there is quite clearly a large profit margin (people are still selling the $30 widget). Or, say Microsoft which clears > 20 billion a year. Bill Gates said recently they have 3k+ software development positions each YEAR that they "can't" fill. In sworn testimony. To the US congress. Well, I've looked at MS, I've looked at Yahoo, I've looked at Amazon. They don't offer any more money than I'm currently making. Yet, they all have billions in free cash flow. If they want to motivate people to take positions with them they need to up the ante. Especially since they are all located in impossibly expensive cities. I live in Salt Lake. My 75k/yr salary has me living very nicely in a home I own, 2 cars, wife, 1 kid, everythings great. Now, the MS position I interviewed for last year was offering 75-80k/yr, but I've got to live in/near seattle, where a house costs > 500k (I paid 170k for mine). Gas is more expensive, taxes (property taxes, sales tax, etc) are more than 2x's as much as here, yet the salary is exactly the same.... No thanks. If MS upped their salary 50%, said if you develop software for us, you will make 6 figures, well 1) yahoo, amazon, google, et al would be forced by the market to up their pay scales. 2) alot more people would do CS degrees.
Another thing MS/IBM/yahoo/google/amazon could do is actually offer some sort of "extraordinary" pay. In the late 90's it was stock options. That doesn't work anymore. The company I work for offers a percentage of profit of anything we as employees "invent". So say I'm working today on our core product, and think "oh, here's this side project, I could take this code, build service xyz around it". Basically its like Google's 20% engineering time, except, when I present my 20% project to my manager, it is a negotiation, and I negotiate my percentage of the profits from it, and we make out a contract, and then its off, and if the sales guys close a million dollars in sales on my new system, well, I get a bonus of 5-10% of that. If I make something that really takes off and is going to make hundreds of millions, well I'm set. If the company sells off my product, I get a percentage of that. There is a lot big companies could do to reward their employees for innovation, creativity, and producing besides stock options. Unfortunately, none of them do, this is another reason I think big software companies have a hard time finding new young talent. The young talent sees MS, Yahoo, Amazon and says, well why go there the big money's already been made? I'll never make it big there, I'll work 40+ hour weeks for 5 years and then they'll send my job to india.
I was in a CS program in 2000. I watched what happened. The bottom fell out of the dot com boom, and seriously, by the next semester class sizes were down by 25-50%. Everyone went to business degrees. Then the whole outsourcing thing didn't help any. However, you can't argue with the fact that MS, IBM, HP, they all make obscene amounts of money, and they all complain that there aren't enough engineers. Well, if they would pay more, I'm sure there would be more engineers.
I wasn't saying anything about the comparable costs of the system vs some other system. I don't think this is extremely cost effective because: a) It requires expensive inputs (aluminum and gallium) b) In the best case it requires a fuel cell and electric motor + the expensive inputs
I don't know what ICE stands for, are you saying ICE is cheaper than fuel cell and electric motor? Are you saying that it is a better solution?
Platinum is also used in fuel cells, so I doubt you could drop that cost, just move it from the cat converter to the fuel cell.
In the best case, we would be using the hydrogen produced in this reaction in an efficient fuel cell which would allow for much higher efficiency than hydrogen combustion. The article mentiones 75% efficiency for the fuel cell vs 25% efficiency for the combustion. I don't know if palladium is used in fuel cells, but I do know that the cost of Platinum is one of the major factors in getting fuel cells priced reasonably.
wrong. The pellets are an aluminum gallium alloy. yes, you can recycle the pellets and reuse them, but going from 0 gallium in our gas tanks to even 5-10KG (they are talking about 350lbs of the alloy in a tank, I think its safe to assume at least 10-20lbs of that is gallium), well at $500/KG, that is 2500-5000 added to the cost of every car.
as a developer I think I would hate this idea. Having to go into a virtual world to collaborate? Email and IM is just fine.
Also most of the time when I'm writing code, having another channel of interruptions is just suicide. Already with email, IM, phone, and in person interruptions its difficult to get 2-3 hours of solid coding in in a day. Add this to the mix, who knows, if at any time someone can just jump on and request a meeting on the thing...
