The insanity of greenery

Is this the column you meant to run on April 1st?
Yeah, I know, it’ll be coming our way soon.

My favorite appliances are solar powered flashlights. They work best when the sun is shining brightly.
For those people who don’t have the luxury of bright sunshine to illuminate their flashlight, they can purchase a mechanical flashlight which recharges by winding or shaking. Then they don’t have to wait for the sun to come out before they can have light.

How do they verify that the power is from the solar cells? why not just hook the diesel generator to the grid and CLAIM that it came from one’s solar array?

I hope to be first to say something crazy…
Wind power when there is no wind…
Use nuclear to power fans to blow on windmills… With the tax rebate, you will make money… And no CO2.
What a crazy world we live in

Human ingenuity and entrepreneurship as applied to the global warming scare is limited only by human credulity.
In other words, there are bottomless profits to be had from this rubbish.

I’ve so enjoyed a site where true Science debates freely but wondered, as I read the blogs, when we would get back to the ‘Point’.
Stewardship is the answer and the technology has been on the books for quite a while thanks to Science and DOE grants.
The issue isn’t re-tax and spend.
The issue, taxed since the late ’70s, is to implement the innovation we have already paid for.
Unless you have a very short attention span, why is solar considered? The issue is energy storage and grid efficiency.

What a strange and incomprehensible world we live in today. Would someone please tell me why we are pursuing wind and solar again? Why such a literal quixotic venture? Are we hell bent on proving to our ancestors that we can be motivated by an idealism that overlooks practical considerations more than their best work of fiction? We can’t say we weren’t told. Sigh, on to Orwell.

You’re too late. PG&E bought them all up.

It will be this way for some time. Yes, the sun and wind are free. No, the application isn’t. We still can’t store AC power. One loses so much power in conversion from AC to DC and then back to AC that it isn’t even a viable alternative today. And that still doesn’t mention the ability to even store such power. It’s not like we’ve a giant battery that we can stick in the ground. No such mechanism exists!!! (As mentioned above, there are some compressed air places, but again, it isn’t viable.) Then, we have to think of redundancy. We can’t mandate the wind to blow nor the sun to shine, so we need a backup. One that is available 24/7. Further, it must have the ability to be powered up on demand. One can’t wait for the coals to warm. Nuclear is out of the question because the power output requires preset determinations before bringing online. So, the redundancy must be generated by the higher cost fuel, gas. Given that it is redundant in every way, in terms of transmission construction, and all the aforementioned, it’s probably more efficient to power the solar panels with diesel generated electricity. And just we I thought the world couldn’t get anymore dumber……..I am truly amazed.

I have to admit, I’m a fan –as polls of Americans have consistently shown– of “all of the above” thinking re energy independence.
Government subsidy will *always* introduce some weirdness in the short term. Eh, okay, it happens. To me, it’s more important to monitor what happens in the longer term.
I’m a “lukewarmist”. Take that prediliction into account. I’m very much a fan of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good in shorter time-frames. This means, to me, that econmic weirdness can be tolerated in the short term, but you have to monitor it in the longer term and act accordingly if the situation doesn’t improve.

Ontario, Canada will be a prime location for such gaming of the rebates. They recently announced the following feed-in tariffs for renewables (by the way, basic electricity rates are only 6 – 8 cents/kWhr, thanks to the current generation mix of hydro, nuclear and coal)-
# Less than 10 kW – 80.2 ¢/kWh
# 10 – 100 kW – 71.2 ¢/kWh
# 100-500 kW – 63.5 ¢/kWh
What a remarkable opportunity for government-sanctioned theft from your taxpaying neighbors.
http://www.morgansolar.com/blog/2009/03/13/new-ontario-feed-in-tariff-rates-for-solar-energy/

My brother gave me a tip a few years ago, that the best deal on diesel powered generators was DOD Surplus sales. Many of the generator were from de-commissioned missile sites. The generators were used for back up power and the only time they were run was the weekly test runs for a few minutes to charge the batteries. These generators had 100s hours on them, and they were designed for over a 10,000 hours at medium speed.
According to my brother who was in the diesel repair business, the Air Force was changing our these generators every ten years regardless of the hours. Most have a run time meter, so you can check the remaining life. We looked into getting a large one to power the neighborhood, but noise became the issue.
I decided on a small Kabota that could power up our house during an emergency power outage. We have used it during the Governor Brown Brownouts and when the snow and falling trees take down the power lines for a few days. I will have to look into using my diesel to offset my power usage during the new high rate periods.

