Yikes! Good that nobody innocently walked by or camped out there :-)
[...]
If you can trust the data. The people who collect such information may have all the possible good intentions. The guys milking the data and trying to push an agenda, different thing. Lots of credibility was lost in the eyes of the general population. Just an observation.
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Lucky you. Right now (or the next 1-2 years probably) would be a good time to get into real estate. The downside is that you are then also a landlord with all the work and headaches that entails.
[...]
We both won't live long enough to tell. But I don't like premature conclusions and tax decisions being arrived at on shaky or sometimes faulty data. Pretty much everyone I know in our middle-class neighborhood (and we know a lot of folks) also sees it that way, and the rulemakers better listen. The last election has shown what happens if they don't.
--
Regards, Joerg
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Yes, that's true enough. I went out there frequently enough to be relatively sure, though. And it is private property after all. But yes, there was a small worry in the back of my mind and I'm pretty sure I'd have been held responsible if something like that happened even if there was no good reason for anyone else to be there. We debated the risks. I'm glad it worked out in the end. But it's not a _designed_ procedure, for sure!
It's too overwhelming. And, I happen to know at least _some_ of the folks doing this work on the ground floor, so to speak, personally. Two. And they know others. Just an observation.
I had a practice of never selling any land, ever. Wanted to pass it on to my children and the community. My wife forced me to sell all our property, though. She is the one who first told me that the whole market was going to unravel, in April of 2005. We argued a bit, but she presented me with a few technical papers by "green visor boys" writing about the kiting of US property mortgages (one was written by a Canadian, though) and I was completely convinced the next month. Sold everything before mid-2006. Make 6 times what we'd paid.
She is like a spider in a web on this stuff. She feels the vibrations. But frankly, I know a lot of other people already knew this stuff, too. Obviously, or else those papers wouldn't have been prepared and written. I was just lucky enough to have a wife who trusts very little and keeps on top of economic and real estate reports and data.
We are moving towards as much self-sufficiency as we can manage, which means developing a community of our own (we can't do everything ourselves, obviously.)
You'll see before you die, most likely. So will others. But I've already seen and personally tested, quantitatively, parts of the theory through specific deductions over the last
20 years and talked with others in the field enough to know which end is up and that's enough for me. It informs only a few of my actions in life, to be honest. Most of what I do is driven by more urgent and personally important things, anyway. Plenty of those to go around.
But pretty soon it'll bottom out. Maybe not before the Fed has to raise interest rates but who knows. Time to buy some of those properties back?
The Kirwan tribe? :-)
Or do you do that with friend and neighbors?
We are doing our part as well, not because of AGW but because the planet can't be used as if we had a spare in the trunk. People just don't want whole new bureaucracies and taxes and fat pensions to be created over all this. There are much better methods, for example related to the smart grid. I've discussed them in a forum where utility experts participate but even there I find little awareness of many simple things that can be done. And also little willingness to discuss them. Like realtime feedback, _real_ peak avoidance incentives, stuff that prevents peaker plants to come on.
--
Regards, Joerg
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Indeed. In the market towards the end of this year.
Think of it more like a corporation (it has to be at least two corporate entities, in fact, to survive IRS scrutiny) with widely diversified income sources (necessary for long term.) We'll work on attracting a board that serves several purposes (as is the case with any well-formed board) and continue to evolve it as time proceeds and their function changes. A pretty clear vision is closer in hand, but I'm still getting some useful and interesting ideas from others (a month back I spent a couple of hours with my state senator here at home on this topic.) If you want more details, you'll need to write directly. As I just wrote, I may be back in the property market soon. If so, it will be for the next step in this process.
I respect and appreciate that. Not for me, but for my children.
No one wants waste, wasted effort, corruption and pay-offs, or even gilded lilies -- doesn't matter by whom. And we all enjoy seeing things done well and fairly -- doesn't matter by whom.
We all want fair play. Obviously.
Our local "big" utility (Portland General Electric, not to be confused with CA's PG&E) has a group that specializes in alternate power -- wind, water, and geo, I think. I had some hours of discussion with their senior engineer (I think the group isn't all that big, as everyone I spoke with before mentioned the same man before I actually contacted him.) I was interested in other subjects, but we came onto what is really jazzing PGE up here. They are really hoping "electric smart cars" take off. Because, as he described, they want to use a large base of smart cars as their "battery" for storage.
