Actually since it's an infrastructure investment it makes sense for everyone. Driving demand lowers costs - those who go first bear the brunt of this. Any power I produce with panels is power that doesn't have to come from another source nor does it need to travel down transmission lines. This is a resource for me but it's also a resource for my utility company. If I and others in my area build enough of this infrastructure my utility may not have to purchase additional generating power - a benefit to everyone.
Would you also argue that improvements to roads you don't happen to travel every day shouldn't be done because they don't benefit you directly?
Corn hardly needed jumpstarting since we had an overabundance of it. I suspect though that rather than having our farmer's cease planting it due to low prices we needed another demand for it which alcohol did indeed produce. I would also point out that at one point alcohol enhanced gasoline was being used to stretch our supply and reduce emissions by leaning out those vehicles that didn't have the ability to adjust for the leaner mixture - that benefit mostly gone now. I will admit that I don't think that we should be producing ethanol in the volume we are with the vehicles we drive since they cannot properly take advantage of it - not to mention the huge drain on our water supply. The alternative is a crashing market for corn I suppose which is also not a great idea.
I see solar as different - it's pretty much one and done. Put the panels up and they produce for as long as they are maintained. You don't simply use them once and have to produce more of them. Solar panels are an investment in infrastructure that ethanol simply isn't. I don't know if the same arguments were ever used for that industry but in my mind the two are nowhere near alike nor can they be compared.
No, I said UNDER $15K as I didn't have the number handy. I asked him again - his out of pocket was $8500. I think that's pretty damned reasonable. Frankly, if I could get it done in my area for $15K and zero out my electric bill I'll probably do it. When it costs $30K or more is when I walk away. My friend hasn't gotten his first bill yet so the savings aren't yet known but he HAS witnessed his meter spinning backwards so I suspect he won't be paying anything this month to the utility to run his AC.
Install cost right now is the issue - panel costs are damned low. The industry is currently small and specialized, when there are more skilled workers doing installs and if subsidies are offered this will take off like a rocket for those of us who have decent sites. IMO it simply makes sense and no I don't think $15K is a ton of money for something that should last 30 years or more. No batteries needed for this to work like you asserted. Yes, it needs to be cheaper or subsidized, most likely the latter. Any solar installs that take drain off the grid are an investment in infrastructure IMO and make sense.
There's the 30% Federal rebate on overall system cost and since there's no rebate from VA that goes up. I think it tops out at like 10K though, I'd have to go look. Some utilities also offer rebates for updating appliances and whatnot and they might also offer something. Other than that it's out of pocket and I agree that payoff in 30 for something with a 25 year warranty doesn't sound good. That said, I expect that before the 25 is up something more efficient will have been produced that I'll want to upgrade to anyway:-)
I think I use a decent amount of power but I seldom see a bill over about $150. If I were paying off a 30K loan and zeroing my electric bill I'm looking at something over 15 years . Bring it down to 20 or 15K and I'm much much more interested. I've sent some email to some companies to try and get some estimates as I'd REALLY like some hard numbers but right now it sure doesn't look good...
I subscribe to HomePower and a part of that magazine is dedicated to code and code changes. Frankly this reads like Greek and it's pretty apparent to me that someone with an electrician's license ought to be involved. Makes sense mind you and certainly helps explain the cost but geez!
I will say that I've asked, as a result of this article, to have some folks come out and give me some formal site survey and estimates. I fully expect that the cost is going to be eye watering but I really want to do this darn it!
Bullshit. Just because the technology doesn't spring to life fully baked and meeting all needs it shouldn't be used? I want solar, I'll happily pay for my electricity use during the night in exchange for getting some of that back with my feed-in during the day when peak usage occurs currently. My return for feed-in need not be 1:1 either. No this won't mean that we can shut down all of our power plants but it will mean that we could significantly lower their usage during the day if a majority of people got on-board. I don't need to go off-grid with banks of batteries to maintain, I am perfectly happy remaining grid-tied and for the majority of homes this works just fine. The hurdle to solar remains cost because while panel costs may have fallen the labor costs to get them installed sure hasn't and there's little competition for the work to push it down and too few skilled folks doing it.
A friend of mine just had panels installed on his home, feasible due to a subsidy he gets in Texas and that Virginia where I live doesn't offer. His cost was under $15K and during the day his meter spins backwards. He's no ecofreak and he's not rich but he's capable of taking the long view and he figured that lowering his overall monthly costs in the long run was worthwhile - I wish I could so easily do the same myself!