“… I’m a fan of solar power when done correctly and without financial carrots …”
The Fat Spaniel tracking page for The Little Chico Solar Project at http://www.chicousd.org/dna/little_chico_creek/Solar_Energy_Project.html shows it produced 269 kWh today, maybe $30-$40 worth.
http://www.getsolar.com/blog/solar-panels-finally-popular-enough-to-steal/899/ “Only 17 of the 46 panels were recovered … represented only about 1/15th of the total installed capacity at the Little Chico Creek School”
How many solar panels are actually installed at Little Chico? How much did the entire system cost? What was the dollar value of the financial carrots from California taxpayers and US federal taxpayers?

Someone said earlier, coal fired wind farms. Already being done. Since the wind farms need an electrical backup, don’t be surprised to discover the backup is coal generated.

I find this re-volting, ………… 8^D

In former East Germany, to fill the gap in everyday demand, peasants were motivated to sell eggs, fruits, vegetables to a state-owned store. Got paid a subventioned price, then stepped in the same store through the front door and bought the their stuff back at a quarter of the price they’ve got paid minutes ago. In ’89 I thought these crazy times were gone for ever.
Wrong.
Producing solar power on your rooftop in sunny Germay today gets paid approx. 40 and 50 Eurocent per kWh. Guaranteed for 20 years.
Glad it’s not a German desease. However, Germans are always concerned that the poor pay for the wealthy somehow, but this is the biggest move-money-from-low-income-households-to-more-wealthy-households program I have seen.
Installed by social-democrats and greens, called a success story.

Using an arc light to power a solar array, and here I thought the discussions of the first law of thermodynamics was heated over the viability of hho generators for cars.

Yeah that machine translation is unreadable. Anyone got a real-live person translation?

This is what I point out all the time: The law of unintended consequences.

I thought some solar panels could produce electricity at night time, they harness cosmic rays striking the panel??

Just the other day a friend was telling me of a new plant that they built here in the UK. All built to the new regs and very green including a large wind turbine, and minimal concrete. Lots of glass and steel.
Except that the turbine has been dismantled as it cost more in power & maintenance to keep it running than was generated. As to the super energy efficient building: with so much glass the inside gets so hot that they have to turn up the ac, resulting in much larger electric bills.
Madness.

Mods, I noticed my comment is still pending approval – if it’s because of the “an easier way” comment feel free to snip it – no harm no foul.
We don’t need Anthony or WordPress getting in trouble for hosting instructions on how to break the law. Sorry if I caused any heartburn.
As always, you guys are all doing an amazing job – thanks for all you do : )

If you have solar panels don’t you already have DC to AC converters?
What about storage batteries? No one ever talks about the cost of these items. Just the cost of the panels.

I memory serves me right those locomotive engines are 2 cycle diesels. Not real efficient but lots of power. You might think that somebody in the neighborhood would notice the diesel smoke and complain.
Also I was wondering a while back about the compressed air idea except using pipelines instead of abandoned mines. I realize there is a huge energy difference between nat gas and compressed air…but…we store lots of nat gas in pipelines and pull off what ever we need during times of peak demand. Couldn’t you do the same thing with compressed air? Here in MN we are having a huge debate about a new power line program called Capx2020. This is going to be a series of high voltage lines running all the way from North and South Dakota, thru Wisconsin and on to Chicago. What if you used pipelines instead? Could you generate enough air pressure and volume to run a generator hundreds of miles away instead of using high voltage lines. At least pipelines are out of sight for the most part. Not to mention that hot air balloning would be alot safer..
Can anybody here do that math?