While you debunked most of his arguments, you failed to mention the battery replacement issue. I went shopping for a hybrid and decided against it for this very reason. All of the money you save in gas plus some more gets eaten up when you replace the batteries. I had a toyota dealership tell me "The batteries are rated for 8 years, but we've had people have them go bad and need to be replaced after just 2. And the batteries aren't covered under any warranty beyond 1 year." The same dealership told me the price for the battery pack was $4500. That is not acceptable, that is like replacing the engine every 2-8 years.
Sorry to reply again (I wish slashdot allowed comment edits).
What if we made sendmail, postfix, et al. categorically reject any email sent from outlook, or relayed by exchange?
The main backbone of most large email systems are still run by unix and OSS. I have seen plenty of "MS" fixes in the configuration of these services. Places where MS clients or relays don't conform to RFCs or in some way or another are disfunctional. Currently the OSS attitude towards that is "Ok, lets put in a configuration option, and work around MS". If we stopped doing that, we'd pretty easily break MS.
well, first off, what if the Apache founders changed the code to block IE. PERIOD.
IE comes to a site served by apache, and the server refuses to serve pages to it, maybe a special new error code "Your browser spreads viruses, as such, we have disabled access" and a link to firefox.
I agree with the sentiment of your post with one caveat.
Often times the attitude of "if it's difficult for the sysadmin to do, who cares?" will produce outlandish schedules, impossible deadlines, and produce huge headaches for everyone involved.
In prior jobs in IT I have had bosses and CEOs who are not technical and have this attitude. There is no better way to destroy moral. When the CEO comes to you and says "Hey, we need feature XYZ that I just read about in CIO magazine, and we need it to show the investors who are coming next week". Well, feature XYZ is going to take 300 man hours, and I've got a staff of 2... Those numbers don't compute.
However, in this situation what happens is some hot shot consulting firm will come in and say "Oh yeah, we can do that, let us replace your IT staff" the IT staff gets laid off, and the consulting firm takes twice as long and costs 4 times as much, and still doesn't deliver... But they've got a nice cutsie contract in place protecting them from being fired, which the lowly employee never gets.
Also, way too often bosses, CEOs, etc, do not have any clue about the difficulty of some IT projects and assume that installing a corporate ERP system is like installing weather bug, just double click and its done! In this case, they will invariably make horrible business decisions. They don't understand what they are getting, they don't understand what is involved, and they sign off on huge projects which cost a lot of money, time, and stress. And, they rarely if ever do an actual Cost/Benefit analysis.
If a system costs $5 million, and the implementation time is 10 months, and you have to hire 10 consultants to pull it off in those 10 months plus your in house IT staff working on it full time (what happened to backups, maintenance, all the other day to day stuff IT is supposed to do), and all of that to save the accounting team of 3 people 1 hour a week? Well, that doesn't make any sense, but I've implemented more insane solutions than that because of the attitude of "who cares if its hard, that's their job, tell them to get it done".
I really don't think they can make Viacom disappear, they certainly can't make a whole country disappear.
They are paying right now, I'm sure their legal department is ballooning, I bet they are spending somewhere between 100-300k/day on legal fees with the lawsuits that have been announced so far. Sure that isn't a lot, but over the 3-5 year term of the ~8 lawsuits that I know of right now, that is more than $400 million. And that is just legal fees. When (not if) they lose some of these suits, then its really going to pile up. They will spend > $50 million in legal fees just for the Viacom suit. If they lose it, they will pay $1 billion + Viacom's legal fees (which will be nicely inflated, and probably > 100 million).
None of the other suits are this big, but combined they will easily cost 3-5 billion over the next 3-5 years (Assuming they go about 50/50 win/loss). If the courts decide that You Tube is not protected by the DMCA protections, then the cost will be > $10 billion because every rights holder will jump on that cash cow.
Long story short, the cost of buying You Tube is going to be 3-5 times more than the actual purchase price.
Seriously though, do you thing the folks at Google thought they'd get sued almost daily for you tube? I wonder who has to serve the 15 years?
I figured there would be a couple lawsuits, but this is getting a little bizarre. Google will be paying out the nose for years for these lawsuits, there is no way this is worth it.
