I'm on the shores of Kinneret (Sea of Galilee to Christians) for Israel's version of FOO Camp. A great time so far, after visiting Haifa and the area. To Tel Aviv on Sunday to speak at the Marker's internet conference for those of you who are in the area.
The news of the past few days has been full of anger that AIG is paying $165 million in bonuses out to managers who drove the company into insolvency, using federal bailout money to do it. The excuse -- these bonuses were guaranteed in contracts.
Last week I wrote about what I consider the main goal of green electricity efforts, namely to stop burning coal. You can do that, to some extent, by removing demand from the grid in places where the grid is coal-heavy. Even in other places, removing demand from the grid will be fairly effective at reducing the production of greenhouse gases.
Update: Since this article a flood of cheap solar panels from China has been changing some of the economics discussed here. I have not altered the article but some of its conclusions deserve adjustment.
No matter what you do -- conserve, or put up solar or wind -- your goal is to take power off the grid. Many people however, consciously or unconsciously take a different goal -- they want to feel that they are doing the green thing. They want their electricity to be clean. This is actually a dangerous idea, I believe. Electrons are electrons. In terms of reducing emissions, you get the exact same result if you put a solar panel on your house than if you put it on your neighbour's house. You even get a better result if you put it on a house that's powered by a coal plant, so long as you also reap the benefit (in dollars) of the electricity it makes.
People don't like to accept this, but it's much better to put a wind turbine somewhere windy than on your own house. Much better to put a solar panel somewhere sunny than on your own house. And much better in all cases if the power you offset is generated by more by coal than at your house.
However, the real consequences are much deeper. The following numbers reveal it is generally a bad idea to put up solar panels at all, at least right now. That's because, as you will see below, solar panels are a terrible way to spend money and time to make greener electricity. Absolutely dreadful. Their only attribute is making you feel good because they are on your roof. But you should not feel good, because you could (in theory, and I believe with not much work in practice) have made the planet much greener by using the money you spent on the panels in other ways.
The true goal is to find the method that provides the most bang per buck in removing load from the dirty grid.
Keep reading to see the math and a spreadsheet with some very surprising numbers about what techniques do that the best.
As you may know, I allow anonymous comments on this blog. Generally, when a blog is small, you don't want to do too much to discourage participation. Making people sign up for an account (particularly with email verification) is too much of a barrier when your comment volume is small. You can't allow raw posting these days because of spammers -- you need some sort of captcha or other proof-of-humanity -- but in most cases moderate readership sites can allow fairly easy participation.
Coach is cramped, but not everybody can afford business class. In addition, there are airlines that require fat people to purchase a second seat if they can't fit into one. Fortunately I am not in that department, but it seems there is an interesting alternative that might make sense for all -- selling half of a middle seat, for half price (or less) to somebody wanting more room in coach.
I recently attended the eComm conference on new telephony. Two notes in presentations caught my attention, though they were mostly side notes. In one case, the presenter talked about the benefits of having RFID tags in everything.
"Your refrigerator," he said, "could read the RFID and know if your milk was expired." In the old days we just looked at the date or smelled it.
I'm looking at you Ubuntu.
For some time now, the standard form for distributing a free OS (ie. Linux, *BSD) has been as a CD-ROM or DVD ISO file. You burn it to a CD, and you can boot and install from that, and also use the disk as a live CD.
There are a variety of pages with instructions on how to convert such an ISO into a bootable flash drive, and scripts and programs for linux and even for windows -- for those installing linux on a windows box.
There are many ways to go green, though as I have identified, the vast bulk of the problem is in just a few areas -- personal transportation, electrical generation, building design/heating/cooling and agriculture.
While those who focus on CO2 work from the fact that both Natural Gas and Coal, which produce 70% of the USA's electricity, emit CO2, coal is a much bigger villain.
There are many opinions about whether the bailout and stimulus package are a good idea or not. But one thing that I hope everybody agrees is bad is that it teaches the lesson that if you screw up so badly that you hurt the global economy, we're not going to let you fall. Take huge risks because in the event of catastrophe, the government has no choice but to make it better.
Is there a way to do a bailout that doesn't end up rewarding, or even saving, the people responsible?
Product recalls have been around for a while. You get a notice in the mail. You either go into a dealer at some point, any point, for service, or you swap the product via the mail. Nicer recalls mail you a new product first and then you send in the old one, or sign a form saying you destroyed it. All well and good. Some recalls are done as "hidden warranties." They are never announced, but if you go into the dealer with a problem they just fix it for free, long after the regular warranty, or fix it while working on something else.
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