I am currently designing a home for an electrical engineer – and – he has expressly requested No PV panels and No LED lighting.
According to my client – the manufacture, life expectancy and disposal costs of PV panels and required accessories – results in a NET Negative in terms of environmental costs and actual money. (Scamsudies notwithstanding)
They may be fun to play with, but they are not realistic yet.
LED’s are similarly overpriced and unstable per my client.
My client is intrigued with VU1Corp bulbs.
___________________________________________
However, I do see the irony in scamming the system using Diesel, Coal or what the heck, lets build a really big fake solar system and power it up with Nukes.
(Geothermal? – anyone)

I once started writing a story which starts: “And the pigs turned to all the animals and said: ‘we have made mistakes, from now on animal farm will be a democracy and you can all vote for whichever pig you like to run the farm'”.
And central to my animal farm was a wind turbine (to replace the old windmill) which the animals work so hard to build and which eventually stands there turning day and night, night and day, through wind rain, snow and calm.

feed in tariffs in italy will pay around 45 eurocents per kwh, versus an average cost of grid electricity of +/- 16 eurocents kwh.
i have calculated that a household of 2 people will consume around 800 euro of electricity a year, however, if a PV system large enough to produce the full amount of electricity the household uses is installed, the family will RECEIVE 800 euro/year. talk about miracles. it was just a matter of time before people would realize that there is a very good business case for frauds.

James Sexton:
“It’s not like we’ve a giant battery that we can stick in the ground. No such mechanism exists!!!”
Well, there’s the gravel pit concept, where you use “excess” power to run a heat pump to suck heat from one pit of gravel and pump it into another pit of gravel. When you need the stored power, the concept is reversed and the pump becomes a generator working on the difference in temperatures between the pits. Both pits live underground, are heavily insulated, have few moving parts and need no high investment of energy to make them in the first place (unlike solar panels, for example).
Basically, a big battery you can stick in the ground.

From the tone of the comments it appears most here are already convinced of the folly of the alternative energy program. If you have yet to be convinced of that folly I recommend reviewing this table from EIA
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table1_1.html
It shows net generation by source from 1995 to 2009. The Other Renewables column is most pertinent to this discussion. It includes ” [4] Wood, black liquor, other wood waste, biogenic municipal solid waste, landfill gas, sludge waste, agriculture byproducts, other biomass, geothermal, solar thermal, photovoltaic energy, and wind.” Hydro has its own separate column.
Despite the billions ratholed to inflate this sector, it has managed to grow from 2.2% in 1995 to 3.5% in 2009, a number that was only achieved because total generation declined by 200 million MWhrs from the peak in 2007 presumably due to the big downturn in the economy.
Those who have suggested pumped storage as being of possible value may want to note that the contribution from that sector has been negative for every year of the record.
The growth that did occur in the OR sector has been mostly from wind turbines, but given the way these blights on the landscape have proliferated in the last decade, imagine what the country would look like with 20 times more of them, which would be the minimum necessary to achieve the least ambitious of the politician’s goals i. e. 20% of generation fro renewables by year xxxx. And that is without allowing for a big spike in demand if they succeed in bribing a sufficient number of people into electric cars.

Surprise surprise! The industry games the system when green energy subsidies are too high. In order to protect taxpayers, European governments will need to add a whole new layer of bureaucracy to police wind farms and solar facilities. And each green energy company will need to hire an under-qualified and over-paid Vice President in Charge of Going to Jail.

So far nobody has come up with a device to harness the “backradiation” illustrated as having a value of 324W/m2 as against a puny 168 W/m2 for solar radiation in IPCC documents.
Enthusiasts for back radiation tell me that there are very high readings at night as well Some sceptics however think that it is all just to good to be true!

I once had a tutor who was a world expert on solar power, he confided to me that “The only profitable thing to do with solar power is to write books about it”. It seems he may have been wrong.
BTW, when they close or upgrade a telephone exchange, BT often give away well maintained, lightly used diesel generator sets. I don’t understand why they have no second hand value, but they have nowhere to store them for future re-use and its cheaper than paying someone to take them for scrap. I understand that many of the diesels end up driving boats in the developing world.