Different strokes for different folks. Personally, fighting for an education that I'm paying for sounds really stupid. On the other hand, getting paid to get a more advanced education sounds like a good idea. Since this thread started I got a promotion to management, I have a great job, I don't work harder than average (40 hour weeks), I have benefits, vacation time, and a very nice compensation package if the company goes public or gets bought.
Obviously everything isn't about compensation, but I am also very happy, I have a house, a wife, a child on the way. I have been happier since I quit school, I haven't regretted it at all. I have good experience, I ran my own company for a couple years, I really don't think I missed anything by not doing research at school. I do research every day in my job, yeah maybe I'm not going to invent a solution to the traveling salesman, but that really doesn't get me excited, or interested.
If you like school and think it is good for you, more power to you. I just found the experience completely frustrating. I thought if I was paying, I am the customer, I should be treated better than I was. Maybe that is a naive approach, however, it has always served me well, if I am paying and not receiving what I am paying for, well, I take my business elsewhere.
Wrong, you still need a full Office license for every user on a thin client app server.
If the BSA showed up and you had 1 office CD and everyone using it through RDP or Citrix, you would be fined just the same as if you had that CD installed on all machines
I use FF on windows, linux and OS X all day every day. I haven't had it crash since somewhere around 1.5 beta.
Right now, FF is using 64MB of ram, its been on all day, it has 8 tabs open, today it has ranged from 1 tab to more than 20... that is on OS X.
FF uses just as much RAM as IE doing similar workloads. Obviously that can only be tested on windows, but i have done extensive bookmarking on > 100PCs.
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its true, I'm only paying $.07/kwh.
I am in Utah, and a lot of our power comes from a huge coal plant out in the middle of the state, but pacificorp does have a lot of hydro elsewhere.
paying my electric bill is an investment I profit on because it frees up capital for other investments which pay much better than investing in solar. If it takes 30,000 to get rid of that $150/mo bill, then the ROI on the 30,000 is like 25 years. I would be much better served to take my 30,000 and invest it in fixed income at 5%, over those same 25 years I'll have 60,000+. If I buy the solar system, I have a system that has aged to its life, and is in need of replacement, I don't have 30,000 because I haven't saved nearly that much on my electric bill. I have to take out another loan to re-purchase the cells for the next 25 years... it is a zero sum game.
On the other hand, if I keep buying energy from pacificorp from the nice coal plant down the street, I keep paying 150/mo. I have 30,000 invested at 5%/yr. that is $1500/yr... which more than covers the costs for coal production. If I can improve my investment returns, I will have even more money.
The only way out of this is if we increased solar efficiency by 100%+ or decreased costs by 50% (neither of which I see happening any time soon), then instead of 1KW for 30,000, I can get 2KW for 30k, now instead of just breaking even, I am making $150/mo through net metering (which I was taking into account before... In the winter months I will produce about 50% of the solar energy as in summer months because of a) position of my roof and b) shorter days, the system I designed that would cost 30,000 would just barely satisfy my needs) so I cut my ROI in half. Now in 12 years I have paid off my system, and I'm now "making" $300/mo, which I can save up for 13 years to repurchase cells.
At current costs and efficiency, solar just can't cut it.
My point is this, you can't finance it at the individual level. I have tried. I could get a home equity loan to finance it, but at current interest rates and a 10 year term, well I'd be paying $350/mo to save 150. Even after the loan is paid back, I'd still need another 20+ years before I would be realizing any "profit". Further what if I want to move? I'm not going to be able to sell installed solar for what I paid for it. It won't add 30k in value to my house, because it isn't worth 30k in any sort of ROI scenario. An investment is worth what it produces. If you are an investor and you buy a cash flow for more than 10 times the cash flow, you are an idiot. Unless it is growing really fast (like greater than 100%) which solar is not.
.02 kwh electricity now, because nat gas has dropped 80% in price). You now have to sell your electricity for .02/kwh, which means your ROI just went from 20 years to > 60 years.