For example, just last week (I think), Washington state was experiencing flooding problems. So much so, that they had to release dam water on the Columbia through the four major dams running out the ocean without getting any power from it. (Also killed a LOT of fingerlings in the process.) They said they released the water instead of generating power, because there was no place to send the power at the time. (In the news, so I can't promise the reporter's details are necessarily accurate -- YMMV.) However, if there actually were all these cars in peoples' garages, they could send the power there. And get it back, if they don't go and drive later on.
I gathered some are drooling over the idea of a million smart electric cars sitting in each major city's garages serving big energy's storage interests with greatly lowered overhead costs handed to them on a silver platter by the hoi polloi who spend their own money for the cars AND for the electric power with after-tax, work-dollars. Hardly gets any sweeter.
We already have done that and irrespective of what we do now it will get a lot worse before it gets better. There is a lot of inertia in the system and we haven't yet even agreed how to stabilise CO2 levels yet.
Exxon and the merchant bankers do not. One reason I am against the proposed carbon tax is that it will serve only as yet another new vehicle for greedy spivs to generate speculative market instability.
The same has already happened to staple foods and other commodities with hedge funds moving in for the kill:
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Last year driving coffee high was "it". Now it is food.
Saving energy and improving insulation are far better low hanging fruit than gratuitous carbon taxes modelled on mediaeval indulgences.
This doesn't make all that much sense unless the cars can also give it back to the grid - which might be technically possible but would complicate things if you plug your car in to charge and the electricity company drains your battery instead!
This sounds positively weird. I can understand that they might have to open the spillways if the dam was in danger structurally with rising water arriving more rapidly than the generators could possibly use it but they should still be able to run flat out and feather some gas/oil turbines elsewhere on the network and in extremis for load balancing sell it at cost to the last gasp dump loads of aluminium and steel smelters, and the chloralkali plants. It would be *very* unusual for all of the dump load balancing consumers to be offline simultaneously.
Inability to store electricity means that production and load have to be balanced but it doesn't make any sense how you describe it here. In the UK HEP with pumped storage is actually *used* as a giant battery to absorb some of the nuclear base generation output if load drops low (and to provide rapid response peak coverage when national load spikes).
The Hoi Polloi are going to be more than a little upset if their car batteries are routinely abused by the electricity companies. There will very soon be an after market in charge only connection devices.
If manmade CO2 is a problem at all, something that IMHO has no been proven. Whether it is or not, we can take a lot of that inertia away but it does take will power and sacrifice. For example, last year the number of miles I used my car for was just under 2000. Don't know my wife's but she never really drives more than about 1000mi/year. That is some _real_ relief for our environment.
Same for another major contributor, coal power stations. It is so easy to flick the li'l switch when it gets hot in summer and that big 7kW compressor in the A/C rumbles to life. We never used it much in the first place and rather got used to the heat but lately we replaced this major energy hog (it's still there as backup though) with an evaporative cooler that eats 0.4kW and only when set on high. Now that's _real_ and immediate relief again. No inertia at all but a cold turkey stop to the tune of 6.6kW of grid load. Are there tax incentives or utility rebates for that? Nope. Because they've got the priorities wrong. We do not need CO2 taxes, we need to set those priorities right, plain and simple.
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IMHO that isn't going to fly, see end of the post.
Worse. Even with a 20-80% limited regime there is a limited number of cycles in a battery until it reaches end of life, and that is usually in the very low four digits. If you assume 2000 cycles and the battery pack replacement costs $5k that means every time the utility uses it for DR they've slurped $2.50 out of your wallet. Using EVs for DR equalization can also gradually reduce their range because it wears out the battery pack. I would not want that.
I threw this into the questions after a smart grid panel discussion here in Sacramento. That sure caused some head scratching.
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Regards, Joerg
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I didn't mean the power elite. I was talking about humans as individuals in broad strokes. As Benj. Franklin spoke in August of 1787 in Philidelphia, 'some of the worst rogues' he knew were 'the wealthiest.'
I'm only for it if the money goes right back into the hands of people at the bottom who make choices each day and not left for those in power to control and wield as they see fit. Not sure exactly how this works because I've not thought much about the details, but if the tax encourages self-moderation and the money returned encourages purchases of alternatives that don't emit CO2 into the atmosphere, then it might turn that inertia just a tad. One can hope.
In any case, it will not easily get popular support here without such a plan. If it's just money piled into the hands of just a few in control, people at the bottom won't support it with their votes. If it looks fair, I think they may give tentative support at some point in time. Without that sense, very unlikley at all.
Tell me about it. I've been watching the markets, too.
Yes. I am with you on this point, as well. There is a long discussion here ahead, but it's too much to consider writing more on it here. I get your point and I'll leave it there.
