Open thread weekend

“A technical question for anybody: If you have a standby generator, you must have a transfer switch (required by Code) to prevent back feeding the grid during an outage- this is a matter of safety for utility workers. With PV, how is it isolated from the grid when there is an outage? You can’t have a transfer switch as the purpose of the PV system is to feed excess power back to the grid. I have never heard this discussed and am simply curious.”
If the grid falls below a set value (like to near zero) this would be trivial. Here is a discussion
http://forums.mikeholt.com/showthread.php?t=138782
OTOH, the purpose of a small roof PV or wind system is to power the house.

From Mike on July 22, 2012 at 11:12 am:

I noticed a count of 24 solar panels on the roof. Check with google, Home Depot advertises panels at $399 per panel. (…)

You can get them much cheaper online.
http://www.wholesalesolar.com/bulk-solar-panels-by-the-pallet.html
A pallet of 22 “Astronergy 240 watt Module Silver” panels is $5807, about $264 a panel, for 5280 watts total, $1.10/watt. Ones of other (perceived) quality, types (poly- or mono-crystalline, etc) or country of origin are available. Even “Made in the USA” panels are available, Sharp and Schott, for under $1.40/watt. Individual panels in that wattage range are available for around $300.
Of course there’s still the mounting hardware, connectors, inverters and other electrical stuff to buy. Just those three exterior electrical enclosures pictured look like several thousand bucks right there. Offhand I’d guess panel prices will be only around a third of total installation cost, with DIY physical panel installing.
BTW, I’ve looked at that site on and off for a few years now. The “by the pallet” pickings are pretty slim right now. I doubt high demand is wiping out supply on hand. The falling panel prices wiping out low-margin manufacturers, and/or dropping subsidies killing demand, seems the most likely reason for stock being so low.

That’s a mighty fine solid-state electronic SOTA hailstone detector you’ve got there, Sir!

RobertvdL says: July 22, 2012 at 11:39 am
Is there somebody who knows how to generate electricity in big quantities with a bicycle? My wife wants to lose some weight. If it works I could even open a gym , open 24/7
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It doesn’t work. A person in fit condition can put out about 250 watts for 30 minutes or so. To be optimistic, assume 250 W for 4 hours, or 1 KWh. Even at the retail price of 24 cents/KWh, that’s $.06 per labor hour payment. Modern industry is excellent at making cheap electricity. Assuming use of Thorium and breeder reactors, there is 1000 years of fuel in the ground. Regardless of what you may have heard, there have been zero injuries or fatalities due to nuke power plant sources after the tsunami that killed 20,000 people in eastern Japan last year. That’s compared to hundreds of annual accident fatalities for other power producers including site accidents at wind farms.

It’s an open thread, so I can steer it to the safety of windfarms. Here’s a UK reference on accidents and fatalities. http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/page4.htm?oo=0 It’s mostly UK statistics, but I noted the 2400 golden eagles killed by the Altamont windfarm in the past 20 years. Can you imagine the outcry if that had been caused by a coal burner or a nuke power plant?

We did exactly the same thing on our terrace house and save $600 p.a. and we also have a Solar HW unit which never needs electric boosting under the Sydney Sun. We too did it with no regard to reducing CO2 output or Global Weirding. We were just protecting ourselves against a deluded Government.

Gary Hladik says: July 22, 2012 at 3:12 pm
We’re facing the question that Francisco, Hank and Dagny had to face. Going along with your nature and fight like hell to save the system, even if you’re the only one left pulling the wagon. Or do you realize that it is immoral to help an immoral system keep going, and do your part to bring it crashing down? I wish it were so easy, here in the real world, I’m rather unsettled about what comes after the collapse. Interesting times, indeed.

