They rehired that person in 2012. They're hoping he can perform the same magic twice.

$7/month for a 10 KW service has to be compared to $0.11/kw-hr for Arizona electricity, scaled out to the actual energy consumed by the household. If I am paying $150/month for electricity and drop that to zero, netting $143 doesn't increase the amortization schedule for the hardware by an enormous amount. Is it reasonable? Hard to say. Charging the consumer SOMETHING for the use of the lines isn't crazy. I pay $15/month just to have power turned on to a cabin I hardly ever use and that consumes no electricity at all. But it is cheaper than having the power turned on and off when I do use it.

rgb

FWIW, I agree with you completely, sir, and I don't even "believe" that AGW is likely to be catastrophic or that CO_2 is intrinsically bad (I actually have pretty good reasons for my beliefs, but not worth the flame wars asserting them entail). Solar power SHOULD come into its own when it is cost effective. Indeed, it is the capitalist way. In the case of power, though, since power companies are hardly capitalist enterprises -- they are publicly sanctioned local monopolies and nearly completely protected from anything like actual competition -- it is entirely within the rights of the same commonwealth that gave them the monopoly to require them to run the damn meter backwards for people that put energy back into the system by whatever means. It is POSSIBLY OK for them to add in a "tax" of some sort and pay back the added power at a SMALL discount, since the consumer is using company resources to effectively redistribute their energy surplus on lines maintained by the company. But then, they are also helping the company load balance and avoid building new generation facilities, so it isn't even clear that should be the case.

I myself already have replaced my windows, my roof, added in a double layer of high-R insulation in the attic, replaced all of the old furnaces and AC units with uber-high-efficiency units and use tankless gas hot water (which leaves a bit to be desired, actually). My energy costs are so low there isn't a lot leftover to pay off an investment in solar out of reduced cost of purchased electricity (one of the paradoxes of this is that your amortization scheme depends on how much you pay out, and conservation measures elsewhere actually increase amortization to where the advantage of PV solar once again is marginal to lose-a-little).

Still, I expect to PROBABLY bite the bullet and do rooftop solar in the next 2-4 years, sooner if hardware gets cheaper faster (reducing the amortization schedule). For the electric utilities, though, solar is already a no brainer win and they are building their own solar farms just because if I can break even or win a bit at full retail costs for solar, they can probably double my payback via economy of scale in solar farms. That may be why they are opposing the buyback option -- they can make more money making solar on their own than reselling solar energy you made and sold back to them at cost. In fact, they don't MAKE any money on the latter.

rgb

Obviously not. My physics Ph.D. is just an accident.

It is equally interesting that you completely avoid the point I was making, which is that we cannot successfully predict the climate using general circulation models. But I suppose if you know any physics or mathematics you already know this. You certainly know how to argue on the basis of logical fallacies. My statement that we are not able to predict the extent of any warming caused by CO_2 and are very, very far from being able to show that it is or will be a bad thing does not, in fact, equate to stating that there is no such thing as the greenhouse effect or that increasing CO_2 should not cause a logarithmic increase in average surface temperature. Outside of that, it is a simple matter of fact that -- if you bother to actually look at e.g. figure 9.8a of AR5 -- the GCMs do an absolutely terrible job of either predicting or hindcasting the climate outside of the reference period where they were dynamically tuned to match it.

Some other facts. One cannot observationally separate natural versus forced warming in a dynamical nonlinear chaotic open system like the Earth. The error bars in our knowledge of past climate state are far larger than are acknowledged to the public (when error bars are published at all -- as a general rule a simple line graph is drawn as if it is "true") and IMO the error bars on things like HadCRUT4 -- which are only a factor of 2 larger in 1850 than they are in 2014 -- are completely absurd. And the GCMs, BTW, are basically just dressed up weather models, run forward in time on an absurdly coarse (compared to the Kolmogorov scale) spatiotemporal grid, some 36 orders of magnitude short of where they would need to be to be able to semi-reliably actually integrate out the models from known initial conditions, if we knew the initial conditions. They are limited not by design (only) but by the simple fact that we cannot afford to build a computer network capable of solving the problem.

But hey, I probably don't know anything about mathematics or statistics or computational modeling or large scale computation either. So feel free to dismiss my opinion because you don't agree with it on the basis of my presumed incompetence. After all, anybody that doesn't agree with you must be ignorant or stupid or being paid off or holding a vested interest or -- pick your favorite fallacy and have at it.

In the meantime, by all means support research into ways to irreversibly change the climate system even more than it may or may not have been changed already. What can go wrong?

rgb

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...

