From the Guardian:
It has been said that Obama is the worst president since Jimmy Carter, perhaps now in the eyes of 350.org supporters, he’s “worse than we thought”. Carter was the first to put solar panels on the White House. Being nothing more than an icon, they didn’t last.
And here we have a more recent example of iconic posturing:
350.org “community solanizer” Bill McKibben writes:
Disappointment at the White House, Pride in the Movement
For the last three days, I’ve been sitting at my kitchen table in California cranking out press releases, calling reporters, and generally playing “pit crew” for Bill and our Put Solar On It road trip. It’s been a great ride: tens of thousands of people have shown their support for putting solar back on the White House, the crew had great stops in Boston, New York, and D.C., and we managed to secure a meeting with the Administration to discuss putting solar back on the roof.
As we expected (but secretly hoped wouldn’t be the case), the White House didn’t commit to … well, anything. We tossed them a big, fat soft ball to hit out of the park and they just watched it float on by.
===============================================
So much America’s “first green president”. Solar isn’t even mentioned here:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/energy-and-environment
The irony, it burns.
UPDATE: some people wrongly got the idea that I hate solar power, which is not the case at all. I put solar on my own home, see the story here.
-Anthony
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Incredible how many posts are ranting on about “solar” without have read enough of the article to realise that Carter’s panels were for hot water. As others have pointed out solar water heaters are about 4x more efficient that PV electricity.
Solar PV with high feed in tarifs and tax credits is more to do with boosting the banking sector and promoting loans. Economy not ecology.
PV needs billion dollar plant investment and hi-tech factories. Solar hot water panels you can make in your shed.
Exchangers from old air-con units make very efficient absorbers. I made myself a solar collector panel three years back from scrap. It cost me about 100 euro-bucks.
It provides me with hot water 9 months of the year, then I use gas when it’s not quite hot enough. In the summer I also use it for the washing machine and save on power there too.
We looked at solar water heating for our home and the payback period was the same as the life expectancy of the installation. So we decided to leave it for now.
Justa Joe
Perhaps you aren’t factoring in the $1300 a riding mower costs . My conversion using an old frame was less than half that.
The batteries were cycled out of a Freightliner sleeper cab. The recycling centre charged me @ur momisugly$6. So far they have done my lawn for 2 years. So $9 per summer so far. There is no indication that they won’t do more, I just don’t know yet.
All engineering was done by me. There are lots of people who could do it and have done it.
I use the electric mower to pull 7 1/2 cords of wood into my basement for the winter. Little noise and no exhaust is nice.
Perhaps you didn’t read the part where I said that I mowed each and every week this summer on solar power.
How about this: rather than try and create electricty by other means, start learning to live without it. Human civilization had been around for thousands and thousands of years without it. For example, have you seen the photos of Earth from space at night? Do we really need all that light all the time?
Anthony, I read your article, and I think it needs a “reality check” update. “…at peak you can expect a 15% solar to electricity power conversion efficiency.” O RLY?
Also:
“There are state and federal tax credits for any solar installation which when figured in with rebates, can make the project quite attractive, and in some cases, a very low cost.”
The caveat for getting credits seems to be “qualified installations.” Solar can look attractive as DIY, you can make your own photo-voltaic panels, perhaps even do your own off-grid electrical installation. It’s about the same for solar heating. But soon requirements for permits, inspections, factory-made panels and equipment, licensed contractors, and certified installers can creep in, at higher costs that virtually mandate obtaining financing which many can’t afford or even get, especially with the current housing market. “Any” is not the truth these days. To try to get those rebates and tax credits, you can easily spend more than they are worth by having other people do the work rather than yourself, and not that many can afford to have someone else do it at all.
“To achieve this, your home or business has to outfitted with a TOU Meter, so that PG&E can track when you use power. Then when you connect a solar power system to that, it will log when you are generating power during midday peak times, and when you are drawing power during off-peak times. The trick is to generate exactly enough power to result in a net-zero energy use, because PG&E does not pay you back for any excess power generated.”
Is this still the same out there? Here in Pennsylvania the electric companies MUST buy your excess. Our local utility PPL has switched to “not-smart not-dumb” meters that can “phone home” your monthly usage, so no more meter readers except for spot checks, and I don’t see why they couldn’t be used to take readings at approximately the daily off-peak on-peak transition times except for data processing limitations at PPL’s end. (These are different from the proposed “SMART!” meters that will FORCE you to use power as the company wants by limiting the supply.)