Economics of my soon to be installed 4 KW system in Phoenix. Note that there are almost no economies of scale (price/kWh) for larger systems.
Installed price if I purchased the system: $16,500.
Guarantee kWh over 20 years under the lease agreement: 120,387. It is 6300 the first year and 5737 in year 20.
The numbers:
– Before subsidies: capital cost per guarantee generated kWh: $0.137.
– After subsidies ($7330 in subsidies): capital cost per guarantee generated kWh: $0.076.
These numbers apply to the 20 year lease option so they include subsidies, repair and a probable inverter replacement.
– Price kWh if the lease is fully prepaid: $0.069
– Price kWh if one takes a $0/down lease. $0.113.
– Price kWh with a $5,000 down-payment $0.076
In my situation roughly 50% of the generated power will be during the high rate period: M-F noon-7. It is offsetting $0.245/kWh power. In the low rate period, it is offsetting $0.065/kWh power. If the system overproduces, I get high and low period credits from the power company. If I end the year in a positive balance, then I get cashed out at $0.065/kWh. My average price for power last year was $0.134/kWh
The fine print.
The lessor is NRG – the largest power producer, the largest nuclear power producer and because of this program the largest solar power producer in the country. The use a 4.5% discount rate on their lease. I was more comfortable dealing with a power company that did leasing than a finance company that did solar. With the two other finance oriented quotes, I could never figure out the price/kWh over the life of the lease.
The disposal terms after 20 years are clear – I can buy the system, I can continue to lease, NRG can pay to take it out and restore the roof. If none of the preceding occur, the system reverts to my ownership 90 days after the lease ends.
Pne out for the lessor: The guarantee can be reduced one time if, after one year, the system does not produce its rated power. Does not seem to be happening based on references and BBB rating (almost 4 years).
If they do not meet the guarantee, NRG writes us a check at the end of the year.

