People Can't Do Math, Green Energy Edition

Yes, some rooftop solar installers are sketchy. But some aren't. It's like many other things, you need to do some research.

Yes, some regions get less sunlight than others, which means you'll get less financial benefit from solar, all other things being equal.

 

But, if you own the house you live in, and if your financial situation allows you to get loans, and if you get a loan to pay for the installation of rooftop solar, and your savings on your electrical bill are more than the loan payments -- sorry to break it to you Bucko, but you just got free solar. Free as in, not only is it not costing you money, it's making you some money.

 

 

I'm posting this in frustration after reading a thread on asocial media in which a few of the participants were unable to grasp that, yes indeed, in some cases, for some people, solar power can be free.

 

Actually much better than free, but one mental weakness at a time.

 

I'm autistic, and one of the aspects of my neurological condition is that I'm above average at math, so I can understand how rooftop solar can be free, or how an EV can cost the owner less than ICE over 5 years, let alone 10, despite having a higher purchase price, because lower operating and maintenance costs more than make up for the higher initial price.

 

Unfortunately, another aspect of my neurological condition is that I'm not good at explaining math to morons.

 

It's extremely frustrating. People who are too dumb to grasp the importance of polluting less, would pollute less anyway, if they were smart enough to see how much money it would save them.

Solar Power and the Environment

The environment -- you know: the air we breathe, the water we drink, the birds in the skies, the fish in the seas, the plants we eat, the cute furry animals some of us eat -- the environment. Or to put it another way: our home. Or to put it in a much more precise way: the stuff we need in order to live. 

 

Just now, in an online group devoted to discussing solar power, a lively discussion had broken out when someone appeared and claimed that rooftop solar was not as good an investment as the S&P 500. Vigorous advocates of rooftop solar responded, saying that the stock market did not always go up, so that you'd have to find an investment with a guaranteed return in order to make a sensible comparison. Someone pointed out that the price of electricity had been going up, and that this had been left out of the comparison to the S&P. 

I didn't carefully read every single word of every comment in that discussion. I stopped reading after a while, after having seen not a single word about the environment. Not one single comment to the effect of: I put a value of X on spewing less poison into the air and water. Not one single comment to the effect of: if we all kill ourselves, money will be worthless. 

An entire conversation about solar power, entirely missing the actual point of it. Or what used to be the point, before greedy human pigs figured they could save a lot of money with solar. They've figured out that solar power is actually not a Chinese hoax, but they still haven't figured out that life does not entirely boil down to how much money they have.

And this means that there will be a lot of people who favor solar power because the economic advantages of it have become obvious enough that they can see the payoff for themselves personally, but who still are not quite bright enough -- despite all of the terrifying weather, despite all of the scientists and government agencies screaming their heads off about it full-time -- to have grasped that if we do not implement a bit of togetherness, and make changes including solar and many other things, we are all going to die. But they think they are smarter than anyone else if they have a lot of money. And a lot of us who should know better also believe that anyone who has more money than we do is smarter than we are, because that's the sort of simple-minded thinking which has become so pervasive since the days of that grotesquely overrated simpleton, Adam Smith, who assured each of us that if we just concentrate on the amount of currency we personally own, the Invisible Hand will take care of everything else.

If you're making economic calculations, and you assign no worth to the environment, you're not merely calculating inaccurately. You're entirely missing the point of any human calculation.

Solar In My Neighborhood

I live in an extremely progressive, environmentally-concscious neighborhood, full of Teslas and Bolts and many other EV's, and yet, they still have us screwed pretty bad when it comes to energy. It does not look like this around here:

 

My next-door neighbor has a solar roof, but I can walk east for more than a half-mile before I see one more house with solar panels. I can walk almost as far to the west before I see more solar panels: the branch of Chase bank next to a strip mall there has solar panels covering its entire roof, north, south, east and west. 

I keep meaning to go in there and ask someone about the solar panels. Because we live in one of those areas where there are all sorts of restrictions about what sort of solar set-up you can have, and I had assumed that literally covering your roof with solar panels was illegal in this city.

Maybe this is just an example of businesses tending not to put up with some of the crap that utilities succeed in shoving down homeowners' throats. Or maybe the fact that most of the roofs around here are not yet covered with solar panels, south, north, east and west, is an illustration of people not knowing their rights. I myself don't actually know whether what Chase is doing there is different than what any of us could be doing. And I know more about solar power than most people do.

There's a local group which wants to take our fair city away from the utility and run our power ourselves. I keep meaning to go to one of their meetings. If all of the neighborhoods in this town had roofs like those in the picture above, we could export a lot of electricity, undercut the prices of that utility, get others to join us, and put that utility and their coal-fired plants out of business. 

I'm good at daydreaming. Top-notch.

