Pinging Joerg

Not really. A big lake in the mountains, waterpumps and waterturbines

If a company does not have a specific reason to be located in some expensive district (such as serving demanding local customers), it should relocate to some cheaper district and expect to pay less for the personnel that could use cheaper housing.

If you are forced to have two cars in a family, then it makes sense to have one for inner city commuting (such as EV) and an other for long distance work and holiday traveling.

With only one car in the family, the compromise is much harder.

Next time your outdoor temperature drops below 0 C, may I suggest that you close the windows at least for the night :-).

Today we had -10 C in Helsinki, and -35 C in other parts of the country.

You might be interesting looking at

If you look at the 2011 graphs, the per capita consumption, it varied from 1 kW/person to nearly 2.5 kW/person, including the consumption of the heavy (24/7) industry. With triple glaze windows and sufficient insulation in the walls, a house at these latitudes (60+ N) can be operated with 8000-10000 kWh annual _total_ consumption , i.e. 1 kW average consumptions.

Even if the consumption is concentrated (unrealistically) to 3 or 4 winter months, we are still talking about 3-4 kW winter time loads. I really do not understand, why someone would be invest in 10+ kW gear.

But not in America :-)

Seriously, neighbors just had that issue that buyers didn't want to carry their fair share of all the upgrades they had done. So ... off the market it went and it is now rented out. Meaning nobody can buy it for the next few years.

If there is a global warming at all, that is. Some serious doubt has been cast on that lately.

If a CO2 bubble comes up it'll be a very quiet event. The next morning there is going to be a eerie silence in the lands. Because every human and every animal within a certain radius is dead.

Absolutamente. That is just about the only economical method of longer term demand response management. However, and that is a big one, there are the enviro-freak crowd and the NIMBYs (not in my backyard). They all will fight every new installation tooth and nail. Some speckled frog living there can't be disturbed, and the other guys don't want their pristine mountain views altered by the two large tubes going up a mountain.

Most companies are located in industrial zones which are difficult to reach by public transport. Mostly the employees come from all around the company. Relocating the company will make the trip longer for some people and longer for others. Moving employees is also expensive because the government charges a tax of 6% of the price of the house. That tax has been temporarely lowered to 2%. If you take into account that a house costs between 200k and 300k euros...

We more or less have that but even then a car which can't travel more than a few ten of miles is useless.

The windows are shut and the house is very well insulated. For NL standards that is.

Thats not per home!

I still find that difficult to believe. In my own home (2 adults + 2 kids) we use about 16000kWh per year (hot water + electricity).

I trust that was meant to be $30K ....

Yup, sorry for the typo. With tax rebates that goes down a bit but I ran the numbers and it still didn't compute for us. Many solar installers will come up with different numbers but one has to watch it, they are often unrealistic. And many do not seem to understand what an ROI is and that this matters to people.

So you dig the pump/turbine station *into* the mountain, like the Brits have done in a couple of places. Pristine Scottish scenery preserved, just a loch that goes up and down a bit. I've been round that one, if you didn't know it was there, you wouldn't see it. They get full size trucks a mile inside the mountain to get plant in and out.

That, plus those "project labor agreements", and you'll have a major big-dig union boondoggle that'll saddle our grandkids with even more the thay already got.

Sounds like bad policy to me.

That is a major policy screw-up. Getting people to jobs and back should be priority over most other things.

Enginering is mostly telecommutable, why is that not being done? Of course telecommuting is not suitable to everyone either, but what the employee can handle should determine.

Denmark.

Am i confused or is that a small footprint house (1530 sq ft living = space,

Sounds poorly insulated.

Really? R60 ceiling/roof and R35+ exterior walls? That is my target values for the rather benign climate of central valley California.

eration/

I piss away almost that much, but i run a lot of computer power 24/7.

?-)

Well for one, having slaughter houses and meat packing plants kept the prudes too close to reality. They didn't like that and legislated them out of their faces. etc., etc.,=20

and

^^^^^^^^^^^^ = past

Be cheerful, it drives your enemies nuts. ?-)

Rome fell because of bad government.

It is. But people seem like to stay in jobs they like even if it means driving a certain distance.

Well, the local governments try to make as much money as they can by selling land and spend nothing on public transport.

I tried that for a while but the problem is that the person who is not there is always to blame for delays in a project. Damn politics.

The footprint is about right. Its about 1530 sq feet of usable floor surface. For NL standards its neither big or small. Note that NL is among the most densely populated countries in the world. Land is scarse.

Very little about working is about getting things done in a measurable manner..

-- Les Cargill

One can exclude some rare extremes but still not throw the baby out with the bathtub. For example, while in the Netherlands:

a. I lived above a pub.

b. Next door was a busy bank.

c. An auto repair shops was across the street.

d. Numerous stores plus the post office was also across the street.

e. The main bus line turned around and stopped there.

And so on. It all actually made for rather pleasant living. One did not need a car at all, and for some time I didn't have any. Heck, most of the time I didn't even need my bicycle because you could be just about anywhere within minutes of walking.

:-)

True. But that does not mean all their ideas were bad. For example, their building quality was more than an order of magnitude better than what we consider buildings today. Much of it is actually still in use.

Zoning laws are in most cases nonsensical. There the Romans did much better.

With slave labor that was pushed to the point of collapse or death. Would you want an adult book store and a casino next to your church? How about a racetrack, or boiler factory?

Nowadays they wouldn't need slave labor anymore because there cranes and such.

There already is a pub across from it, plus numerous restaurants, a children's train circuit, a bank, a coffee shop. What's the problem with that?

BTW, at my very first apartment there was a huge chocolate factory immediately next door. No problem.

That's awful, just awful.

John Larkin, President Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com

Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro acquisition and simulation