I was surprised that the comments on McKibben’s Article in Rolling Stone did not take him to task for his evaluation of how to throttle the fossil fuel industry. Several of the quotes did not appear in the Rolling Stone given in this BLOG article, especially the quote,” hold the power to change the physics and chemistry of the planet”. I don’t know if they were edited out by Rolling Stone or just out of the web page that I accessed below.
Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math | Politics News | Rolling Stone
Bill McKibben is an journalist environmental activist who likes to write about the climate change issues but really doesn’t understand any of the science, especially mathematics and probability. Therefore everything he says comes from other sources. I struggled through his rant against fossil fuels to see where he thinks the action the environmental activists need to take to prevent climate change. Below is my analysis.
McKibben has given up on many of the enviro-activist’s efforts to limit the production of fossil fuels. “So far, as I said at the start, environmental efforts to tackle global warming have failed”. “The planet’s emissions of carbon dioxide continue to soar,…”“This record of failure means we know a lot about what strategies don’t work.”
Well that is quite an admission!
What did they do wrong?
1. “Green groups, for instance, have spent a lot of time trying to change individual lifestyles:” “Most of us are fundamentally ambivalent about going green: We like cheap flights to warm places, and we’re certainly not going to give them up if everyone else is still taking them.” “People perceive – correctly – that their individual actions will not make a decisive difference in the atmospheric concentration of CO2”
2. “A more efficient method, of course, would be to work through the political system, and environmentalists have tried that, too with the limited success. “They’ve patiently lobbied leaders, trying to convince them of our peril and assuming that politicians would heed the warnings. Sometimes it has seemed to work. Barack Obama, for instance, campaigned more aggressively about climate change than any president before him – the night he won the nomination, he told supporters that his election would mark the moment “the rise of the oceans began to slow and the planet began to heal.”” But in light of the numbers I’ve just described, it’s obviously a very small”
The numbers are: 2 0C, 565 Gigatons of carbon dioxide, and 2795 Gigatons of fossil fuel reserves
a. 2 0C is a upper limit on the global temperature determined by the Copanhaden Accord. “The accord did contain one important number, however. In Paragraph 1, it formally recognized “the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below two degrees Celsius.”
b. 565 Gigatons is total amount of carbon dioxide needed to raise the global temperature by mid-century 2 0C “The 565-gigaton figure was derived from one of the most sophisticated computer-simulation models that have been built by climate scientists around the world over the past few decades. And the number is being further confirmed by the latest climate-simulation models currently being finalized in advance of the next report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change”
c. 2795 Gigatons is the mass reservoir of fossil fuel “It was highlighted last summer by the Carbon Tracker Initiative, a team of London financial analysts and environmentalists who published a report in an effort to educate investors about the possible risks that climate change poses to their stock portfolios. The number describes the amount of carbon already contained in the proven coal and oil and gas reserves of the fossil-fuel companies, and the countries (think Venezuela or Kuwait) that act like fossil-fuel companies”
“At this point, effective action would require actually keeping most of the carbon the fossil-fuel industry wants to burn safely in the soil, not just changing slightly the speed at which it’s burned.” “That’s a commitment that I make.” The next day, in a yard full of oil pipe in Cushing, Oklahoma, the president promised to work on wind and solar energy but, at the same time, to speed up fossil-fuel development: “Producing more oil and gas here at home has been, and will continue to be, a critical part of an all-of-the-above energy strategy.” That is, he’s committed to finding even more stock to add to the 2,795-gigaton inventory of unburned carbon.
Obviously McKibben feels that there no hope of a satisfactory political solution. “So, the paths we have tried to tackle global warming have so far produced only gradual, halting shifts. A rapid, transformative change would require building a movement, and movements require enemies.”
What movement does McKibben believe is needed to keep 80% of the fossil fuel in the ground?
“These climate numbers make painfully, usefully clear is that the planet does indeed have an enemy – one far more committed to action than governments or individuals. The enemy is the fossil fuel industry. “Veteran anti-corporate leader Naomi Klein, who is at work on a book about the climate crisis said “But these numbers make clear that with the fossil-fuel industry, wrecking the planet is there is their business model. “They’re clearly cognizant of global warming – they employ some of the world’s best scientists, after all, and they’re bidding on all those oil leases made possible by the staggering melt of Arctic ice.”
He has a plan to stop them?
“Left to our own devices, citizens might decide to regulate carbon and stop short of the brink; according to a recent poll, nearly two-thirds of Americans would back an international agreement that cut carbon emissions 90 percent by 2050. But we aren’t left to our own devices.”
“Environmentalists, understandably, have been loath to make the fossil-fuel industry their enemy, respecting its political power and hoping instead to convince these giants that they should turn away from coal, oil and gas and transform themselves more broadly into “energy companies.” .” In December, BP finally closed its solar division. Shell shut down its solar and wind efforts in 2009. The five biggest oil companies have made more than $1 trillion in profits since the millennium – there’s simply too much money to be made on oil”
They loath oil companies. They have always viewed them as the enemy.
Why is the fossil fuel industry responsible for the climate crisis? McKibben’s answer is that the fossil fuel industry is responsible for producing the CO2 and should taxed rather than the users of fossil fuels because they are not paying for the pollution caused by fossil fuels. The logic of this is difficult to comprehend. It is the same logic that says that guns manufacturers should pay for the cost of crimes committed using guns. If an industry pollutes water by using it in their processes, they should pay to compensate for the damage in the waste disposal. This scheme would require the water company to pay because they supplied the water.