BTW BP is actually one of the companies that I'd consider a leader in solar. They have been investing in the technology for ages. While I'm not thrilled at what occured in the Gulf this company has certainly been working on solar for a very long time.
Yeah, I'd like to see some citations about how we've thrown a ton at solar too! One company failing isn't nearly enough evidence. They were given a drop in the bucket and the Chinese subsidies have been killing us, tariffs should supposedly even that out...
Labor to install, inverters, wiring, and it must be done properly to code. I could swing cost of panels, cost to install and get inspected? Not so much:-( I'm not willing to go Guerrilla either....
Yeah they even advertise in my area. Sadly when I hit their sites I found that they don't service VA and I've yet to find a subsidy program in my State either other than the overall Fed program.
Panels aren't the issue - installed cost is the issue. While I might be able to afford enough panels to cover my roof and power my home I cannot afford to have them professionally installed. I could perhaps undertake this myself but I doubt my insurance company would be happy and I don't possesses the skills required to ensure it would meet code. My roof is also damned tall, tin, and has a pretty decent slope to it - no thanks! I have a garage and a lower porch roof that are easier but again the code issues appear to make this a poor investment to attempt on my own.
Make no mistake - I'd own solar in a heart beat if I could!
Sorry but I disagee. Subsidies make sense when you're trying to jumpstart something like this that will have an overall benefit to the country. Spiking demand for panels to get production numbers up, getting a support system of installers built, and lowering the demand on local power production are all good reasons to want subsidies IMO. If I could get panels on my roof without having to get a second mortgage - on a home that is already upside down - then I'd do it and lower my demand on the grid. But I can't, costs are way over the top, so in my area where there appears to be almost no subsidies or other incentives this industry stagnates. I've got a terrific location for panels but no way will I spend the coin it would currently require...
I did and in my area, VA, it appears to be nothing worth pursuing. This is a shame since I've got a roof devoid of shade with good pitch and facing. I even tried one of those places that lease panels who advertise like crazy on the local news radio station - nope they won't install in VA. (?!)
A friend of mine in Texas just had a grid tie system done. After subsidies and whatnot it still cost him about what a small new car would but his meter now spins backwards during the day. IF I could do that i would without a second thought and my month to month energy bills aren't even all that bad since I've insulated the heck out of my place.
I guess where I'm confused is that the later hardware from that company did NOT have this feature - which is why I never upgraded! Perhaps this is true, I've gotten two responses saying so, but it also seems odd they pulled one of the major selling points from the new hardware when they felt they were in the right In the end the company went under fighting this, I hope that DISH has better luck although frankly I dumped them to get the TiVO DVR on Direct - and then dumped THEM when they too dumped TiVO. I now have two TiVO HDs with cablecard and am pretty happy:-)
How exactly have they changed it? The content is likely still on the disk, they just sense the commercials and skip ala ReplayTV. Replay was sued and lost on this BTW. I wonder when the TiVO 30second skip will get them sued as it pretty much allows you to jump over commercials too. 30second forward, 15 back - love it!
As for recording it and being allowed to do what you want - if you think anyone believes that in the industry you've not been paying attention. They want it locked up in a steel box, how dare you wish to move it to another device!
You might want to take a look at what occurred with ReplayTV. They were sued for this very thing, lost, and were forced to remove the option from new hardware. Needless to say they didn't last. I'm surprised the TiVO 30 second skip Easter egg hasn't gotten them slapped....
Actually they seemed to have some ideas for functions that were bound and could be accelerated. However Intel contacted them having apparently already decided what instructions they were going to accelerate and they weren't useful. Additionally, as I recall, shortly after contacting the development team Intel sort of let on that these guys were somehow on board when in fact they were really only just being contacted and weren't. things didn't go really well after that and I couldn't find any more contact on the mailing list between the devs and the guy who claimed to be from Intel after that.