I think it would have a substantial ripple effect. TFA isn't about possession, it is about using a "lethal weapon" in a drug-related crime. If you subtract out the pot, you also take away the right to search people who happen to visibly be smoking pot and your odds of catching them for secondary offenses go way down. Sadly we wouldn't make a dent in the petty crime committed to support a drug addiction (as pot is not addictive and not so expensive most people feel compelled to steal in order to afford it) but it is a good first step in that direction as well.

And even 20% fewer lawyers is a good thing. With luck we might even make it 25 or 30% fewer. So far I've spent $20K or very near that defending my sons from silly possession charges, almost all of it going to lawyers.

rgb

We've had traffic signal LEDs for a while, but AFAIK no overhead street lights. I'm not sure they are bright enough to meet their "standard" or whatever.

I'm just quoting over the counter prices I see in my grocery store or local hardware store. So far Duke power hasn't offered any killer deals on them (although they do periodically with CFs, but I'm already using CFs throughout the house). Also, I need/want 100W equivalent brightness and the best Harris-Teeter can do is 60W equivalent for around $25-30. Online Cree bulbs (Cree is right down the road and some of my ex-students work there) are around $24 for 100 W equivalent, Eco-bulbs around $23, save a bit if you buy in bulk.

That's a lot of money for a single bulb. Yes, they claim 25,000 hours. Yes, the bulbs haven't existed for any reasonable fraction of that much time so we have no idea how long they'll last. My garage has a whole bag of CFs that are rated for 8000 hours and didn't make it to 3000.

      rgb

Including me...;-) But we are what, 0.001% of the total population? Not exactly a plurality to be taken seriously.

rgb

Where do you live? Someplace either very enlightened or broke, I imagine. Mostly enlightened if they are buying LED lamps, which are not cheap.

But hey, when I visit Charlottesville, it has these lovely 1 meter wide bike lanes on most of the streets near UVA. I'm so jealous. Durham just painted a line on the side of existing streets that sequesters anywhere from 0 to 40 or 50 cm and call that a "bike lane". On my own ride into campus there is a place where it goes from 40 cm to 0 cm under an overpass at one of the two busiest traffic points on the entire route. Several people are badly injured or killed every year riding bikes in Durham (including, a couple of years ago, Seth Vidal, the principle developer of YUM and a good friend of mine) -- I wonder why?

These are the steps we should take long before we try uber-expensive and risky measures like mucking around with either atmospheric chemistry or space blankets in the sky or even massive (and hence expensive) rail projects. They make sense even if AGW is nonsense or sensible but not a real threat or even beneficial. It's a lot healthier for me to ride a bike into work -- or would be if it weren't for the substantial risk of injury along the route and the fact that I'd have to ride down a mile of country road with an inadequate bike lane during rush hour in the dark because of the silly time shift. Bike lanes, losing most of the street lights and regulating commercial light pollution after hours, and some clever use of electronics to control crime instead of light. They make sense even if Lockheed-Martin does have commercial fusion (as they claim that they will) within five years.

rgb

What's the point of putting anyone in prison for weed ever? If the states would just get around to legalizing it completely, no more BB-gun crime in your area! Prisons would empty! Lawyers would starve! All of these are good things.

And one day we will. As my son points out, every year, lots of Old People (tm) die. At some point enough of them who learned about the evils of pot from William Randolph Hearst and Anslinger via vehicles like "Reefer Madness" will have died, and the simple fact that states that have legalized it de facto or de jure aren't imploding in an orgy of drug-fuelled crime will be persuasive even to those that think that it is not necessarily good for you to smoke pot. And on that day, every single person who lost their freedom, their health, their wealth, and their future not because of the chemical effects of pot but because we made it illegal and created a world where breaking any law, just or not, is dangerous will cry out to the sky:

Why?

Yeah, and did you notice that nobody -- nobody at all -- is calling for street lights to be turned off for good. Everybody's worried about burning coal, wasting energy, making resistance heating electric hot water heaters illegal as of this year (sheesh!). They want us to turn off the lights in our houses, they want us to spend $20-30 on LED bulbs because incandescents use too much energy -- but the streets are lit outside of my door with enormous halogen bulbs that burn all night even when there are no human eyes open to see their light. Empty parking lots blaze with halogen and mercury and neon. Cities string Christmas lights by the thousands along miles of road once a year. We pay for all of it, and yeah, it means that we can't see the sky particularly well even living on the rural edge of the city with deer in our back yard.

As a species, we're scared of the dark. We don't even consider turning off all of this completely wasted light (and saving some serious power, instantly) because then bad things would come out from under the bed and get us.

We're not even completely incorrect in this belief. One of the bad things is us and we are indeed scary as shit.