Example: I am an investor, I have 100 million dollars. I can spend that on Google in 2002 through Venture Capital, or I can build a solar plant. Based on your numbers I could build ~100MW solar plant for 100 million (you cited 600 million for 500MW, so I'm giving some wiggle room on your side). As an aside do your numbers include the cost of the land? That can power @ 1KW/home 100,000 homes? Ok, so figuring $150/mo 6 months out of the year, and $75/mo in the winter (yes I'm using my extremely limited sample of 1 for those numbers, I have no idea what the "average" electric bill is) that is 1350/yr/home.
1350 * 100,000 = 135,000,000. Right now I know your numbers cited in your article are wrong. If the math really worked out like this, and there was less than 1 yr ROI on a solar plant, it would have been done by now. The market would have done this already.
So now for the real numbers. To generate 1KW of electricity from solar, retail is 30K+. so, 100,000KW (100MW) is 3 billion dollars. Granted they wouldn't be doing it retail, but say the mark up on retail is 100% (IE wholesale is 15k), if the markup is more than that, again, everyone would be producing solar panels, because it is a hideously profitable business.
Even if the wholesale->retail markup is 100%, 100MW still costs 1.5 billion, not 100 million. Lets say the markup is 200%, so its 10k for 1KW wholesale. Well, you still have 1 billion for 100MW, and that is just the panels! That doesn't include labor, that doesn't include transformers, that doesn't include land, or anything else. That is the panel that sits on the ground. Now then, you can generate a 135 million revenue stream from something that costs at least 1 billion, and because so much is stripped out of that 1 billion dollars it will be much more than that. Labor alone will be at least as much as the solar panels, so you're at 2 billion right there. Now with interest on your initial loan to do the thing in the first place you are looking at a 20 year + ROI. And the cells all have to be replaced at 25 years, so you're looking at another 1 billion+ in year 25, you just barely paid off your debt, much less paying for people to actually manage the system.
Of course there is another problem with this scenario. The revenue from solar energy will only grow as fast as oil prices increase. If we deployed 100% solar, what do you think would happen to oil prices, coal prices? Natural gas prices? Yes that's right they would plummet. Guess what would happen then? Gas would be back at $1/gallon. Who would pay $3 for ethanol? Who would pay an extra 10k for an electric only car? No one. The problem is none of the renewable energy sources compete with oil unless oil is > $70/barrel, and we have the catch 22 that if we deploy 100% renewables, it will drive the price of oil down, and you will get even less return on your solar plant (IE, the nat gas fired plant down the street can give you
Compare that to the 100 million I put in google in 2002. I have > 3 billion dollars cash today, and no debt.
You got me there, I've been in the UK a number of times, but never even rode in a taxi. All trains and the tube, except for a couple of break downs on the tube, always seemed like a much easier way to get around than here in the US where going to the grocery store is a 20-25 minute drive depending on traffic. I'd much rather wait 5 minutes for the tube, and have it only take 10-20 minutes to get there...
It is zero emission the same way that ethanol or bio diesel is zero emission. Yes the reaction produces CO2, but it is the CO2 that the plant just pulled in during the last year (or 10) while it was being grown. It is not putting CO2 that has been trapped for millions of years into the atmosphere the way fossil fuels are.
Sorry to reply twice, I would like to say that I telecommute to work 2-3 days a week, and I really think that is the best/easiest way that the US could cut emissions from cars.
Unfortunately, cars really aren't our biggest problem. only 25% of our emissions are from cars, if we got rid of cars altogether it wouldn't comply with this agreement. If we cut our car emissions by 50% (telecommuted 50% of the time, got twice the gas mileage we do now whichever) it would only cut our emissions by 12.5%. That leaves almost 40% still to be cut. The largest polluter we have is our electric generation complex. It needs to be all nuclear or a lot of wind/solar needs to be brought online. Either way, its gonna cost billions and be more expensive than coal is, so there will be a lot of pressure against it.
yes, it will fit on the roof, but it still costs 30k+ to do it. If it takes 30k for me to go out and produce my own electricity, it will probably cost the grid twice as much as they have to worry about redundancy, and they have other regulations they have to comply with.
So, either everyone in the US has to have 30k laying around to DIY electric production, or the huge for profit corps have to spend at least the same amount (times however many customers they are servicing) and purchase a bunch of land to boot and it simply won't be competitive with coal, nat gas, or nuclear.