However after investigating PPL’s demands before you can hook up to their systems and sell them power (page, FAQ pdf), I’ve determined the best solution is either going off-grid completely with generator backup, or using your utility connection only for a backup battery charger.
There are some perfectly valid safety considerations involved, namely that the electric company can always and easily shut off your connection without pulling the meter since when they’re working on the high voltage lines any current you send out will feed through the transformer and can kill someone working on those presumed-dead HV lines.
Given that perfectly-legitimate consideration, and that your outgoing power must match the profile of the incoming power, and all the extra burdens with the legalese that gets tacked on, I cannot see how grid-tie really makes sense. Having your own batteries and a non-grid-tied system seems the logical choice.
I think some people here could stand to read this book.
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/
In particular the “every right thinking person must hate Obama” attitude on display here is pretty much straight out of the book. A moment of thought should reveal that in fact lots of people don’t hate Obama. Indeed a majority clearly preferred him to the other guy which is how come he got elected.
Might not even be to do with solar – but instead a case of not preventing the guards on the roof with the MANPADs from getting to the appropriate places on the roof to get their best (and probably final) shot.
From: Ian H on September 12, 2010 at 2:54 pm
Hate is the other side of the coin from love, and denotes a high level of concern about a person or an object. The opposite from those is indifference. People increasingly just don’t care about him and his policies, and simply want him gone.
Obama was elected because he was such a good mirror. With such a small track record to mention, and what there was not mentioned much, with an airy call for Change and promising to do things that were seen as calls for decent people to help those in need, voters saw someone much like themselves, one of their own, indeed many saw themselves when looking at The Candidate, saw themselves assuming power and taking control of their lives away from the powerful. And now…
He should use them to charge the anti-aircraft battery on the White House roof.
David L
Please feel free to be our guest. Do post here on how you get on. You could also try going without modern medicine, walk or ride a horse for transport and eat only locally grown food without benefit of modern synthetic fertilizers or herbicides and insecticides. Go for it! Let us know!
Mike McMillan said on September 12, 2010 at 4:33 pm:
At the least, some of those solar-charged walkway lights so the snipers can see better at night.
☺
Brad says:
September 12, 2010 at 6:04 am
…and tell me again how Obama could be worse than Bush? …..and an economy in the tank because Bush let Wall Street ruin the economy…what was that about Obama again?
__________________________________________________
Brad you have the wrong president. It was Clinton not Bush.
Clinton repealed the Glass-Steagall Act which had prevented the coupling of investment banking and lending by signing into law the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. It allowed commercial and investment banks to consolidate. Economist Robert Kuttner said the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act contributed to the 2007 subprime mortgage financial crisis. The Community Reinvestment Act, enacted in 1977 under Jimmy Carter, forced banks to downgrade the quality of their mortgage portfolios by making mortgage initiators lower credit standards to less qualified borrowers in poorer communities. The act was expanded further during Bill Clinton’s presidency, creating a higher percentage and a larger pool of subprime mortgages.
The second major mess by Clinton was signing the World Trade Organization Act. Now the WTO writes many of our laws under the guise of “harmonization” with the threat of trade sanctions if we do not comply. It encouraged the export of US jobs overseas while opening our borders to substandard and dangerous food, medicine and other products.
The birds Clinton let loose are now coming home to roost. Clinton was President from 1993 to 2001. Statistics showed in 1990, before WTO was ratified by Clinton, Foreign ownership of U.S. assets amounted to 33% of U.S. GDP. By 2002, just after he left office this had increased to over 70% of U.S. GDP. source: http://www.fame.org/HTM/greg%20Pickup%201%2010%2003%20report.htm
Given those statistics one could state that Clinton sold the USA to foreigners…. “
Contrary to what some anti-Obama bloggers might think, Obama’s job ratings have remained pretty steady at about 46% approval for some time now. Higher than Ronald Reagan’s at the same point in his presidency, so no need to go back to Carter for a comparison, and of course nowhere near the lows in the 20s that GWB sustained.
Can’t say the same for congressional Democrats, but even they are ranked higher than congressional GOP. The coming election doesn’t look good for Dems, but it’s NOT a reflection on Obama or his job performance, or his job ratings would be much, much lower.
I still can’t grasp the irrationality of the politics on this site on Obama. If he does something “green” he gets bashed for that, if he does something against the greens, he gets bashed for that. If he pushes for cap’n trade, he gets bashed for that, if he turns his back on cap’n trade he gets bashed for that. If he were to give in to these 350.com people, he’d be bashed for that, and if he doesn’t, he gets bashed anyway. Is there any logic to this behavior at all? If you bash him regardless of what he does, what incentive does that give him to do what you want him to do? Why not actually praise him when once in a while he does something you approve of (like right now, for not giving in to the pressures of a purely symbolic act of putting useless PV on the white house roof)?