The sums don’t add up for using artificial light – the product of the efficiencies for Elec to light to elec is less than the ratio of £/kWh bought to £/kWh sold. Marginal using generators on the UK rate. A direct shunt from one supply line to another could work but I guess this is not that different to bypassing the meter which goes on anyway. Battery storage buying at night selling in the day could work and could be argued as a desirable outcome to provide peak load smoothing and capacity management on the grid. Don’t know how the figures work out on batteries. I’d guess a bit of intelligence in the invertors/meters and the panels should be able to prevent all but the most determined scammers.

stevengoddard (19:10:57) :
(…)
For those people who don’t have the luxury of bright sunshine to illuminate their flashlight, they can purchase a mechanical flashlight which recharges by winding or shaking. Then they don’t have to wait for the sun to come out before they can have light.
A good friend of my mother sent her an inexpensive “shaker” flashlight. I looked it over, noticed the plunger was actually a crudely sheared-off steel slug… and the little circuit board wasn’t populated… and a clip on the other side of the board held two coin-sized lithium batteries… Works great! Lights right up whenever she needs it!
================
MattB (21:11:19) :
Using an arc light to power a solar array, and here I thought the discussions of the first law of thermodynamics was heated over the viability of hho generators for cars.
Back in the ancient days of muscle cars and the initial worries about better mileage in the late 1970’s – early 1980’s, they had water injection systems, a fine mist going into the engine intake that allegedly cooled the chamber and generated better performance and mileage by converting heat into expanding water vapor, plus some extra lubrication benefits. Major drawback was piston rings and valve seals are not absolute, high-pressure chamber gases escape and get into the oil thus excess water would accumulate in the oil.
Today’s engines are engineered to run hotter for better emissions and efficiency, anything that results in chamber cooling will irritate those sensitive electronic controls. So the HHO generators simply break down the water beforehand using alternator current, and the water is reformed in the chamber upon combustion. There may be something to it, you may get some better numbers, but you still end up with excess water in the oil and related maintenance problems.

Here’s another “Dark Side” story. The truth about Brazils sugarcane ethanol industry:
http://www.dtnprogressivefarmer.com/dtnag/common/link.do?symbolicName=/ag/blogs/template1&blogHandle=ethanol&blogEntryId=8a82c0bc268be2db0127f7c5788f11de&showCommentsOverride=false
The Dirty Underside of Brazil’s Clean Energy Revolution
While Brazilian sugarcane ethanol has a leg-up on corn ethanol in U.S. federal and state-level low-carbon fuel standards, Foreignpolicy.com in Washington, D.C. said the Brazilian industry has its share of environmental and other problems that have gone largely unnoticed.
Most notably, Foreignpolicy.com said sugarcane ethanol produced with crops grown in Brazil’s Atlantic rainforest have led to “deforestation and, paradoxically, more carbon emissions.”
Brazil has lost about 93 percent of the Atlantic rainforest there is just a small remnant of it remaining today.
Foreignpolicy.com said Brazil’s sugarcane ethanol industry the Atlantic rainforest, which is home to tens of thousands of plant and animal species.
“Despite the hellish conditions for the workers, ethanol has been able to sell itself to the public on its ability to reduce carbon emissions,” Foreignpolicy.com said.
Brazilian ethanol raises other greenhouse gas emissions issues.
The industry uses more than 240,000 tons of nitrogen fertilizer a year.
In addition when cane is cut by hand controlled fires are used in fields to smoke out razorsharp leaves, snakes and tarantulas.
The burnings pollute the air with soot release methane and nitrous oxide.

More “two birds, one stone” Green Logic:
New hydroelectric solution: Dump seawater into old mines.
We have very deep old mines below relative sea level. We just need a pipeline to get the water to a mine, where it will flow through a water turbine and generate power. The pipeline can run over land, just need to “prime the pump” to start the flow, have the discharge at a lower level than the intake, and a normal siphon effect will take care of the rest.
Free electricity, and it will help out on that pesky sea level rise problem. Win-win!