I saw a special on your texas wind farms a couple weeks ago. the only reason it is cheaper is because they got huge subsidies on the installation of the wind farms (subsidies President Bush put through as Governor.. go figure?!).
Unfortunately, and I'm being serious here, the same rules don't apply in england, france, germany or any of the EU countries.
.5% more efficient, but we need a doubling or tripling to 30-45% efficiency)
The US is simply a much larger country than any in the EU. To take family vacations it almost always means a 10+ hour car trip. try putting 6 people in a car that gets 50MPG+. Not going to be fun. And you'll get a bunch of tickets for not having a seat belt for each person in the car. From london its what a 3-4hr drive to anywhere in the country? Heck its a 1.5 hour train ride to Paris. 3 hours doesn't even get me out of my state.
Now, mass transport would be great, I love trains, unfortunately the US has nothing like Eurostar. The only remaining passenger train company in the states gets more than 50% of its revenues from subsidies, and the tax payers will not agree to give one more cent to a company bleeding so much red.
Planes for 6 people (worse than the car ride in terms of carbon) are prohibitively expensive, buses (while probably being net gain for carbon) cost > $100/person for a ride of 10 hours, so $600 for 6 people. And then I have to rent a car once I get where I'm going because unless you are in a city center there is no mass transit in cities. Now I'm not trying to defend that, it is simply the reality especially in the western US. Or I can pay about $200 for gas in the SUV and off we go.
Raising taxes on that gas would cause 1 thing. Lots of unhappy people who can no longer afford vacations at all. Further, it would be great if cars were free and I could have a nice little car to jet around the city, and then have a decent sized car for trips. Unfortunately, that isn't the case, so most US families have 1 car for city driving and 1 for trips, and the person who is responsible for the kids takes the big SUV all over the city. Again, I'd be happy to keep the SUV parked 99% of the time, but I can't afford 3 cars.
If it were a perfect world and there was mass transit between and inside every US city, then this all would be a moot point. This infrastructure simply doesn't exist in the US. In London and Paris you can jump on the subway and get anywhere in the city. You can do the same in NY, Boston, and to a much lesser extent LA. But 95% of US cities > 1 million people don't even have a subway, some don't even have bus systems. Further, in the UK, and France at least, you can get almost anywhere whenever you want on a train. Nothing would make me happier than if this were to come about in the US. Unfortunately, I really don't see it happening any time soon. Even cities that are trying to deploy mass transit do it very poorly. I don't know why, but every attempt I've seen has caused many more problems than it has solved, and it has lost millions if not billions of dollars.
The US is very bad at central planning, maybe its a result of the cold war, I think its just because we have always been more independent, but we really suck at it. The only solution then is abundant cheap energy (Nuclear would be great) so we can have clean cars running on hydrogen. Unfortunately since the environmentalists have shut down nuclear as an option, our only other option would be a breakthrough in renewable energy, and I really don't see that happening either, we've tried to make solar good, and it just never gets any better (ok, maybe someone finds something and makes it
I completely agree. Nuclear would be great. As I stated in my post, it will never happen. The same environmentalists that want reduced emissions fight nuclear tooth and nail as well.
Ok, so Greenpeace leaked that the US is against this "communique" but they don't specify anything in the communique except that it requires reducing emissions. What are the specifics? Does it single the US out in any way? Does it put broader or more strenuous penalties on the US? Neither of these things would surprise me coming from Germany. There are a million things that the US could be objecting to. Not including third world countries in the agreement, singling out coal power production for special penalties, maybe it specifies per capita caps (the US uses more energy per capita than anyone else). My point is, without seeing the actual communique, this is just Greenpeace making headlines. It is more of the same from the environmentalists: "Here's something scary and bad, but we won't give you the actual facts, just take our word for it, the US sucks".