You’d think people here were irrationally driven by something other than science or even policy.
John McManus says:
“The batteries were cycled out of a Freightliner sleeper cab. The recycling centre charged me @ur momisugly$6. So far they have done my lawn for 2 years. So $9 per summer so far. There is no indication that they won’t do more, I just don’t know yet.”
“Perhaps you aren’t factoring in the $1300 a riding mower costs . My conversion using an old frame was less than half that.”
————————————————————
I actually considered the cost for a riding motor, but discounted it as a push because it would always be cheaper to restore a gasoline powered riding motor to it’s original state than it would to convert it to an electric. The typical cost for 36v batteries with the capacity to operate a riding lawn tractor would be quite expensive. You say that you can obtain such batterie(s), which are still good, for the price of the core charge of a typical 12v automotive battery. Putting 3 12v automotive batteries in series wouldn’t provide enough capacity for this application.
You have not stated the origin of electric motor(s) that you used or cost of said motors. Retrofitting an electrical motor, which wasn’t designed for said tractor, installing the huge battery, and setting up a 36v charging system is quite the technical feat. 36v chargers aren’t cheap either. In my plant I have a 48v charger for the electric forklift (am I green?). It runs on 240v 3 phase. It would be quite the feat to get that baby to charge something for $ .24.
Anyway the stated conversion costs were half of $1300. That cost has to be pro-rated over each lawn cutting. In the biz we say that the considerable higher cost of an electric forklift versus an LP truck is because you by your fuel up-front.
nofreewind says:
September 12, 2010 at 7:53 am
Here is the bottom line. 30 miles from my house there is a 3 MW solar project being built for 18 million dollars……
______________________________
Perhaps they should consider this instead for the additional cost of $7 million.
John Deal, the Hyperion CEO, says that such micro nuclear reactors should cost about $25 million each. In the U.S., where people spent more energy than in other parts of the world, such a reactor should be able to deliver power to only 10,000 households, for a cost of $2,500 per home. But in developing nations, one HPM could provide enough power for 60,000 homes or more, for a cost of less than $400. This is quite reasonable if you agree with Hyperion, which states that the energy from its HPMs will cost about 10 cents/watt…Hyperion power modules are about the size of a “hot tub” — approximately 1.5 meters wide..”
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/emergingtech/a-micro-nuclear-reactor-in-your-garden/1089
Toshiba is going for US government approval of their mini nuclear plant.
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Toshiba%27s_Home_Nuclear_Fusion_Reactor
Gail Combs says:
September 12, 2010 at 5:20 pm
Amen.
Aww Gail, Gail, Gail, it jus’ t’ ain’t so.
Time to examine the bill from Congress that helped to recreate the toxic trusts of the Roaring Twenties:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramm-Leach-Bliley_Act
The bills were introduced in the Senate by Phil Gramm (R-TX) and in the House of Representatives by James Leach (R-IA) and Thomas Bliley (R-VA). The bills were passed by a 54-44 vote largely along party lines with Republican support in the Senate and by a 343-86 vote in the House of Representatives. Nov 4, 1999: After passing both the Senate and House the bill was moved to a conference committee to work out the differences between the Senate and House versions. Democrats agreed to support the bill only after Republicans agreed to strengthen provisions of the Community Reinvestment Act and address certain privacy concerns.
The final bipartisan bill resolving the differences was passed in the Senate and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton on November 12, 1999.
The banking industry had been seeking the repeal of Glass-Steagall since at least the 1980s. In 1987 the Congressional Research Service prepared a report which explored the case for preserving Glass-Steagall and the case against preserving the act.
Many of the largest banks, brokerages, and insurance companies desired the Act at the time. The justification was that individuals usually put more money into investments when the economy is doing well, but they put most of their money into savings accounts when the economy turns bad. With the new Act, they would be able to do both ‘savings’ and ‘investment’ at the same financial institution, which would be able to do well in both good and bad economic times.
_________________________________
The Gramm-Leach bill was a 100% GOP affair. Many commentators on the right would like to make this affair Bill Clinton’s responsibility. The bipartisan nature of the vote for this bill definitely puts a lot of responsibility on both parties. But the initiative for the impetus behind this and the bankruptcy bill lies within the GOP. A number of Democrats desired this, too. But nearly the entire GOP desperately wanted these bills.
