So
unless I’m miscounting, with Mark Critz’s election to fill John
Murtha’s House seat in Pennsylvania last night, Democrats have now won 6
out of 6 special Congressional elections since President Obama took
office. (Or 6 out of 7, if you include the Senate race.)
This
is not to say anger is not abroad in the land. It is – and
rightfully so. We are, as the President says, in a ditch. But at
least some voters seem not ready to hand the keys back to the folks who drove
us there.
Our
job is to get voters to focus on the broad contrast, which is everywhere you
look, most recently with the $75 million cap on BP’s liability.
Democrats want to raise it to $10 billion. Republicans don’t.
And
our job is to inspire people to vote for more change, not for worse
gridlock.
The
Party of No has blocked so much needed legislation, kept so many
outstanding appointees bottled up, taken the filibuster to such new
heights, cheered when we lost the Olympics, sneered when our President won
the Nobel Peace Prize, fought against consumer protections, fought for
corporate protections – and perhaps most tellingly, blocked the
establishment of a bipartisan deficit commission that they themselves had
proposed. Its seven Republican co-sponsors actually voted to kill the
thing once the President signed on.
But
I digress.
SOLAR
Michael
Joblin: “Congrats
on going solar. We decided a couple of months ago that this summer we
will install both a solar PV system for our electricity and a solar
thermal pool heating system. We’ve been researching panels and
installers, and there are many of both. I’m beginning to think
there's a possibility of the paralysis of analysis. May I ask
which panel you've selected and why, and what percentage of your estimated
total usage you will be generating? With the tiered pricing in use here,
there's diminishing returns as the percentage of usage increases.
We're currently looking at generating around 70%-80% of our usage, which
should cover 90%+ of our utility bill. As for panels, right now
we're looking at SunPower, Sanyo, Suntech, First Solar, and Kyocera. I gather
from my reading that I should probably also look at Yingli. We don't
understand why we don't see many more solar installations here in the desert
than we do. Would you have a theory about that?”
#&9758 We chose Sunpower
230 panels for this system because we had very little space available to
fit the panels. It is a 3.68kW system that will cover approximately 73%
of the electric load of the property. (It’s a summer place.)
Our gurus for this explain, in answer to your question:
Sunpower panels are the most efficient available on the
market, meaning we can fit more watts in a given area when compared to other
brands. There is a high cost associated with this; however, for unique
applications like this, Sunpower is ideal. For systems where space is not
an issue, we typically use Suntech or Canadian Solar. They both produce
excellent panels and CS is the closest affordable panel from an efficiency standpoint
to Sunpower.
In New York State, residential system ROI's go down as
you exceed 10kW since the rebate is capped at 10kW. The same is for commercial
at 50kW. NYS does not have a Renewable Portfolio Standard which makes the
annual payback entirely dependent on the electricity negation, after you apply
the state and federal incentives. In NJ, the payback is not only
dependent on the negation of electricity after incentives, but the sale of
Solar Renewable Energy Credits (SRECs) to utilities who are fined for not
producing a certain % of their power renewably. SRECs are valued around
4x's the cost of electricity.
Regarding the amount of solar currently installed in a
particular market, it entirely depends on what State incentives are available
and whether or not that state has an RPS. Solar typically costs around
the same no matter what state you are in (except for non-typical mounting
applications); however, the incentives vary the paybacks from 5 to even 20
years!
☞ I understand only a little of that. But
as to the last little piece, I’m quite sure desert-based panels would pay
off faster than ours would, other things (like incentives and energy costs)
being equal. What we need to get to are panels cheap and efficient enough to be
compelling investments without subsidy. Which would mean, at least in
part, recognizing the true cost of fossil fuels.
Which gets us back to:
Stewart
Dean:
“Here’s
a link to the report itself – Hidden Costs of Energy:
Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use – and for
something this important, it’s a major journalistic and political failure
that it’s been around since last October and hasn’t gotten heavy
coverage and been used to leverage action for alternative energy.
Sheeesh.”
Amie
Home:
“I’m glad you're getting solar panels, we’ve come close a couple
of times but keep expecting to move and have been hoping for some technological
advancements, hoping that like PCs the price won’t come down necessarily
but the product will get better. In the meantime we've just cut usage and
replaced heavy usage appliances with energy efficient ones. But the Tom
Rooney article you posted was just
plain trite. ‘They confuse price with cost. Like Pee Wee’s
customers.’ Come on! If Pee Wee were a real and not
fictionalized person, his customers wouldn’t know that he was dumping so
they wouldn’t be confusing anything – they’d just be
unwittingly supporting a criminal. The article was poorly written by the
CEO of a solar company pushing his own wares with a lot of trite phrases that
bugged the heck out of me. Even though I’m pro solar, I hated
it.”
SCANNING
PHOTOS
Bill: “[Re Marc’s
‘fourth’ thing yesterday:] I don’t understand.
How does scanning photos that you already have save anything? It
may make displaying and sharing the photos more convenient, but if you already
have a hardcopy photo what have you saved? Indeed, a real extremist would
claim that scanners fill up hard drives that eventually fail and have to be
replaced, adding to our recycling costs. But I won't go there.”
☞
All true. Some people use the scanner to go paperless. Others, like
me, may have used them to cut down a little on our paper use, but just
love the way our photos are now preserved, easily backed up, organized, shared,
and accessible. Where it once would have been beyond weird to carry photo
albums everywhere you went, now you can – on your iPhone.
The
FIFTH of Marc’s 12 Most Useful Things
So
far, I’ve given you the first through fourth (well,
Marc gave them to us). And at the end of this series, I’ll give you
the link to all 12. But for now . . .
5. Love vacuuming.
All hand-held vacuum
cleaners I’ve had in the past were weak suckers, if you want to call it
that, — until I got this one. The “Black & Decker
PHV1800CB 18-Volt Pivoting-Nose Cordless Energy-Star Handheld Vacuum
Cleaner” is amazingly powerful in its suction, even though it’s
hand-held and cordless. Having it handy saves you from having to drag out
your big regular vacuum cleaner in 99% of all situations. The Black and Decker
got 132 5-star, and 44 4-star ratings out of 208 customer reviews on Amazon (as
of 5/9/2010). Black
& Decker Handheld Vacuum Cleaner, approx. $55.