Further, if the G8 did reduce emissions by 50% by 2050 (below 1990 levels... um... ok, so we reduce our energy consumption by 50% and don't completely destroy our economy how?). Even if we come up with a huge breakthrough on the energy production front, and we manage to reduce emissions by that much, China and India will both be producing 5-10 times more emissions than they are today, and today China and India are producing almost as much as the US. They aren't covered by this agreement at all. So net result is, global warming still just as much of a problem and the developed world has no economy left, or wasted hundreds of billions converting over to clean power.
The problem with agreements like this is that you can't know, say the G8 (including US) signs this agreement, and now its 2048, and no one has made fusion work, wind power is still too costly, and too sporadic, wave power doesn't pan out, solar power is still only 15% efficient, nuclear power because of local regulations is not an option... And we have this global treaty that on Jan 1 2050 requires us to pay huge penalties or turn off half our economy.... There is not a good solution to the energy problem, and you don't commit yourself to something extremely detrimental to your economy, way of life, people in general hoping for a massive breakthrough. And that is exactly what this is hoping. We would need a seriously massive breakthrough on some renewable energy front (nuclear, solar, wind, whatever) to comply with this regulation. There is nothing that seems to be on the horizon which would allow us to comply. Hydrogen cars? Great but hydrogen takes energy to produce, so now we're burning more coal. Electric cars, same problem. The only solution is to go completely nuclear. But thanks to these same environmentalists, that is 100% impossible in the US. It will not happen.
The only other possibility is to start spending billions if not hundreds of billions buying up huge swathes of land to put up wind farms or solar panels, and then there is still huge amounts of regulation, law suits, all sorts of things that will happen with that. I wanted to take my house off the grid, but it is impossible for 99% of americans to pull this off, because solar panels to power even a modest home cost > 30k. Very few people have that money sitting around, and even if they did, they would be stupid to spend it on something that will at most save them 100-150/mo on their electric bill. 30+ year ROI is not considered a good investment anywhere.
Where do you work and what do you do?
I make pretty decent money, but I don't have a surplus 30-40k/mo.
Or stop being a widget scientist
I think that line quite sums up what is being said by the GP. Americans have decided to stop being widget scientists. Now, the whyfore of the pricing situation you have presented is because these widgets used to cost $30, then globalization came along, and now we have chinese and indian widget scientists who will work 80 hour weeks for $15/month. So the chinese firm can sell a widget for $3.85. The american firm has no choice, outsource and get those cheap widget scientists, or go out of business trying to sell a $30 widget.
However, some of the stuff that goes on is just blatant greed. IBM making billions in PROFIT (after all the costs are accounted for) will still screw their employees in favor of sending stuff to china or india, or they will just keep payscales down because they can and its such an "honor" to work for IBM. This is where there are issues. These are jobs and markets where there is quite clearly a large profit margin (people are still selling the $30 widget). Or, say Microsoft which clears > 20 billion a year. Bill Gates said recently they have 3k+ software development positions each YEAR that they "can't" fill. In sworn testimony. To the US congress. Well, I've looked at MS, I've looked at Yahoo, I've looked at Amazon. They don't offer any more money than I'm currently making. Yet, they all have billions in free cash flow. If they want to motivate people to take positions with them they need to up the ante. Especially since they are all located in impossibly expensive cities. I live in Salt Lake. My 75k/yr salary has me living very nicely in a home I own, 2 cars, wife, 1 kid, everythings great. Now, the MS position I interviewed for last year was offering 75-80k/yr, but I've got to live in/near seattle, where a house costs > 500k (I paid 170k for mine). Gas is more expensive, taxes (property taxes, sales tax, etc) are more than 2x's as much as here, yet the salary is exactly the same.... No thanks. If MS upped their salary 50%, said if you develop software for us, you will make 6 figures, well 1) yahoo, amazon, google, et al would be forced by the market to up their pay scales. 2) alot more people would do CS degrees.