Ever tried to calculate what happens? Saving energy and improving insulation is an inherently linear function. There are exponentials going on that will easily overwhelm it in (short) time. It may be necessary but not sufficient. There is only one real solution here. Folks rarely sincerely discuss it and we have no experience nor ideas on how exactly to do it, either. Care to guess what it is?
Yes. That's _exactly_ what he said they were wishing for. The smart electric cars are supposed to work in both directions. I've not tried to work out the details on my own. I assume they are doing so, because he told me they were.
What he told me is that they would "poll" the car for the following day's plan (the owner who cooperates is supposed to keep their schedule available -- which of course means that when the power company's computers are hacked, a bunch of hackers will know exactly when to rob you... but that's another story) and they would decide from that how to use the car for their storage requirements. Like anything, there will be problems, of course. And it will take a long time to work them down to "reasonable" for most folks and a long time for folks to learn how to accomodate the system.
If you are interested in details about this, I'd be happy to call them back up and see what their current plan looks like and if it is still ongoing or what and if they have any detailed docs I can look at and share. Might be interesting to see.
See:
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Perhaps I didn't read it well or communicate it properly. But that's the article I was thinking of.
Well, see the article and come to your opinion from there.
Hehe. Well, I still had that conversation just the same. Hadn't even considered the idea before he mentioned it to me.
APS, the largest electric power provider in Arizona, just announced a
15% rate increase to cover the cost of renewable energy sources ;-) ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, CTO | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
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I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Do you have any example where this has ever worked? Once a tax is instituted you'll hear a huge slurping sound and the majority of such "revenue" is gone. There will be a barrage of entities at the ready to pounce at that very millisecond.
[...]
Insulation isn't linear. You will eventually reach a point where the energy savings potential of any additional invested Dollar will diminish rapidly. Or cause other grief such as mold.
If CO2 is your worry you must try to live as neutral as possible. You and I are doing that with respect to heating, which is propably the majority of the CO2 footprint for many households. Others don't. Still others think that holding fancy speeches and then flicking the thermostat in their huge mansions or flying to an AGW conference in private jets whitewashes them.
The details will not work out. Just the limited number of cycles and the battery cost puts a damper on this. Unless the utility rewards with big bucks, which they hardly can.
Yeah, like li'l Joey getting sick and you want to drive him to the ER at
2:00am, only to find out that the needle in your EV shows 15mi of charge and the next hospital is 25mi away.
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Just curious: Isn't increasd runoff forecastable even if you don't have much of a storage reservoir behind the dam? Couldn't they have traded with some major power plants elsewhere in the country, offset partial shutdown costs to them but keep the wind power going?
[...]
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Regards, Joerg
http://www.analogconsultants.com/
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Use another domain or send PM.
Given the recent announcement that cell phone radiation causes brain cancer, I wonder what kind of cancers all the electronics in electric cars cause? ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, CTO | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
It also takes some trust: In the case of "information workers" (those who primarily just sit in front of a PC all day), you can save incredible amounts of energy by just having those employees work from home... yet many businesses are uncomfortable with the idea of allowing their workers to be "out of sight." "When the cat's away, the mice will play" and all...
Clearly your miles *driven* last year is well below average, but I'm thinking your miles *flown* is perhaps *well above* average?
Good point, but you have to understand that many people probably wouldn't be comfortable with your evaporative cooler alone... although I'd admit to having any idea of the real numbers here; it might be rather larger than the, say,
10% I'd just completely guesstimate. :-) I mean, consider large retail establishments like Wal*Mart: They're only paying for AC to make the
*customers* happy, and if they thought the customers would be "happy enough" with swamp coolers, I have to believe they'd install them in an insight given the order of magnitude difference in energy usage.
It probably does make sense to offer financial incentives to get people to try out swamp coolers, though. So long as you let them keep their A/C as well (in case the swamp cooler isn't adequate for their desires), I bet you would get a fair number of takers.
That I'll never really understand. I work out of sight for all my clients and they trust me. Some are an ocean away. Usually I only visit if there is a compelling need such as an EMI hunt or a major redesign talks where umpteen big boards need to be discussed.
Most likely not. Because we are active in programs such as guide dogs we don't really go on vacations, meaning no kerosene is burned for fun. When I fly for biz it's mostly SWA and they "pack'em in there" . A full or almost full Boeing 737 beats the usual single-occupant car in gas mileage. Ok, I did also drive in rental cars. But mostly not alone and only the really necessary miles.