“Much of that profit stems from a single historical accident: Alone among businesses, the fossil-fuel industry is allowed to dump its main waste, carbon dioxide, for free.” “If you put a price on carbon, through a direct tax or other methods, it would enlist markets in the fight against global warming. Once Exxon has to pay for the damage its carbon is doing to the atmosphere, the price of its products would rise.” Tax them heavily
Mckibben offers a simple method to redistribute the tax called “fee and dividend.”
“The economic playing field would now be a level one for nonpolluting energy sources. And you could do it all without bankrupting citizens – a so-called “fee-and-dividend” scheme would put a hefty tax on coal and gas and oil, then simply divide up the proceeds.” There’s only one problem: Putting a price on carbon would reduce the profitability of the fossil-fuel industry. After all, the answer to the question “How high should the price of carbon be?” is “High enough to keep those carbon reserves that would take us past two degrees safely in the ground.
“The higher the price on carbon, the more of those reserves would be worthless.”
“It’s not clear, of course, that the power of the fossil-fuel industry can be broken. The U.K. analysts who wrote the Carbon Tracker report and drew attention to these numbers had a relatively modest goal – they simply wanted to remind investors that climate change poses a very real risk to the stock prices of energy companies/”
3 “Forcing the fossil fuel industry probably would fail”. McKibben is saying that the political clout to make people pay to reduce carbon use is gone and is probably dead. In essence he is admitting defeat of the environmental activists to get the controls on fossil fuel companies despite the efforts of the president to create an alternate energy industry through massive tax breaks and incentives, the subsidizing of the biofuels industry which still produces CO2, the efforts to shut down electrical power plants that use coal, the threat to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies, the ruthless efforts by the EPC to add more and more regulations about CO2, and the supreme court agreeing to let the EPC label CO2 a pollutant based on false testimony by flawed IPCC reports. They have won many battles but the wins are not significant. None of this apparently matters in the war against fossil fuel distribution.
Mckibben has given up yet. He has a new strategy to bring the fossil fuel industry to its knees. Create a huge protest movement to get people to divest themselves of earnings from fossil fuel stocks. He cites the success of the Apartheid movement in support of the minorities in South Africa as a successful example of how a protest could cause the fossil fuel industry to keep 80% the energy resources underground.
“So pure self-interest probably won’t spark a transformative challenge to fossil fuel. “But moral outrage just might – and that’s the real meaning of this new math.” “The fossil-fuel industry is obviously a tougher opponent, and even if you could force the hand of particular companies, you’d still have to figure out a strategy for dealing with all the sovereign nations that, in effect, act as fossil-fuel companies”
McKibben’s article paints a dismal picture for environmental activism on behalf of reducing the continued growth in the use of fossil fuels. This is interesting when one considers all the things that environmental activist’s lobbies have accomplished since the beginning of the fear of global warming started. But no one will help them destroy the fossil fuel industry, at least enough, to make a level playing field for the fledgling alternate energy industries.
McKibben said a lot of things in the article that are not true and for which he offered no references. His analysis of artic ice melting and forest fires caused by global warming are just two examples. But worse he does not understand physical sciences and notably mathematics and probability and he doesn’t understand simple economics. His fear of capitalism is so great that he does not seem to realize that the law of supply and demand is still going on in the world, not just in the US.
Several points could be mentioned.
1. The withdrawal of investments in South Africa changed the minds of the South African Apartheid government by reduced investment but the withdrawal of investors in companies doing business with South Africa was economic not political. They were worried about their investments.
2. Fossil fuels and oil in particular are commodities and traded on the free market.
3. A reduction in demand for oil by greater taxes would affect the sale of the commodity in the US but it would encourage other nations, who don’t care about global warming, to buy more fossil fuel because it would be cheaper.
4. A “fee and dividend” program to extract financially damaging taxes from fossil fuel companies would not necessarily be returned to citizens as a dividends. Especially by our government that seeks more ways to spend tax dollars.
5. Finally, the development of a protest movement in the colleges and universities on the heels of the failure of the occupy Wall Street movement to change Wall Street or the governments relation to the banks. In an environment where the unemployment rate is so high that college graduates even with advanced degrees are finding difficult to find any job and are faced with impending doom that their huge students loans are due to be repaid as soon as they graduate. People are not going to see this as a moral imperative compared to Apartheid. I doubt that middle class people with investment portfolios in IRA’s and state governmental and union fiduciary agencies are going to risk divesting of fossil fuel stocks and their associated rates of return for a hypothetical limit of 565 gigatons of carbon dioxide to prevent 2 0C global warming when the average temperature of the planet has barely changed in the last decade despite major weather events such fires, droughts, and heat waves and simultaneous increases in CO2.
The evidence is not that strong that global warming requires a mandate to save the planet. The global warming advocates have lost credibility by the fact that the IPCC computer programs don’t prove anything, by not acknowledging that there are also natural causes for global warming and by not providing any real evidence that something bad will happen if temperature goes up 2 degrees in the next 50 years. Their stand is shaky in lieu of the fact the planet in the last 4000 years has gone through bigger heating and cooling cycles with little evidence of problems for heating compared to cycles where the temperature fell below the temperatures in the 1890’s. There is no moral imperative. It is a GIGO computer program supporting a pseudo-religious quasi-political belief system that requires no evidence only the religious leaders in the United Nations handing down fallacious reports with misleading data and information written by a few selected elites scientists without peer review who were chosen to prove that the globe is warming solely due to the use of fossil fuels.