You need to watch out for the hidden subsidies. People who use solar cells to reduce their demand on the grid when the sun is shining are using the grid as a free backup for when sunlight isn't available. If they sell power to the grid during the day, and consume it at night, at the same price, they're using the grid as a free battery (and it's not even a battery at all).
Let people pay the true cost of using the grid as a backup, and the true cost of treating it like a battery, and then we'll see how economic solar cells really are, no matter how low their purchase price falls.
But I see the long-term trend as due to the ever-increasing burdens placed on employers. As we've made it ever more expensive to employ people, we've discouraged hiring and, ultimately, job flight. Obama's put that in overdrive.
Obamacare is the single largest impediment to hiring right now. 2nd is taxes, 3rd is the economy.
For example, I don't plan on buying Obamacare. I read the law over and over to see what my penalty would be (if I decide to pay it--I might just choose martyrdom.). I couldn't figure it out. I just couldn't. Then I tried to figure what I'd have to pay as an employer, and gave up.
This makes me risk averse. If I plan everything for a 10% margin and I'm off 10%, I'm dead.
I'm way more optimistic. As long as we don't completely crush America's spirit, the People will rush out to build factories, make new products, and fill new needs the moment they're unshackled. For example if we kill medicine, then emancipate it, doctors will open little clinics overnight...if...we...only...let...them.
Regulate them into oblivion, increase the barriers to entry and it's all gone.
Government unions are diabolical. Private unions are at least self- limiting--they dare not bankrupt their host. Government unions have no such limit, no restraint to what they expect and demand.
Sure, but since the half-life of the early-in-the-chain daughter isotopes is less than an hour, you're about half a day too late on the average.
This does, though, give new meaning to the term "hocking radiation" :-)
--
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Absolutely. But there's little the governmant can do in the near term to improve the base of our economy. And they are mostly doing the opposite anyhow.
The health thing hasn't hit us yet. And we're losing money (by design) so taxes aren't an issue right now. The cost of labor is an issue: unemployment, workman's comp, FICA. But right now, the economy sucks. We needn't hire people if sales are slow.
Maybe so. But I think the time constant for building a business or an economy is measured in decades.
"...the White House is in over its head, isolated, insular, arrogant and clueless about how to get along with or persuade members of Congress, the media, the business community or working-class voters."
from *TIME MAGAZINE*, who worshiped big O not long ago.
Average retail price of heating oil was $2.908 per gallon on 10/4/10.
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Crude oil price 3 days earlier was $81.58 per barrel, about $1.942 per gallon, about 67% of the heating oil retail price. It appears to me that fossil fuel energy is delivered more economically to homes by trucks than through an inefficient energy conversion stage, a second energy conversion stage, wires and usually at least 3 transformers.
Yes, you are correct there. I was discussing combustion vs. resistive heat.
Then again, combined generation, transmission and distribution losses for grid electricity are more like 60-plus %, and a COP of 4 for a heat pump sounds to me pie-in-sky-high.
Now, for some numbers...
Last time I checked, USA national average residential electricity cost was 11 cents per KWH. If used to power a heat pump with a COP of 3, that is 3.67 cents per KWH of heat.
Home heating oil at $2.908 and 138,700 BTU (40.65 KWH) per gallon works out to 7.15 cents per KWH, 7.53 cents per KWH with 95% efficiency - looks like the heat pump wins out.
But, heat pumps don't work all winter everywhere. When they don't, combustion is a better deal than resistive heat unless electricity cost is less than about 70% of the national average.
The last house I had was heated with a heat pump and I must agree, they do not work well. This is in the Baltimore area. It used resistance heat for the second stage. I think they would be nice if they used natural gas for the first stage, but used the heat pump to preheat the return air to augment the gas. You still need 90% of the hardware for cooling, reversing valve and defrost timer.
The 2 degree (or ° to make some happy) differential to get to the resistance backup really makes for a chill.
I also think that many heat pumps are not operated with the correct refrigerant charges.
Solar panels don't produce daytime power. They produce sunshine power. There's a correlation between sunshine and air conditioning loads, but to avoid the hidden subsidy effects people would have to use their solar panels for power generation only when power demand is pushed up by high temperatures. It wouln't make economic sense to do that - it would be much cheaper to use domestic petrol or natural gas generators.