AFAIK Home Depot cools their buildings with evap coolers. Walmart has also started:
walmartstores.com/download/3836.pdf
IIRC their big Las Vegas super center is also cooled that way.
Most likely there would be, because the installation can swallow a fair amount of money. I cannot understand why a much lesser whole house fan enjoys incentives and its superior evap cooler brethren don't. All the whole house fan does is cool in the evening, and suck in tons of dirt, pollen and dust into the house while at it.
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Use another domain or send PM.
And the laptop your are sitting in front of with the WLAN turned on? And that DECT phone here next to me? And the smart meter 8ft behind me? Oh, I am soooo afraid :-)
Never mind that I did ham radio for more than a decade ...
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Roger that! IBM had no problems with people working from home, at least they didn't one or even two days a week. Of course they trusted people with sick leave, too. There wasn't any such thing. OTOH, where I work now, forget even bringing it up. My boss wants me to limit time with vendors to 15 minutes and wants to be (but isn't) copied on all emails. I trusted the kid, when he was a kid, more.
I'm going to put on 2500-3500 miles in the next three weeks. By air? Zero. ;-)
I wouldn't be too happy with a swamp cooler either. ;-) If it weren't for AC, I sure wouldn't live here[*]. It's 99F now (5:30PM) and it's supposed to be hotter tomorrow.
[*] any more than I would live in Vermont without heat or Oregon without a roof. ;-)
Their financial incentive is money saved on electricity. I'm against any wealth transfers.
Never mind that I worked for a commercial radio station for years. AM output power 1kw, FM output power 10kw with ERP 100kw. Ditto on the ham stuff. ....
Wow! Hopefully you aren't going to be the driver for all ~3000 of them!?
(That being said, when I first graduated and moved to Oregon, working in Corvallis, the ~90 minute drive to Portland seemed like an *eternity*. Whereas, flash forward a decade, and a 4 1/2 hour weekend commute back to Portland no longer seemed like that big of a deal...)
Oregon is really quite nice, and while a roof is very much recommended :-), there's a lot of control available as to the amount of rain you receive based on just how far north or south you live in the state!
Well, yes, I take your point and respect the fact that you're a man of principle, but it's one of those situations where many people just aren't interested and/or savvy enough to change their behavior based on the "obvious" savings from using less electricity. :-(
Kind of odd really. I though good stewardship of the planet was one of the tenets of his belief system. And to be fair he does seem to live by them even if he defends the right of all Americans to profligate waste.
It is actually worse than that as the saved money gets spent elsewhere and potentially on cheap long haul holidays for instance!
Lowering the worlds population is about the only thing that will bring a long term balance otherwise sooner or later there will be spectacular resource battles over probably water first and then food. The hedge funds are all doing their very best to make sure that famine stalks the poorest nations. Sadly wars, disease and famine are capable of lowering the worlds population but the results are very ugly.
That is going to be fantastically annoying if you need to make an unplanned longer journey. It isn't like you can charge up an electric car particularly quickly and any fast charging makes batteries very hot so shortening the lifetime. Fast charging followed by immediate heavy use would I expect be particularly hard on them.
Be amusing to see what they are planning. I honestly can't see it flying except for regular short urban commutes and school runs.
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It demonstrates conclusively that if you don't plan the system and fail to provide the necessary infrastructure to move power from where it is abundant to where it is needed you get total chaos. It does look like a monumental balls up caused by adding a load of extra wind generation to an area that is isolated, already in big power generation surplus and lacks the essential supergrid transmission to deliver it to customers.
Sounds like they have feathered all other non-hydro but that because wind power goes as cube of windspeed at certain times of year the wind generators + hydro can overwhelm the network capacity. Not at all good engineering - the wind industry should be paying for the power lines or an industry that needs vast power should be moving to the state.
I thought US Alcan aluminium plants were dump loads in that neck of the woods are they all offline or something?
UK is somewhat different in that being smaller the supergrid infrastructure is already in place. Partly because southerners don't like power stations in their backyards most power is in the North.
If you don't provide thick enough cables to move the electricity to your customers you end up with this daft situation. Market distortions caused by the volatility of the wind farm generation seem to have been allowed to create this situation with no overall engineering plan.
In the UK the wind companies are paid by "peak capacity installed" which is utter madness and has seen proposals to put windfarms in totally inappropriate locations with nothing like economic windspeeds. Some were shown to be not connected to the grid and still being paid!
I haven't done the sums, but it strikes me that unless and until a large proportion of people have electric cars this will not work at all.
"Think tank pipe dream" is the phrase that springs to mind. (does that work in American? I expect the pipe held Opium)
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