I keep meaning to look into these Biden-administration solar incentives, to see whether I could actually go solar myself right now, despite my low income. 

I keep meaning to actually do something.

Well, I write one of these posts on green energy now and then. Maybe I've actually encouraged someone somewhere else to actually do something.

More Blackouts

On Saturday, February 25, I posted a few impressions from the middle of a blackout which affected hundreds of thousands of people in Michigan, maybe over a a million. Two days later, on Monday, February 27, the power came back on. 

And it stayed on for four whole days, until Friday, March 3. There had been a big snowstorm overnight, and when I opened my eyes in the morning, the red LED clock that sits close to my face as I sleep was out.

This time it was much warmer than the previous blackout. Once again it seemed our whole block was affected. As late morning came on, my major problem personally was caffeine withdrawal. There was no way to heat water in my place. I headed off to a steakhouse, the nearest place that would have coffee. Google maps says it was a 4/10 of a mile walk. It didn't feel that long. The biggest problem was finding dry sidewalk or street to walk on amid huge piles of melting snow. 

On the way to the steakhouse I could see kids sledding down two hills in the public park nearby. On the smaller of the two hills, smaller kids were not moving very fast. Bigger kids were really zooming down the bigger hill. Near the steakhouse, people said there they had had no interruption in power.

The steakhouse was sort of like a return to my childhood: rural Midwest, 50 years ago. The coffee was nothing fancy. It was what people used to call "Joe." But it was strong, the waitress was very nice and she kept it coming, and after I while I decided to have some eggs Benedict. They make a big serving of eggs Benedict. I walked home in a much better mood than I had been in walking out, with the caffeine energy competing with sleepiness from a huge meal in a very pleasant way.

It wasn't nearly as cold as the previous blackout, but that night it was plenty cold enough. The next day, most of the snow blocking my car in had melted. I dug out the rest and headed to the library, and to the coffee shop adjacent to the library, or, actually, IN the library, which makes a great almond-milk mocha latte. 

This library is where people come to warm up and charge up their phones and laptops during blackouts. And that's exactly what I was doing when I got an email telling me that Amazon had made a delivery back at my place. I looked around for a photo of the delivery on the Amazon website, and sure enough: the package was outside, right next to the door of the enclosed porch, instead of inside that door, as is my standing request, and as Amazon does most of the time. 

I've never had a package stolen when it was left outside like that. I've never heard of any such thefts anywhere near my home. But anyone who is obsessive-compulsive will understand that that doesn't matter. I had to return home immediately to get that package inside before someone stole it or an unexpected downpour got it wet, or some huge stray dog picked it up between his jaws and began to to carry it west toward Nebraska. 

I retrieved the package. I changed into clean clothes. I was ready to return to the library for more warmth and wifi and recharging when I noticed that the sun was shining very brightly into the living room. Then it occurred to me that it was strange for the living room to be all lit up at that time of day -- and THEN it occurred to me that I had left the living-room light on, and that my electricity was back.

And the electricity meant that I could get my laptop online from home -- except that now my Internet was out. My brother called to see how I was, I told him: fine, except for the Internet. He suggested calling tech support. Sure enough, just like that, after two calls to tech support, BAM, my Internet was back.

Some people who, like me, favor big changes in the local energy structure, such as massive adoption of rooftop solar, are hopeful that blackouts will win people to our cause. While I certainly agree that massive adoption of rooftop solar would both help prevent these blackouts, and keep more people warm during blackouts (besides things like cutting way down on pollution and greenhouse gasses from electricity generated from Koch Industries coal), I don't see a lot of local people saying the same things. Solar energy remains far from widespread in Michigan. I think we've got a lot of hard work to do in changing public opinion.

Solar: Utility-Scale vs Rooftop

Headlines tell us of reports which show that utility-scale solar energy is much less expensive than rooftop solar. 

I assume this means that rooftop is more expensive in terms of $ to build the system per watt/hour produced.And I have no reason at all to doubt that this is true.

However, if you compare the cost to the consumer per watt/hour, presumably some people can save with rooftop. And presumably those numbers are not in these reports, nor are numbers to do with net metering.

 

I don't claim to know everything about solar energy, or utilities vs rooftop. Far from it. I'm having a very hard time finding information, and it seems that in the past decade or so, intentionally-confusing jargon to do with solar and utilities has grown at a monstrous rate.

 

I'm sure that utilities which are private and primarily concerned with pleasing their shareholders would much rather sell electricity to a consumer than have that consumer generate his own, or even compete on a level playing field, generating an excess and selling that excess back to the grid at fair rates. I'm also sure that such privately-held utilities would like for people to believe that rooftop is an option only for very wealthy people, and not even try to become better-informed.