There are a lot of states that now offer some form of “net metering” so that residential solar installations can sell excess power back to the grid. Each state program stipulates the total amount of power that a single residential customer can sell back to the grid and whether the power company must pay the retail or wholesale price, etc. In this area, New Jersey is considered to be the most progressive net metering state because enrollment is unlimited and the total individual generating limit is 2 MW (which seems quite reasonable!):
http://www.dsireusa.org/incentives/incentive.cfm?Incentive_Code=NJ03R&state=NJ
Another interesting thing about New Jersey is that it has some of the cheapest fuel prices in the nation:
http://gasbuddy.com/gb_gastemperaturemap.aspx
I haven’t done the math on this because I don’t know how much the wholesale electricity rates are in NJ but it would be interesting to figure out if an efficient diesel (or natural gas burning) generator could make a profit under NJ’s net metering scheme. The only major drawback to this idea is that you’d have to live in New Jersey.

Another law of unintended consequence here is that these government programs have essentially ensured prices will remain high for solar panels and there is little (no?) incentive for the manufacturer’s to improve efficiency.
Richard111
Most new solar installations are what they call grid-tied. The panels tie into an inverter which hook into the grid – no batteries required. You can still have batteries in a system like this as a UPS, but you can do that without the solar panels. The only time you have to have batteries with solar now is for a home not connected to the grid.

******
13 04 2010
GregO (19:18:55) :
Diesel powered solar panels – what’s next; coal fired wind turbines?
******
That might not be so far-fetched. While traveling during late summer in W Pennsylvania on the PA turnpike, we stopped on the road very near a wind-farm. There wasn’t a breath of wind. Most of the pinwheels weren’t turning, but a couple were turning merrily around.
Amazing. There wasn’t a breath of wind on the ground very near them. A few low clouds above were almost stationary. I can’t say for certain, but it seemed these were actually motoring — drawing electricity to turn.

Man mandated intervention. The fires in the cane fields before the sugar cane harvest cracks me up. It must get nasty in the head of a greenie weenie to see all the smoke before the clear ethanol is produced. The burnings are part of the calculation of emissions by ethanol whether they want to ignore them or not.

>>>>A 90 year old man who spent most of his life studying told me that he had the solution: Pump water up hill using solar or other non-fossil fuels in the day, release it during the night to regenerate the power and release it to the grid.<<<<
I'm only 48, but… but I have to say… why not use solar power to pump water up into a water tower… not to convert back to electricity… but for the actual application of a water tower… you know, to store water for personal or municipal use and create water pressure for your plumbing…
In other words use solar power for applications where it makes sense to use it, not for mass consumpution in power grids.

Whenever you have an economic system that pays a producer above market rates, you have the potential for this kind of abuse. Heck, you actually guarantee it.
In the UK, the Feed In Tariff that became operational on 1st April, pays anyone who installs a solar panel on their roof, 45 pence per KhH of electricity fed back into the grid. Those that have bothered to profit by this always buy the cheap electricity from the grid and sell back 100% of their own at the much higher price.
Yet, I can see an even better scam. Why be content to sell the miserly amount of power that they are able to generate from their solar panels? Wouldn’t it be even better to hook up a diesel generator in parallel with their panels and sell even more elecricity to the hapless consumer?

Re: rbateman (20:58:26)
Even better is the approach of Bellows Falls (VT) Light & Power in the 1930s with their Grandpa’s Knob wind generator. They simply shut the sluice gates on their hydro plant when the wind was blowing and allowed the head to rise in the impoundment. Mother Nature did the rest. Why bother pumping the water uphill? When the wind died down they had all that energy stored that they could use to make electricity with vanishingly small costs to acquire it.
C. the C.

Rbateman
Ah….But how many deisel powered trucks, will it require, to build the hill (here on the Fens) to pump the water up?

Here in Michigan, ultra-lib Gov. Granholm has installed a law that requires 10% of electricity be from renewable sources. As a practical matter, this means wind and solar. Nuclear would qualify, but high costs and long lead times rule it out because the law takes effect in just a few short years.
To ramp up, Michigan power companies are letting 10-year contracts to buy solar and wind produced power at rates 5-8 times that currently charged to consumers. This cost is calculated at the source and does not include the cost of transmission to the grid.
Even at the optimum scenario, 10% of power at 5 times normal yields a net increase of 40% in overall electricity costs, paid either in higher rates or in taxes to the State to be paid in subsidy.
And you wonder why the economy of Michigan is in the tank.