Another thing MS/IBM/yahoo/google/amazon could do is actually offer some sort of "extraordinary" pay. In the late 90's it was stock options. That doesn't work anymore. The company I work for offers a percentage of profit of anything we as employees "invent". So say I'm working today on our core product, and think "oh, here's this side project, I could take this code, build service xyz around it". Basically its like Google's 20% engineering time, except, when I present my 20% project to my manager, it is a negotiation, and I negotiate my percentage of the profits from it, and we make out a contract, and then its off, and if the sales guys close a million dollars in sales on my new system, well, I get a bonus of 5-10% of that. If I make something that really takes off and is going to make hundreds of millions, well I'm set. If the company sells off my product, I get a percentage of that. There is a lot big companies could do to reward their employees for innovation, creativity, and producing besides stock options. Unfortunately, none of them do, this is another reason I think big software companies have a hard time finding new young talent. The young talent sees MS, Yahoo, Amazon and says, well why go there the big money's already been made? I'll never make it big there, I'll work 40+ hour weeks for 5 years and then they'll send my job to india.
I was in a CS program in 2000. I watched what happened. The bottom fell out of the dot com boom, and seriously, by the next semester class sizes were down by 25-50%. Everyone went to business degrees. Then the whole outsourcing thing didn't help any. However, you can't argue with the fact that MS, IBM, HP, they all make obscene amounts of money, and they all complain that there aren't enough engineers. Well, if they would pay more, I'm sure there would be more engineers.
I wasn't saying anything about the comparable costs of the system vs some other system. I don't think this is extremely cost effective because:
a) It requires expensive inputs (aluminum and gallium)
b) In the best case it requires a fuel cell and electric motor + the expensive inputs
I don't know what ICE stands for, are you saying ICE is cheaper than fuel cell and electric motor? Are you saying that it is a better solution?
Platinum is also used in fuel cells, so I doubt you could drop that cost, just move it from the cat converter to the fuel cell.
In the best case, we would be using the hydrogen produced in this reaction in an efficient fuel cell which would allow for much higher efficiency than hydrogen combustion. The article mentiones 75% efficiency for the fuel cell vs 25% efficiency for the combustion. I don't know if palladium is used in fuel cells, but I do know that the cost of Platinum is one of the major factors in getting fuel cells priced reasonably.
wrong. The pellets are an aluminum gallium alloy. yes, you can recycle the pellets and reuse them, but going from 0 gallium in our gas tanks to even 5-10KG (they are talking about 350lbs of the alloy in a tank, I think its safe to assume at least 10-20lbs of that is gallium), well at $500/KG, that is 2500-5000 added to the cost of every car.
as a developer I think I would hate this idea. Having to go into a virtual world to collaborate? Email and IM is just fine.
Also most of the time when I'm writing code, having another channel of interruptions is just suicide. Already with email, IM, phone, and in person interruptions its difficult to get 2-3 hours of solid coding in in a day. Add this to the mix, who knows, if at any time someone can just jump on and request a meeting on the thing...
While you debunked most of his arguments, you failed to mention the battery replacement issue. I went shopping for a hybrid and decided against it for this very reason. All of the money you save in gas plus some more gets eaten up when you replace the batteries. I had a toyota dealership tell me "The batteries are rated for 8 years, but we've had people have them go bad and need to be replaced after just 2. And the batteries aren't covered under any warranty beyond 1 year." The same dealership told me the price for the battery pack was $4500. That is not acceptable, that is like replacing the engine every 2-8 years.
Sorry to reply again (I wish slashdot allowed comment edits).
What if we made sendmail, postfix, et al. categorically reject any email sent from outlook, or relayed by exchange?
The main backbone of most large email systems are still run by unix and OSS. I have seen plenty of "MS" fixes in the configuration of these services. Places where MS clients or relays don't conform to RFCs or in some way or another are disfunctional. Currently the OSS attitude towards that is "Ok, lets put in a configuration option, and work around MS". If we stopped doing that, we'd pretty easily break MS.
well, first off, what if the Apache founders changed the code to block IE. PERIOD.
IE comes to a site served by apache, and the server refuses to serve pages to it, maybe a special new error code "Your browser spreads viruses, as such, we have disabled access" and a link to firefox.
I agree with the sentiment of your post with one caveat.
Often times the attitude of "if it's difficult for the sysadmin to do, who cares?" will produce outlandish schedules, impossible deadlines, and produce huge headaches for everyone involved.