I do a HUGE amount of x.264 encoding at home. I'd LOVE to be able to accelerate it and in fact did my own testing of the various GPU accelerators awhile back. I didn't have as great an issue with the quality as I did the lack of flexability and control over the encoders and thus gave up on it. In fact some of the GPU encoders would ONLY leverage the GPU and my CPU was nearly as fast! When both were used together the GPU encoders were certainly quicker but with so little flexability I decided against using them . I had high hopes that the new generation i7 stuff with accelerated instructions would help but I guess not:-(
Yeah now go look at the heaping scorn that was heaped on the Intel rep when he approached the x.264 guys way late in development. Had they been smart enough to come forward sooner we might have gotten accelerated instructions the x.264 guys would have used - not so now it seems.:-(
unRAID will do this and in fact I often come home and find all my drives spun down as nothing is accessing them. Can put them all in one array too and the only "waste" will be the single parity drive. Been running it for at LEAST 5-6 years or more and have never lost data...
I've been using unRAID since the beginning, unless this is new I do not believe you can have redundant data on multiple drives. You CAN spread a single folder across multiple drives and the parity drive protects against crashes and enables recovery. Since parity isn't striped drives spin down when not needed too.
So far I've not lost any data and I've had multiple drives fail over the years - never a dual failure however which unRAID cannot protect against. However if a dual failure occurs you don't lose it all either and I don't need tons of hot spares and crap spinning.
Are you running TOR? If not the TOR.Onion link won't work. I don't happen to have TOR installed or I'd have explored the hidden site myself. So far though no one seems to have found the code to download and test near as I can tell...
I cannot find anything on the site that appears to make it available to me in a form I can run, a GIT repo for devs and some press releases is all. I suppose I could hit the "secure".onion site but I see nothing to indicate there's code there. the summary appears to make it sound like they want participation and I'd love to help but see no way to do so.
I know someone that had this happen to them. He supported a challenger and when the challenger lost they fired him and even went so far as to tell him why he was being fired. He sued, was threatened by many, and he won! This was in Delaware but it's apparently pretty common all over. The fact that they were so blatent about it is probably one of the only reason why the guy I knew won and actually they may have just settled - I'd have to ask him. He's pretty quiet about the results and the money as it apparently came with a gag order but at least he got something. I wish him the best of luck finding work again in that community though...
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Actually since it's an infrastructure investment it makes sense for everyone. Driving demand lowers costs - those who go first bear the brunt of this. Any power I produce with panels is power that doesn't have to come from another source nor does it need to travel down transmission lines. This is a resource for me but it's also a resource for my utility company. If I and others in my area build enough of this infrastructure my utility may not have to purchase additional generating power - a benefit to everyone.
Would you also argue that improvements to roads you don't happen to travel every day shouldn't be done because they don't benefit you directly?
Corn hardly needed jumpstarting since we had an overabundance of it. I suspect though that rather than having our farmer's cease planting it due to low prices we needed another demand for it which alcohol did indeed produce. I would also point out that at one point alcohol enhanced gasoline was being used to stretch our supply and reduce emissions by leaning out those vehicles that didn't have the ability to adjust for the leaner mixture - that benefit mostly gone now. I will admit that I don't think that we should be producing ethanol in the volume we are with the vehicles we drive since they cannot properly take advantage of it - not to mention the huge drain on our water supply. The alternative is a crashing market for corn I suppose which is also not a great idea.
I see solar as different - it's pretty much one and done. Put the panels up and they produce for as long as they are maintained. You don't simply use them once and have to produce more of them. Solar panels are an investment in infrastructure that ethanol simply isn't. I don't know if the same arguments were ever used for that industry but in my mind the two are nowhere near alike nor can they be compared.
No, I said UNDER $15K as I didn't have the number handy. I asked him again - his out of pocket was $8500. I think that's pretty damned reasonable. Frankly, if I could get it done in my area for $15K and zero out my electric bill I'll probably do it. When it costs $30K or more is when I walk away. My friend hasn't gotten his first bill yet so the savings aren't yet known but he HAS witnessed his meter spinning backwards so I suspect he won't be paying anything this month to the utility to run his AC.
Install cost right now is the issue - panel costs are damned low. The industry is currently small and specialized, when there are more skilled workers doing installs and if subsidies are offered this will take off like a rocket for those of us who have decent sites. IMO it simply makes sense and no I don't think $15K is a ton of money for something that should last 30 years or more. No batteries needed for this to work like you asserted. Yes, it needs to be cheaper or subsidized, most likely the latter. Any solar installs that take drain off the grid are an investment in infrastructure IMO and make sense.