However, for far, far less than it would cost to loft crap into upper atmosphere or orbit, for far less than it would cost to even "commission research into" eventually lofting crap into orbit, we could start to actually use smart technology we already have and e.g. make street lights motion sensitive, or control crime (the usual excuse for having them, since "to prevent irrational fear of monsters" isn't an easy political sell for all of its truth) by actual robocop monitoring, looking for crime and not just putting up lights to nominally scare it off.

One could go down a rather long list of petty vanities that cost comparatively huge amounts of energy that we routinely pay for -- and waste. Billboards. Streetlights. The pointless annual time shift. Trucks vs trains. The utter lack of functional, safe, bicycle lanes in almost all the communities in the US. Electric cars. Living in borderline desert regions instead of water-rich temperate regions just because cheap, plentiful energy and long range importation of water makes it possible if unwise (as California and Las Vegas and the southwest in general may learn any year now).

Personally, I think that the evidence for catastrophic anthropogenic climate change is all but nonexistent -- it is a simple matter of fact that the changes in climate from the mid-1600's to the present, whatever their cause, have been almost entirely beneficial and in any event are utterly lost in the noise of normal daily and annual variation (overall warming from that entire period is around 1 C, an a signal too small for people to even notice against the noise). If someone truly "believes" in it, however, in spite of the fact that the models that predict it suck and the IPCC itself in the third annual report admitted that the problem of predicting the climate was basically unsolvable so that it is no surprise that the models suck -- let's start by turning off not the lights in my house, where I live and use the light, but outside where all it does is help the deer find the best hastas and roses from my garden to eat late at night.

rgb

Seriously. We have a perfect understanding of the climate. We can predict to a tenth of a degree what the weather will be two weeks or two hundred years from now anywhere on Earth. We fully understand what triggers ice ages and can hindcast the climate of the entire Pliestocene, quantitatively. Our knowledge of solar dynamics is almost perfect, so we can confidently predict the state of the sun well into the future. Our measurements of atmosphere, ocean, and land are complete so that we know the entire state of the ocean (for example) well enough to predict with complete accuracy its future evolution given any possible variation of solar input. Finally, we are perfectly capable of predicting the future course of human affairs -- global population, the distribution of that population, land use -- and can predict already precisely when we will make critical scientific and technological breakthroughs (like thermonuclear fusion or widespread LFTR fission or storage batteries that don't suck or high temperature high current superconductors) . Our knowledge of the interior of the Earth itself is at last nearly complete, so we can predict to the day when Yellowstone or other supervolcanoes will wake up and erupt continuously for ten or twenty thousand years. Finally, once we create an orbital cloud of atomic sodium (or whatever) into space, it will be easy to remove it or rearrange it if it turns out to do something completely different than we expect, such as trigger snowball earth or act in its own right like a layer of greenhouse gas between the Earth and 3 K infinity.

Oh, wait, those are all things we don't have, and can't do, and don't know. And I absolutely shudder to think of the price tag, both in dollars and in joules.

I swear, common sense is a lost art.

Let's go back to discussing orbital solar cells as a solution to both energy production and screening. Adding 64 MJ/kg (times a thousand or so) to the cost of solar cells by lofting them into orbit and giving world governments potential access to an orbital superweapon just to get to 1370 W/m^2 sunlight is sheer economic brilliance compared to this one. Oh, wait! Maybe we can combine the two! We can mortgage the next 100 years of human productivity to pay for it, no problem! It's not like we have anything else to do, like ending world poverty, preventing antibiotic resistant malaria from breaking out into a worldwide pandemic, embracing rational thought at the expense of the not-great world religions, and coping with leftover hypernationalism and colonialism from the cold war. So sure, let's do it! Solar cells AND making Earth a ringed or stratospheric smog laden planet!

What could go wrong!

rgb

If your primary security concern is a federal subpoena, you have already made far greater errors than picking the wrong email provider.

Legalized marijuana.

High efficiency solar panels (>40%) suffer from all three of those issues. They are made of high efficiency solar cells, which are patented. The panel can not exist without the cell. The cells are exclusively manufactured in places where it is patented (so far), and the cells have no non-infringing uses. They can be used to convert light to electricity, and aren't good for much of anything else.

That's the sole example of any significance—nobody gives a shit about the patented super-water-efficient toilet (literally). But that example is a problem even in the developed world. The cheap panels being imported from China are cheap because they contain no patented technology and are therefore legal to import without a license. They're also miserably inefficient compared to the (patented) state of the art. The owner of the world record (patent) holder boasts that there are 80 MWp installed worldwide. Judging by the fact that there are zero consumer products available, a license to make them can not be had at any price, let alone a reasonable price. The manufacturing contributes little to the price. It's still made of semiconductors, and if there is one thing southeast Asia knows how to produce in spectacular quantities for dirt cheap, it's semiconductors.