Tucci (06:44:52) :
But if you want to run a stationary Diesel generator, and you have access to #2 home heating oil, it’s doubtful that any inspector is going to be checking the fuel tank of your device.
Wow – haha, another efficiency in action moment… aka law of unintended consequences… aka people will find a loophole and exploit it.
I’d love to do the numbers on this sometime, just to see how much self-generated electricity using subsidized heating oil vs. electricity from the grid might cost.
I guess it would also make sense to know what kind of laws one might be breaking by doing this too 🙂

r (07:12:10) :
Just remember,
The largest most modern solar farm sits on 82 acres of land. I produces 800 mega watts of power. This is just enough energy to run the newest computer designed to study climate change with.
That one soundspretty efficient land wise. This one was just built. Apparently we have a lot of extra land here in Kansas!
Smoky Hills Phase I >
Project Location:
West of Salina, Kansas about 20 miles, and just north of Interstate 70 on both sides of Highway 14. The project is located in both Lincoln and Ellsworth Counties.
Project Interconnection:
Midwest Energy 230 kV transmission line in Ellsworth, County.
Project Size (Phase I):
100.8 MW (Phase II is an additional 150 MWs)
Project Turbines:
1.8 MW V80 turbines manufactured by Vestas, with an 80-meter hub height and 80-meter blade diameter.
Landowners and Acreage Involved:
Over 30 landowners and 12,000 acres are involved in the project.
Commercial Operation:
February 2008.

Dave Springer
Just for reference, transmission losses are usually estimated at 7-8% – those high voltage lines are surprisingly efficient.

Will the nuclear option be prohibited, as a source of energy, because its nuclear fuel could be eventually used by terrorists?

Susan Kraemer (09:52:17) :
“Spain is far ahead of the US in solar power.”
That is the perfect example of GREEN INSANITY with a record of unemployment caused as a consequence of the green passion of Spain’s leftist government. Spain is already reaching the same levels of deficit as Greece. A real perfect example.

Re: Tucci (06:44:52)
I have commented here before about the similarity between #2 heating oil and road diesel, and there likely is a legal method to accomplish the intent of what you said. The state is interested in you paying road taxes for fuel used in vehicles on the road, so to duck them you file paperwork saying the fuel is for off-road only. This is a long-recognized exemption for farm equipment, often used to not have to pay road taxes for gasoline used in agriculture, and often involves having the fuel delivered to a tank on your property.
Plus there is an issue of possible additives in diesel to make it work better in an engine, as opposed to the rather tame conditions when #2 is burned in a furnace. If you have a new generator under warranty, best not to possibly void that warranty by using #2 if not specifically allowed in writing to use such.

” NickB. (08:50:22) :
[…]
Wow – haha, another efficiency in action moment… aka law of unintended consequences… aka people will find a loophole and exploit it.
I’d love to do the numbers on this sometime, just to see how much self-generated electricity using subsidized heating oil vs. electricity from the grid might cost.”
A trend towards microgeneration as it is called is already being recognized by energy research institutes at universities; it is estimated that in about 5 or 10 years large numbers of microgeneration installations will be rolled out. Japan is subsidizing fuell cells for microcogeneration (heat + electricity for a household) to develop a product for the international market, 5000 of these things are installed already. BBC reported.
So it’s not as anarchistic as some might think; big industry is already developing products for this market. The Bloom box is another one. Of course it sails under the banner of reducing CO2.
Here’s a report:
http://www.ciobinternational.org/news/view/1720

NickB. (12:12:30) : Thanks for the link. I was asking about it because perhaps what there is behind all that “serious concern” it is not other than the “undesired consequence” (for their purposes) of cheap and wide energy availability, which would go against their Malthusian and Brave New World Paradise, chosen by them to be OUR FUTURE.

Using cheap electricity to produce expensive electricity is the equivilant of a “renewable energy carry trade”

I like solar and wind power. I love america and oppose the expensive power which in Spain’s case gives then 22% unemployment. I see many can’t learn from the spanish fiasco.

