journalism schools don't teach math

Greenies are village idiots. PETA is pushing the concept of an "Unhappy Meal" at McDonalds...

I pray for a civil war, shooting liberals is going to be such fun... hopefully they'll wear their SEIU and Acorn T-shirts so we can claim "uniform" distinction ;-)

...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    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     |

                  Obama: All Sizzle and No Steak

Sarah Palin, Rush and Dubya are all f***ing geniuses?

Where _do_ you get your brain cells?

--
www.wescottdesign.com

Tim, You are truly getting tiring. FOAD!

...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    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

You write, "I pray for a civil war, shooting liberals is going to be such fun..." basically throwing the first punch in starting a brawl and you suggest Tim is the problem here??

Look in a mirror for once. And stop encouraging hate, war, and murder instead of civil discourse for a change.

Jon

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Hmm... 3 megawatts? Seems a bit small for a city of 88k people... each person would consume only 34 watts of power, haha...

Why not report him to the CIA for fermenting a second US civil war? (one good turn deserves another)

I cannot think of anything less patriotic. With any luck you will at least get his firearms licence revoked for being mentally unfit.

Regards, Martin Brown

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You can complain about the unnecessary number of significant figures (a common journalist failing) but the numbers look basically sound.

If the football stadium when used 5 hours a week wastes $200k on electricity at 10c/kWh then it is using ~2GWh a month or 24GWh a year. Comparable to a modest sized town. Pretty much what you would expect in Texas I suppose - profligate and wilful waste of resources.

Regards, Martin Brown

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nhappy

=A0 =A0 =A0...Jim Thompson

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The CIA is not supposed to do stuff within the US that is the FBIs area.

You lack imagination :)

?pgno=1

Uh, what sort of school did you go to?

John

..

Let's make a deal. You serve electricity to the city for $200k a month and I get the balance of their payments. I can probably buy the city after a while.

I had in mind a modest town of about 8000 homes.

I take your point after looking at their claim again about Santa Monica (pop 88,000). It would require domestic power of around say 4MkWh per home and so something like 120GWh a year depending on assumed occupancy rates. And I suppose the US power consumption per home is a lot higher than in the UK so my assumed usage is probably on the low side.

I looked Santa Monica's energy use up and it seems their base household load is around 230GWh/year so it looks like someone slipped a decimal point. It is still a hell of a lot of power for a sports stadium!

Regards, Martin Brown

C...

a n

I guess I am not getting the $199.8m monthly check.

Back to your statement:

$1 buy 10kWhr and $200k buy 2MWhr. Sorry to make fun of you. Everybody make mistakes once in a while.

PNC...

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in

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You are wrong (yes I am). $200k buys 2GWhr. But the city probaby use

2TWhr, while the stadium use 2GWhr.

?pgno=1

Whose money is being "wasted"? That "$200k on electricity" is being paid for with the money handed over, voluntarily, by the people who bought tickets.

Yeah, I wonder too, albeit I can guess - one of the unionized propaganda mills.

Thanks, Rich

For those curious about a source of information, examine these web sites:

...and a spreadsheet noted there, located here:

In particular, the spreadsheet provides better detail.

On the spreadsheet you will see that the residential portion of the electricity energy use in 2006 was 656,000 GJ/yr. This is about 20.8 MWatts, if I got my figures right. The article mentioned by John regarding the stadium states "2,036,560 kWh per month" (I guess, based upon a rough figure of 10 cents/kWh [which is believable] and the monthly expense of $200k, which was explicitly given), so that is

2.788 MWwatts -- call it 2.8 MWatts.

There is quite a difference between 20.8 and 2.8. And that's only the residential portion. Total electrical energy usage in 2006 was about

3,000,000 GJ/yr, which is 95 MWatts for the city's electricity as a whole.

Granting the population of 88000, and depending on which electricity figure you use, the 2.8 MWatts of the stadium (granted for now) works out to an equivalent of either 2,600 (2.8/95*88000) or 11,800 (2.8/20.8*88000) Santa Monica residents. In neither case, 88,000. If you decide to consider the stadium a commercial entity and just look at the commercial use of electricity (per capita) in Santa Monica, then it is 3,300 residents' commercial burden (2.8/(95-20.8)*88000.)

....

Cross-check time. The 20.8 MWatt figure I get from Santa Monica's energy report card for residential use works out to about 240 watts per resident, continuous. I don't know what the average number of residents per home is, but from a real estate site:

I see about 46,000 households. This then works out to 450 watts per household, as a continuous average.

Is that within reason?

I don't know enough to know.

Jon

Just comparing the dollars reveals a huge blunder. If the Santa Monica residents pay an average of only $100 a month, that's already $8.8 million a month, nowhere close to $200,000.

The math blunders I see in newspapers and magazines and web sites are astounding. Journalists, even supposed energy and architecture and science writers, usually can't tell a million from a billion, or a watt from a joule.

John

Or the slightly different twist on what you said here: $200k divided by 88k people gives about $2.27/month/resident of electrical cost. Whether retail, commercial, or industrial pricing, it is also obviously wrong on its face. I only could wish for a bill like that.

Yes. And this author 'wrote well' and with credentials that would suggest better. I wrote to him. Hopefully, I'll get a response and the article will get a correction of some kind.

Jon

I think someone dropped a decimal point along the line.

Probably low for the US. A rough number for average household electricity consumption in the UK is 4MWh / year ~= 460W continuous which seems a bit high to me. US houses tend to be bigger and poorly insulated. And aircon would push it up considerably if used.

Mine is a lot less and I decreased it by 20% after I got an OWL.

I found several unused 12W wall warts lurking under tables in the office. And the new DTV proved to be drawing 40W in standby. Curiously of my computers the oldest server designed for 24/7 operation also had the lowest standby current at only 1W. Modern ones were around 4W each.

The main residual base load that is unavoidable are the CH pump and WiFi network router. If the latter could be persuaded to sleep when there is no traffic it would save another 10W.

Not unless every resident pays $100. It is roughly a ~3x overestimate. You are no better at math (sic) than the journalists you seek to attack. And my electricity bill is closer to $100 a quarter. YMMV

You seem to be confusing arithmetic with mathematics here.

Billion is particularly hairy as most Americans believe that the British billion is different. But it hasn't been since 1974 when Harold Wilson adopted the US usage, but that doesn't prevent US dictionaries from perpetuating the myth.

Regards, Martin Brown

That web site I mentioned, regarding Santa Monica own accounting figures, says, "per capita electricity use ranks relatively low compared to the national average of over 12,000 kW per year." Which they elsewhere note "at just under 9,000 kW per capita per year."

So 12/9 * 450 = 600 watts... on average across the US. You are right that it was probably low for the US, I gather.

Jon