Yes, seems like a plan, but you still have to rob Peter to pay Paul. Those not using solar pay those that do use it. Night-time storage is another problem. The old lead acid battery hasn't changed for decades. Maybe there's a better way?
That's the agenda of the party of Gimme, Gimme, Gimme, Gimme, Gimme. They expect to rob all the rich Peters, not realizing that the rich Peters are the ones who create the jobs for the working Pauls. When you rob them, they can't afford to hire employees. Why are the liberals so blockheaded about that?
**Regarding the price of coal, read this from that investment adviser:
China has good reason to buy up energy resources around the world... It's running short on coal. China builds a new coal-fired power plant every week. It will soon surpass the U.S. as the world's largest producer of electricity, and coal fuels 80% of that electricity. Already China consumes 60% of Australia's coal exports... and Chinese demand for foreign coal doubled in the last year. Assuming that happens again, China will exhaust Australia's export capacity, something that would send global coal prices soaring...
We have serious concerns about what this would mean for U.S. power companies. As the U.S. prints more and more dollars to bail out banks, autoworkers, and insurance companies, much of that "stimulus" winds up in China, thanks to our enormous ongoing trade and account deficits.
You can think about it this way: The more the Fed prints, the more power plants China builds, and the more coal it will buy. Meanwhile, back in the U.S., our major coal-fired power plants have been subject to all kinds of expensive regulations... but haven't been allowed to raise prices enough to pay for the repairs. Many have been operating at a capital deficit since 2005. The power companies' balance sheets are now seriously weakened. Rising coal prices could literally bankrupt them...
The "case" that (some??) increase in GW stems from an increase in CO2 is not proven; the data gathered from asphalt parking lots kill that "conclusion".
My point was that in the last three years, his 401K might well have had a negative rate of return. Now take a deep breath, and step away from the caps lock key...
Baltimore is about the same latitude as Tokyo and I don't recall any big problems at all with heat pump aircon there even in winter. The natives found it a bit chilly in winter and had hightech paraffin heaters. But for me most of their winter days were still relatively warm and more importantly very dry. If the Japanese can do it then it can be done.
Granted that in the interior US continental climate would make it a lot harder, but looking at Wiki Baltimore has a maritime climate much like Tokyo.
That is quite likely given that CFCs used to make up a large proportion of them. Substitute formulations were not as good in original kit as the working fluid they were designed for. Certain mixes used in new UK fridges will only work properly if the fridge is in the house and fail completely if ambient drops below 10C (eg fridge/freezer in garage).
Scrubbing SO2 out of the generator exhaust costs very little and everybody does it. Scrubbing CO2 is technically feasible, though nobody seems to contemplate scrubbing more than about 80% of the CO2, but nobody has done it yet. It's going to be expensive, and those game enough to predict how expensive usually talk about doubling the price of electricity to the consumer, which wouldn't be popular, but wouldn't break the economy or anything like it.
There are a variety of potentially better ways of storing energy. Super-conducting inductors have been mentioned. None of them has been reduced to practice.
And I don't think anybody is contemplating powering our entire civilisation by photo-voltaic solar on it own. For large scale installations, thermal solar does seem to be cheaper, and at a least one planned installation is intended to melt lots of salt duing the day and extract heat from it overnight to keep the steam turbines running.
Windmills don't stop working overnight, and at the moment they do provide cheaper power than photovoltaic generation. Windmills do stop generating when the wind stop sblowing, as it does from time to time, but if you have a bigger enough grid this isn't a problem - and the Germans are contmeplating setting up solar-powered gnerators in the Sahara and coupling them back into the German grid with with very high- voltage direct current links. Super-conducting links could also do the job, but keeping a cable running across the bottom of the Mediterranean super-conducting would take some interesting technology.
And - of course - raising the average price of power enough to pay for a significant protion of solar and wind generation gets you into the ball-park where it could pay you to sequester the CO2 output of a more or less contentional coal-fired power generating station and bury the CO2 underground or in some convenient deep ocean trench.
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