There's the 30% Federal rebate on overall system cost and since there's no rebate from VA that goes up. I think it tops out at like 10K though, I'd have to go look. Some utilities also offer rebates for updating appliances and whatnot and they might also offer something. Other than that it's out of pocket and I agree that payoff in 30 for something with a 25 year warranty doesn't sound good. That said, I expect that before the 25 is up something more efficient will have been produced that I'll want to upgrade to anyway :-)
I think I use a decent amount of power but I seldom see a bill over about $150. If I were paying off a 30K loan and zeroing my electric bill I'm looking at something over 15 years . Bring it down to 20 or 15K and I'm much much more interested. I've sent some email to some companies to try and get some estimates as I'd REALLY like some hard numbers but right now it sure doesn't look good...
I subscribe to HomePower and a part of that magazine is dedicated to code and code changes. Frankly this reads like Greek and it's pretty apparent to me that someone with an electrician's license ought to be involved. Makes sense mind you and certainly helps explain the cost but geez!
I will say that I've asked, as a result of this article, to have some folks come out and give me some formal site survey and estimates. I fully expect that the cost is going to be eye watering but I really want to do this darn it!
Bullshit. Just because the technology doesn't spring to life fully baked and meeting all needs it shouldn't be used? I want solar, I'll happily pay for my electricity use during the night in exchange for getting some of that back with my feed-in during the day when peak usage occurs currently. My return for feed-in need not be 1:1 either. No this won't mean that we can shut down all of our power plants but it will mean that we could significantly lower their usage during the day if a majority of people got on-board. I don't need to go off-grid with banks of batteries to maintain, I am perfectly happy remaining grid-tied and for the majority of homes this works just fine. The hurdle to solar remains cost because while panel costs may have fallen the labor costs to get them installed sure hasn't and there's little competition for the work to push it down and too few skilled folks doing it.
A friend of mine just had panels installed on his home, feasible due to a subsidy he gets in Texas and that Virginia where I live doesn't offer. His cost was under $15K and during the day his meter spins backwards. He's no ecofreak and he's not rich but he's capable of taking the long view and he figured that lowering his overall monthly costs in the long run was worthwhile - I wish I could so easily do the same myself!
BTW BP is actually one of the companies that I'd consider a leader in solar. They have been investing in the technology for ages. While I'm not thrilled at what occured in the Gulf this company has certainly been working on solar for a very long time.
Yeah, I'd like to see some citations about how we've thrown a ton at solar too! One company failing isn't nearly enough evidence. They were given a drop in the bucket and the Chinese subsidies have been killing us, tariffs should supposedly even that out...
Sadly it won't help the coming water shortages - at all! :-(
P.S. Yeah, I drive a diesel...
Labor to install, inverters, wiring, and it must be done properly to code. I could swing cost of panels, cost to install and get inspected? Not so much :-( I'm not willing to go Guerrilla either....
Yeah they even advertise in my area. Sadly when I hit their sites I found that they don't service VA and I've yet to find a subsidy program in my State either other than the overall Fed program.
Panels aren't the issue - installed cost is the issue. While I might be able to afford enough panels to cover my roof and power my home I cannot afford to have them professionally installed. I could perhaps undertake this myself but I doubt my insurance company would be happy and I don't possesses the skills required to ensure it would meet code. My roof is also damned tall, tin, and has a pretty decent slope to it - no thanks! I have a garage and a lower porch roof that are easier but again the code issues appear to make this a poor investment to attempt on my own.
Make no mistake - I'd own solar in a heart beat if I could!
Sorry but I disagee. Subsidies make sense when you're trying to jumpstart something like this that will have an overall benefit to the country. Spiking demand for panels to get production numbers up, getting a support system of installers built, and lowering the demand on local power production are all good reasons to want subsidies IMO. If I could get panels on my roof without having to get a second mortgage - on a home that is already upside down - then I'd do it and lower my demand on the grid. But I can't, costs are way over the top, so in my area where there appears to be almost no subsidies or other incentives this industry stagnates. I've got a terrific location for panels but no way will I spend the coin it would currently require...
I did and in my area, VA, it appears to be nothing worth pursuing. This is a shame since I've got a roof devoid of shade with good pitch and facing. I even tried one of those places that lease panels who advertise like crazy on the local news radio station - nope they won't install in VA. (?!)