In prior jobs in IT I have had bosses and CEOs who are not technical and have this attitude. There is no better way to destroy moral. When the CEO comes to you and says "Hey, we need feature XYZ that I just read about in CIO magazine, and we need it to show the investors who are coming next week". Well, feature XYZ is going to take 300 man hours, and I've got a staff of 2... Those numbers don't compute.
However, in this situation what happens is some hot shot consulting firm will come in and say "Oh yeah, we can do that, let us replace your IT staff" the IT staff gets laid off, and the consulting firm takes twice as long and costs 4 times as much, and still doesn't deliver... But they've got a nice cutsie contract in place protecting them from being fired, which the lowly employee never gets.
Also, way too often bosses, CEOs, etc, do not have any clue about the difficulty of some IT projects and assume that installing a corporate ERP system is like installing weather bug, just double click and its done! In this case, they will invariably make horrible business decisions. They don't understand what they are getting, they don't understand what is involved, and they sign off on huge projects which cost a lot of money, time, and stress. And, they rarely if ever do an actual Cost/Benefit analysis.
If a system costs $5 million, and the implementation time is 10 months, and you have to hire 10 consultants to pull it off in those 10 months plus your in house IT staff working on it full time (what happened to backups, maintenance, all the other day to day stuff IT is supposed to do), and all of that to save the accounting team of 3 people 1 hour a week? Well, that doesn't make any sense, but I've implemented more insane solutions than that because of the attitude of "who cares if its hard, that's their job, tell them to get it done".
I really don't think they can make Viacom disappear, they certainly can't make a whole country disappear.
They are paying right now, I'm sure their legal department is ballooning, I bet they are spending somewhere between 100-300k/day on legal fees with the lawsuits that have been announced so far. Sure that isn't a lot, but over the 3-5 year term of the ~8 lawsuits that I know of right now, that is more than $400 million. And that is just legal fees. When (not if) they lose some of these suits, then its really going to pile up. They will spend > $50 million in legal fees just for the Viacom suit. If they lose it, they will pay $1 billion + Viacom's legal fees (which will be nicely inflated, and probably > 100 million).
None of the other suits are this big, but combined they will easily cost 3-5 billion over the next 3-5 years (Assuming they go about 50/50 win/loss). If the courts decide that You Tube is not protected by the DMCA protections, then the cost will be > $10 billion because every rights holder will jump on that cash cow.
Long story short, the cost of buying You Tube is going to be 3-5 times more than the actual purchase price.
Seriously though, do you thing the folks at Google thought they'd get sued almost daily for you tube? I wonder who has to serve the 15 years?
I figured there would be a couple lawsuits, but this is getting a little bizarre. Google will be paying out the nose for years for these lawsuits, there is no way this is worth it.
Different strokes for different folks. Personally, fighting for an education that I'm paying for sounds really stupid. On the other hand, getting paid to get a more advanced education sounds like a good idea. Since this thread started I got a promotion to management, I have a great job, I don't work harder than average (40 hour weeks), I have benefits, vacation time, and a very nice compensation package if the company goes public or gets bought.
Obviously everything isn't about compensation, but I am also very happy, I have a house, a wife, a child on the way. I have been happier since I quit school, I haven't regretted it at all. I have good experience, I ran my own company for a couple years, I really don't think I missed anything by not doing research at school. I do research every day in my job, yeah maybe I'm not going to invent a solution to the traveling salesman, but that really doesn't get me excited, or interested.
If you like school and think it is good for you, more power to you. I just found the experience completely frustrating. I thought if I was paying, I am the customer, I should be treated better than I was. Maybe that is a naive approach, however, it has always served me well, if I am paying and not receiving what I am paying for, well, I take my business elsewhere.
Wrong, you still need a full Office license for every user on a thin client app server.
If the BSA showed up and you had 1 office CD and everyone using it through RDP or Citrix, you would be fined just the same as if you had that CD installed on all machines
I use FF on windows, linux and OS X all day every day. I haven't had it crash since somewhere around 1.5 beta.
Right now, FF is using 64MB of ram, its been on all day, it has 8 tabs open, today it has ranged from 1 tab to more than 20... that is on OS X.
FF uses just as much RAM as IE doing similar workloads. Obviously that can only be tested on windows, but i have done extensive bookmarking on > 100PCs.