For example, in the Senate, only one Democrat voted for the bill. All Republicans but 2 voted for it. Only one of the two didn’t vote at all, the other voted ‘Present.’ 79% of the House voted because of the addition of provisions that would encourage these new-fangled financial institutions to lend to inner city neighborhoods. The House alterations to this terrible bill gave the GOP a veto-proof majority.
Clinton, in turn, signed this. Interestingly, all but 3 NY Representatives supported this bill. Half of the Texas delegation voted against it. The number of Republicans against the bill, in contrast to the Senate vote that was 100% behind the Senate version, was due to anger over the inclusion of the easing of lending to inner cities. A common thread in our history is the frowns over spending money on our inner cities!
To review this matter and look more closely at the machinery that destroyed US banking from top to bottom, we should look closely at this bill:
Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act
http://banking.senate.gov/conf/grmleach.htm
TITLE I — FACILITATING AFFILIATION AMONG BANKS, SECURITIES FIRMS, AND INSURANCE COMPANIES
Repeals the restrictions on banks affiliating with securities firms contained in sections 20 and 32 of the Glass-Steagall Act.
Creates a new “financial holding company” under section 4 of the Bank Holding Company Act.
Such holding company can engage in a statutorily provided list of financial activities, including insurance and securities underwriting and agency activities, merchant banking and insurance company portfolio investment activities. Activities that are “complementary” to financial activities also are authorized. The nonfinancial activities of firms predominantly engaged in financial activities (at least 85% financial) are grandfathered for at least 10 years, with a possibility for a five year extension.
The Federal Reserve may not permit a company to form a financial holding company if any of its insured depository institution subsidiaries are not well capitalized and well managed, or did not receive at least a satisfactory rating in their most recent CRA exam.
For more:
I think she put it together pretty well…
http://elainemeinelsupkis.typepad.com/ezmoneymatters/2008/09/understanding-t.html
Hey, I would like to be a staunch republican again, but I’m simply not that dumb. They (Dixiecrats)burned down the house!
I cannot stand the democrats in charge there now either.
My memory works pretty well. I do recall Bush claiming credit for the record numbers of home owners and first time home ownership.
I also remember him saying he would cut the sky-high deficit by 1/2 before he left office. Hmmm?
Clinton’s presidency was the best Republican presidency they could buy, or steal thru intimidation. Stop with the expanding WTO crap, Richard Milhous Nixon was the one that changed up so much of our trade agreements and went to China and adorned them with preferred trading status.
[snip]
Don’t you see? Neither party is worth plonkers right now. They just pit one against the other and smoke screen what’s actually going down.
[the comment you were responding to has been snipped by a moderator, so this one is also, thank you]
Re: my previous comment
Nah, thank you. It was best to get rid of it, as well as mine which had traces of it. Just good decontamination procedure.
Gail Combs says:
September 12, 2010 at 5:20 pm
Brad says:
September 12, 2010 at 6:04 am
…and tell me again how Obama could be worse than Bush? …..and an economy in the tank because Bush let Wall Street ruin the economy…what was that about Obama again?
__________________________________________________
Gail responds: “Brad you have the wrong president. It was Clinton not Bush….[etc]
What Gail didn’t mention is that starting later in the Clinton era the “Government Sponsered Entities”, Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae, began to buy up large quantities of “bad paper” – which they pretended was good paper, aided also by a self-serving Economic Model which said there was a negligable chance of collapse when its inevitability was instead virtually assured – thus essentially creating a Massive Market For Bad Paper and a Bad Paper Real Estate Bubble, backed as though the Bad Paper was Government Bonds, which it had to be, since the Gov’t was sponsering the further sale of Bad Paper Packages by Freddie and Fannie to investors at large.
The obvious solution for the on-the-ground loan originators – who were also plagued by threats of prosecution even by the Justice Dep’t for “redlining” minorities, as well as inflammatory bad-for-business demonstrations by grouips such as ACORN, and the related extortions by ACORN – was simply to “lend money to everybody”, because the originators could then quickly unload the bad paper to Freddie and Fanny [Thomas Sowell, and also obvious otherwise] So they did just that.
The CEO’s of Freddie and Fanny could also reap large “performance bonuses” from this practice because they could borrow money from the Federal Reserve at its “discount counter” rates, while claiming the bad loans would return money at a good margin. So they did.
Democrat cronies such as Franklin Raines, Roger Mudd’s son, and the omnipresent Jamie Gorelick escaped clean and clear with large “performance bonuses”. Maybe some Republican cronies did, too, but so far I haven’t heard about them.