A friend of mine in Texas just had a grid tie system done. After subsidies and whatnot it still cost him about what a small new car would but his meter now spins backwards during the day. IF I could do that i would without a second thought and my month to month energy bills aren't even all that bad since I've insulated the heck out of my place.
I guess where I'm confused is that the later hardware from that company did NOT have this feature - which is why I never upgraded! Perhaps this is true, I've gotten two responses saying so, but it also seems odd they pulled one of the major selling points from the new hardware when they felt they were in the right In the end the company went under fighting this, I hope that DISH has better luck although frankly I dumped them to get the TiVO DVR on Direct - and then dumped THEM when they too dumped TiVO. I now have two TiVO HDs with cablecard and am pretty happy :-)
How exactly have they changed it? The content is likely still on the disk, they just sense the commercials and skip ala ReplayTV. Replay was sued and lost on this BTW. I wonder when the TiVO 30second skip will get them sued as it pretty much allows you to jump over commercials too. 30second forward, 15 back - love it!
As for recording it and being allowed to do what you want - if you think anyone believes that in the industry you've not been paying attention. They want it locked up in a steel box, how dare you wish to move it to another device!
You might want to take a look at what occurred with ReplayTV. They were sued for this very thing, lost, and were forced to remove the option from new hardware. Needless to say they didn't last. I'm surprised the TiVO 30 second skip Easter egg hasn't gotten them slapped....
How does a NATO meeting and a war in another country connect exactly with how the military handles movies? Could that have been stretched any further?
Actually they seemed to have some ideas for functions that were bound and could be accelerated. However Intel contacted them having apparently already decided what instructions they were going to accelerate and they weren't useful. Additionally, as I recall, shortly after contacting the development team Intel sort of let on that these guys were somehow on board when in fact they were really only just being contacted and weren't. things didn't go really well after that and I couldn't find any more contact on the mailing list between the devs and the guy who claimed to be from Intel after that.
I do a HUGE amount of x.264 encoding at home. I'd LOVE to be able to accelerate it and in fact did my own testing of the various GPU accelerators awhile back. I didn't have as great an issue with the quality as I did the lack of flexability and control over the encoders and thus gave up on it. In fact some of the GPU encoders would ONLY leverage the GPU and my CPU was nearly as fast! When both were used together the GPU encoders were certainly quicker but with so little flexability I decided against using them . I had high hopes that the new generation i7 stuff with accelerated instructions would help but I guess not :-(
Yeah now go look at the heaping scorn that was heaped on the Intel rep when he approached the x.264 guys way late in development. Had they been smart enough to come forward sooner we might have gotten accelerated instructions the x.264 guys would have used - not so now it seems. :-(
unRAID will do this and in fact I often come home and find all my drives spun down as nothing is accessing them. Can put them all in one array too and the only "waste" will be the single parity drive. Been running it for at LEAST 5-6 years or more and have never lost data...
I've been using unRAID since the beginning, unless this is new I do not believe you can have redundant data on multiple drives. You CAN spread a single folder across multiple drives and the parity drive protects against crashes and enables recovery. Since parity isn't striped drives spin down when not needed too.
So far I've not lost any data and I've had multiple drives fail over the years - never a dual failure however which unRAID cannot protect against. However if a dual failure occurs you don't lose it all either and I don't need tons of hot spares and crap spinning.
unRAID is perfect for this application IMO...
Are you running TOR? If not the TOR .Onion link won't work. I don't happen to have TOR installed or I'd have explored the hidden site myself. So far though no one seems to have found the code to download and test near as I can tell...
I cannot find anything on the site that appears to make it available to me in a form I can run, a GIT repo for devs and some press releases is all. I suppose I could hit the "secure" .onion site but I see nothing to indicate there's code there. the summary appears to make it sound like they want participation and I'd love to help but see no way to do so.
Am I the only one that finds this clear as mud?
I know someone that had this happen to them. He supported a challenger and when the challenger lost they fired him and even went so far as to tell him why he was being fired. He sued, was threatened by many, and he won! This was in Delaware but it's apparently pretty common all over. The fact that they were so blatent about it is probably one of the only reason why the guy I knew won and actually they may have just settled - I'd have to ask him. He's pretty quiet about the results and the money as it apparently came with a gag order but at least he got something. I wish him the best of luck finding work again in that community though...