AGW’s Weather (AGW): Hope and Fear.
Al wants to know which way is Northeast.
The answer:
“eastward from the Dakotas. Instead it will take the long way, traveling northwest to central Canada, then will dive southeastward to the New England coast.”
Wants to know if “Snow” will be runned in Boston Mareathon.
Al says, after all, Boston is Teddy’s seat.
…-
“Snow Is Possible for Part of Northeast Saturday
A storm set to begin as rain in the Northeast late Thursday into Friday may bring accumulating snow to parts of the region Friday night into Saturday.”
“The storm will not be swinging up from the Gulf of Mexico or plow due eastward from the Dakotas. Instead it will take the long way, traveling northwest to central Canada, then will dive southeastward to the New England coast.”
http://www.accuweather.com/blogs/news/story/27449/snow-is-possible-for-part-of-n.asp
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/mt/mt-comments.cgi

@geo (20:42:08) : It is all well and good if you don’t mine some “economic weirdness” with your money. But the substudies you are talking about cost me money. I have no tolerance what so ever for economic weirdness with my money. You want to pay for it go right ahead, but do so with your money not mine.

I happen to be an electrician, since March 1983. In all this time, I have spent at least 11 years working on schools, new and remodel. Anyway, most any school these days has an emergency generator (diesel) with enough fuel to run for 3 full hours. So, you might research a new school and find the design firm and see what generator they spec’d and find out what company they ordered from and see what you can afford. Also, there is a brand of portable, towable generators by Rand that you could rent or arrange to by. If you have acreage, you can do what escavation companies do and have an above ground, gravity-drain refillable tank and have your fuel delivered directly.
A friend of mine has a gas generator that he hooked up to his house, including a transfer switch for when the power is interrupted from his normal service provider.
Long live John Galt.

Re: “If you have any doubts about what you are observing, turbines that are motoring will be rotating backwards.”
This statement is absolutely untrue. Neither induction nor synchronous generators “reverse direction” when shifted from generating to motoring. Power utilities routinely motor certain of their hydroelectric generators in what they call “condensing mode” by depressing the tail water, cutting off motive power and letting the machines “motor”. When additional power is needed, they simply open the wicket gates (throttle) and additional power generation is instantly provided. In all cases, the machine rotates in the same direction, whether motoring or generating.

Hydroelectric pumped storage is the the only efficient bulk electric power storage mechanism ever devised and commercially demonstrated by man. It is typically between 75% and 80% efficient, returning to the grid 0.75 to 0.8 kWh for every 1.0 kWh withdrawn from the grid. Since the difference in price between “peak” demand power and “off-peak” power is much greater than the ratio of input/output of pumped storage, pumped storage is an economic money machine. It allows very efficient “base load” machines such as nuclear, that would otherwise have to be throttled back at night, to continue at full throttle with the excess power diverted to drive the pumping operation. During the daily demand peak, instead of firing up relatively inefficient combustion turbines, the shortage between base generation and peak demand is made up by bringing the stored water down through the reversible pumped storage turbines running in their “generate mode”.
Why do we in the U.S. not have more of these economically efficient marvels? Try getting permits for ANY hydroelectric project in the U.S. today! As T. Boone Pickens discovered the hard way in the Texas panhandle, you can’t get past the environmental intervenors for a big wind farm, much less a hydroelectric project.

Neocons know how to exploit well-meaning green schemes.

Vargs
“I’m baffled why they don’t use the power generated to manufacture hydrogen for fuel cells on site.”
Hydrogen is a hoax, Ballard Power Systems who research and develop fuel cells, even said they can never work. Hydrogen is not a fuel, it has to be produced, by far the cheapest way is with fossil fuels. It doesn’t liquefy easy like propane, so it requires expensive equipment and a lot of wasted energy to compress it. It’s the lightest element so it leaks out of everything and it doesn’t have much power so you need lots of it to do anything. This is why fuel cells are essential to try to get a better return for your effort.
Batteries are much cheaper they give you a better return, and have gotten much better over the years.