The House and Senate Banking Oversight Committees, featuring Chairmans Barney Frank and Chris Dodd starting after the 2008 elections, claimed that everthing was hunkie-dorrey in spite of attempts by people such as Buch and McCain to warn of disaster – but which anyone with an honest brain should have already known. [I even did, but I didn’t know that Freddie and Fanny were actually creating this Massive Market For Bad Paper because I hadn’t paid any attention to the schema which “encouraged” some iffy loans, after hearing about it briefly in the news in ~ 1998, and I’d assumed no one would be stupid enough to try it on a massive level. But they did.
What has Obama done to rival this chicanery? Well, he’s in turn created a Massive Federal Debt Bubble, with accumulations of debt at an ongoing ~$1.5 trillion/yr., which makes Bush’s unacceptable over-spending look like he’s downright miserly. Simply follow the money to whomever benefits most from Obama’s targeted “stimuli” to find out who his chosen winners are. But it certainly ain’t gonna be America or the vast majority of its current and future taxpayers, the chosen losers.
pedex:
Want alternatives to compete and have a chance? ok, then remove all the subsidies with the several industries that heavily involve petroleum and see what happens once the massive market distortions are removed.
pedex, for maximally undistorted markets don’t forget to remove all the taxes on the several industries, too, which nearly always significantly exceed the “subsidies”/deductions in the case of the evil Oil Companies, and don’t forget to eliminate the seperate State and Federal windfall gasoline sales taxes, too, which here in Oregon totalled around 42cents/gal. last time I looked, regardless of the price per gallon, and which equated to a much balleyhooed “excessive” ~10% profit to Exxon over one particular quarter of about 40cents/gal. at an overall price of around $4/gal..
“Reduce Gov’t induced distortions and ripoffs!” Including “Carbon Taxes”. Watch the economy boom and the standard of living increase, as solar and wind energy atrophy – naturally.
Ed Murphy says:
September 12, 2010 at 8:42 pm
“Aww Gail, Gail, Gail, it jus’ t’ ain’t so…”
True Ed, yet Bush did try to constrain Barney Frank as well as Chriss Dodd and their lending policy, which, more then the repeal of Glass-Steagall, created the crisis.
Janet Reno (under Clinton) instigated 15 major law suits forcing the banks to make more andm more risky loans, under federal threat. Obama himself led one law suit claiming red linning, later shown to be false.
Fannie Mae, a Gov sponsored enterprize, led the way creating the highly leveraged Securitized Mortgage Packages which all major banks around the world eventually followed. It is the Gov responability to regulate finance and banking. Dems have been in charge of this for a very long time, which is why they recieve such heavy contributions from wall street. [ isn’t this way off topic . . mod]
Found in: david on September 13, 2010 at 12:50 am
I believe it is agreed there is fault on both sides, by both action and inaction. For precisely apportioning the shares of the blame, there are other sites. For holding those responsible accountable, the November elections are coming soon. Let’s get back to the topic.
kadaka:
“Having your own batteries”
There’s the rub when going off-grid: energy storage. Have you looked at the realities of purchasing and maintaining a bank of 50 lead-acid batteries where each battery has a realistic service life of 3-5 years? You can’t use cores purchased from recycling plants. When someone replaces a lead-acid battery it’s almost always because it’s been reduced to less than 20% of its original charge capacity which is where the average driver starts to experience times when his car won’t start.
I spent a hundred hours or so last year looking at economical ways to lower my energy bill. Given I live in sunny south central Texas these were mostly focused on somehow harvesting solar power but I also have several acres of trees which provide 10-20 tons of excess wood every year so I also looked at syngas generators.
Nothing ended up making economical sense for generating my own power with electricity being delivered to me on demand at a total cost of $0.13/kwh. What came the closest without taking up an inordinate amount of time in maintaining the system en was owner-installed photovoltaics with a grid-tie. Unfortunately to qualify for the various financial incentive (subsidies) the system can’t be owner-installed and the jacked-up cost of qualified installation more than negates the financial subsidies. Near as I can tell the subsidies only benefit the sellers. Also unfortunately the cost of grid-tie equipment is prohibitively expensive for reasons I can only guess at but in the least cynical light I’d guess it’s a simple matter of economy of scale or more specifically a lack of economy of scale. So I decided to wait a few more years before looking at it again in the hope that economy of scale would drive down the price of a grid-tie.
In the meantime I found the best course of action is to be proactive about using less energy rather than trying to get your energy at a lower cost.