Don’t Plug In, Whatever You Do!

June 26. 2008 by Dick.

Electric utilities in Vermont are worried about the high cost of home heating oil. They fear consumers will be inclined to use electric space heaters to heat their homes this winter.

Hey, I’ve been running the numbers on that. At over $4/gallon for oil, the 11 or 12 cent kilowatt-hour looks pretty good.

The utilities say their grid, particularly in Southern Vermont, cannot handle the added load if we all turn on a space heater.

And they want us to add plug-in electric cars to the mix?

Ye gods.

Posted in Extras!, Quickies, Cars, Business, Dick's Dumps | 1 Comment »

Solar Energy a Tough Sell

June 9. 2008 by Dick.

The Miami Herald thinks solar power is a white elephant.

The old saying is, “If it bleeds, it leads.” I guess there wasn’t enough blood in South Florida yesterday.

Florida Power and Light, the principle utility here, has “scaled back grand plans for solar energy in Florida. Sunshine may be free, but generating energy from it is still a costly proposition,” according to a report by John Dorschner in the Miami Herald.

It surprised me to discover that “Florida gets much less direct sunlight than some other places.” The Herald continued that “What’s more, solar can be considerably more expensive than other forms of energy, experts say.”

For the record, FPL Group has desert solar plants and wind facilities throughout the western states. It is the largest U.S. producer of wind and solar power. FPL serves more than 4.4 million customer accounts across Florida.

“I haven’t seen anything yet that shows solar is right for Florida,” Jay Apt, executive director of the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center, concluded in the Herald.

Now for the real story.

“Backers of solar power insist that costs would drop quickly over time if solar gets support from utilities and politicians. But those who study energy economics are skeptical.”

I want to know where they found these experts. Consider this:

1959: “Only Jules Verne can get a man to the Moon”
1969: “That’s one small step for man …”

1975: “The American automobile industry can’t possibly double the gas mileage on cars. Double? Are you crazy?”
1985: The Corporate Average Fuel Economy for cars reached 27.5 mpg.

1992: “The sweet spot for desktop computers is $3,000″ (I paid $3,085 1992 dollars for an 80486-based Gateway 2000 in May of that year).
2002: Gateway sold Pentium 4-based desktops with Windows XP for under a grand (and some for half of that now).

2006: Google founder Larry Page and Silicon Valley venture capitalists John Doerr and Vinod Khosla lit a public fire under solar power with a California ballot issue.

Computer chips and solar cells are, at the engineering level, pretty much the same thing.

“A solar cell is just a big specialized chip, so everything we’ve learned about making chips applies,” Paul Saffo, an associate engineering professor at Stanford University and a longtime observer of Silicon Valley said in the International Herald Trib earlier this year.

That tells us we can link Moore’s Law and solar technology. Moore’s law states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every two years or so; its corollary is that prices plummet at around the same rate.

In 2006, Solaicx was one of dozens of Silicon Valley firms driving the then-$11 billion worldwide solar energy market. Applied Materials, the world’s largest manufacturer of chip-making equipment, began selling machinery that manufactures solar wafers that same year.

In 2006, SunPower founder Richard Swanson told CNN the solar industry was like the chip industry 30 years before. “It was an extremely fun and dynamic industry,” he said. “But unless you were in it, it was practically invisible until the IBM PC came out in 1981.”

That was a couple of years ago, long enough for the news to reach Florida by now.

So. Mr. Dorschner thinks solar power is a white elephant. I think the Herald and Mr. Dorschner should maybe do a little more research. And maybe, just maybe, they should report what the solar industry is doing that will change the numbers instead of looking to spill enough blood to kill it.

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Filed under Bad Journalism and Far Green Angst.Sources:
http://www.miamiherald.com/457/story/561858.html
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/17/technology/PING.php
http://money.cnn.com/2006/10/26/magazines/business2/solar_siliconvalley.biz2/index.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore’s_law

Posted in Newspaper "Science", Business, PC, Media, Dick's Dumps | 5 Comments »

Guestbook and More

May 31. 2008 by Dick.

Wow.

A friend and I were talking about names; we had a tiny question about how many peeps keep the given name their parents gave them.

One of my high school classmates changed hers from Diane to Eugenia so I googled her. A first page result was on classmates.com and, as it turns out, you have to sign up to access the info.

Signing up is free so I did. After all, I have a myspace page, right? What could it hurt.

I hate to be nickled and dimed. I dropped Verizon because they charge Vermonters by the minute for local calls. I’ll probably stop flying when the airlines start charging by the pound.

If you sign the classmates.com guestbook or send a message to a classmates.com member like me, I have to pay for it. This is worse than texting. Since I am pugnaciously parsimonious, you are far more likely to get my attention by email or phone.

I pay a flat rate for those.

dblog4495h-at-gmail-dot-com

Posted in Business, Dick's Dumps, Random Access | 1 Comment »