” Dennis Nikols (22:20:50) :
After living through Enron why am I not in the least bit surprised. Greed and self-interest have no morals, never have, probably never will.”
Another way to look at it, Dennis, is that both Enron and Greenscams have a common source: efforts of the government to repeal the laws of economics and physics with subsidies and regulations. The “unintended consequences” in each case are actually people doing the monetary/financial equivalent of water running downhill by the shortest available route.

Peter (05:14:09) :
Hydrogen is a hoax
I’m not sure I’d go that far, but I agree with everything else you said. People need to stop thinking about hydrogen as a fuel, and start thinking about it as a battery… a really, REALLY, expensive gas battery that still sources its power from fossil fuels.
A lot of people don’t realize that the only remotely economical way to produce hydrogen is with fossil fuels. Splitting water to produce hydrogen by other means is extremely inefficient. Not to mention the storage challenges. Batteries are still better.

You have no idea how perverse this system is…in France, if you produce electricity, EDF has to buy it at a preferential price far higher than the price of electricity they supply.
They are obliged!
Many people simply buy some land close to a tiny river, put a generator there…and it brings them an additional salary everyone else is paying for it in their bill. And if they simply take current from the plug of the next neighbor, and say it came from the generator…they can sell EDF their own current for higher price they bought it.

@ E.M.Smith (23:46:36):
I’ve been considering the septic tank, and wondering about tapping it for methane. How much is it generating right now? Does it serve any function in keeping the system working? How about a house hooked to a municipal sewer system, does it have a source of “free” energy waiting to be used (at least until too many neighbors tap it as well)?
I’ve read that some municipalities now have treatment facilities that trap the methane for energy use. I’ve also heard of a few farmers that use it to power generators, gathered with a simple tarp over a pit for the animal waste, provides all the electricity they need. For a basic home the potential energy available may not be much, but that sure doesn’t mean it’s not worth considering at all.
More research is needed. Where do I send the grant application?

Every once in a while I point people here and elsewhere to the project being advanced by Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, see lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com and focusfusion.org . It got go-ahead funding in late ’08, and is targeting unity this year or early next using D-D, and will move on to p-B11 aneutronic thereafter. If it all pans out, there will be proven designs for manufacturing license world-wide within a couple of years thereafter.
The economics will kill all the green alternatives, and most conventional, dead within a very short timespan. The plan is for 5MW generators, about the size of a container or home garage including all housing, costing ~$250,000. Which is $0.05/W, 1/20 of best conventional, and about 1/100 of solar, etc. Output will cost about $0.001-$0.003/kwh at source, which is again 1/100-1/20 of current retail, and even better compared to all Greenscams.
Deployable anywhere there is reasonable monitoring and bi-annual or annual maintenance/refueling access. Distributed disruptive tech, with a vengeance.
Existing plant, and even fission plans, will be economic roadkill in short order.

Dave Springer said “I can see some small offset for delivery charge being fair but in fairness any electricity I generate will be taken up by my neighbors within a few hundred feet of me so it’s not like my juice is going through fifty miles of wire back to the power plant.”
The problem is that when you are producing solar power your neighbors are not home and the power is needed at an industrial plant miles away. When your neighbors get home and demand peaks (about 8PM), you produce nothing. For your system to make sense you need to be paid what your power is worth which might be a few cents during the day.

Last year Americans were driving across the Mexican border to buy gas from Pemex, the state owned petroleum company at about $2.00/gal then returning to sell it about $3.50/gal.
Pemex soon ran low on gasoline and had to send tankers across the border to buy at about $3.50/gal so they could sell it again at $1.50/gal.
It took several weeks for the Governments to notice

Solar energy has so many advantages and a number of companies are working on increasing the efficiency that a few, at least I hope it’s a few, “cleverly” try to take advantage is always unfortunate. I hope those honestly interested in advancing this technology will out those few.
I read today that Spectrolab has a photovoltaic panel used in space that boasts an efficiency rating of 30%. Nothing mentioned about making this available for the average homeowner, but they won’t be the only company that achieves this level of efficiency. I found this hopeful.
If you are interested in learning how you can transition to solar energy or incorporate solar energy into your life, check out http://www.solar-energy-advantages-blog.com for a practical approach.