 

The word "utility" means "the quality of being useful or helpful," or "Something which is useful or helpful." I am quite certain that some utilities are very different than others. But, the ones who don't even try to serve the common good when they can make greater profits instead: should we even call them "utilities"?

Innovation in EV and Renewable-Energy Technology

For you Republicans: "EV" means "electric vehicle." Those things which you believe are well-meant, but don't work, whose sales are booming worldwide, because they work really well and are rapidly improving. The way that you believe that solar and wind energy are well-meant, but that the time when they will provide electricity more cheaply than coal or natural gas or oil is some time off. And, in a way, you're right about that: that time is some time off and keep getting further away, because it is years ago. That's right: wind and solar have been cheaper than coal and gas for years, and they keep getting cheaper, and coal and gas and oil don't. That's the reason why more and more wind and solar power plants keep being made, and why more and more rooftops have solar panels on them: not because of widespread insanity, as you may have been told, but because it's a better deal. Financially. Even before you start to calculate the value of being able to continue to breathe.

To be fair, some of you Republicans are already with me, but to be real, an awful lot of you are still buying (or selling) a line of BS from big polluters.

Utilities are also not necessarily everybody's friends. They themselves are building big solar and wind plants, and in some cases are even eager to build solar generating systems on people's roofs which they, the utilities, own, not the owner of the building, all because they would rather make the profits of generating electricity by solar panels than see you make those profits by generating a lot of electricity on your roof and selling what you don't use to the grid. In the past four years they have done a very good job of taking those profits out of other people's hands.

On the other hand, off-grid solar and wind are growing fast: people who've decided they don't need the power utilities at all. The word "utility" means the quality of being of some use to someone. When electric power utilities take worse and worse advantage of their customers, they undermine their very reason for existing. A strategy which may seem unsustainable in the long term.

Those of you who are technologically-literate, regardless of political affiliation, know that the biggest current problem with EV's is batteries. And you know that also when it comes to EV batteries, there is an awful lot of disinformation out there. The importance of range, of how far an EV can go without recharging, is exaggerated. The abundance of charging options is hidden from public knowledge as much as possible. And the rate at which EV batteries degrade, lose their power, turns out to be not as great as even EV enthusiasts feared, let alone the stories that circulate in the right wing. 2004 Nissan Leafs are being sold second-hand, why, because they're a great deal, and their batteries, their original batteries, still work pretty well. 

Still, EV batteries are a problem because they're very heavy, and because they take a while to recharge. (Not as long as you might think if you get your news from right-wing sources, but...)

So it occurred to me a while ago that EV's could be recharged from satellites. That's right: besides radio and TV and Internet signals, you can also send electrical charges wirelessly over great distances. The wireless recharging technology is not very advanced right now, or it would be widely used right now, but eventually, unless some other technology I'm not thinking of beats it to the punch, the current aggravation with EV batteries will be overcome, not just by better batteries, but by satellite recharging. This means that EV's will have to carry much smaller battery packs, which in turn means that they will be much lighter, which means that they will be even peppier and more efficient than they currently are.

So that occurred to me a while ago, and I conferred with my brother, who is a mechanical engineer, and he confirmed that this has already occurred to other people and they're working on it. 

But then yesterday, while my mind was up there in space with those satellites, it also occurred to me that electricity can be generated in space -- space, where overcast skies are less of a problem than the problems which Republicans tirelessly exaggerate in their attempts to convince people that solar power will never work.

And of course, solar power has been used in outer space for a long, long time. How long? Since 1958. 

When googling this subject, I came across things which I don't yet understand at all. But people have been working on large-scale solar power generation in space since the 1970's. 

So, to summarize, renewable energy has already been a better deal than coal, gas and oil for some time, and it will continue to improve much more quickly than fossil-fuel technology. How great the benefits will be which the public reaps from the change to wind and solar, and how fast the change will happen, depends on education: education of scientists, technicians, engineers and mathematicians, but also the education of the public in general about the political and economic forces which are slowing the transition for the sake of the short-term financial interests of a few people, at the cost of everyone's health.

Solar Energy Storage

As critics of solar power have pointed out, the sun only shines during the day, so whaddya gonna do fr power in the night-time, huh, smart guy? The answer is batteries.

And Tesla is not the only company in the world that makes devices for the purpose of storing solar energy, although some people talk as if they believe that Tesla's Powerpack is the only energy storage option for home solar. You know what, a lot of them probably do believe that. But the fact is, some large companies including LG, Mercedes, Nissan, BMW, Sonnen, SimpliPhi, Sunverge, Powervault and ElectrIQ are competing with Tesla for a slice of the home solar storage market, as well as a lot of smaller companies. Tesla also makes those Giga Batteries, which utility companies use to store the electricity from their solar and wind and other generating sources, but there, too, Tesla is far from the only option.

So shop around, please.

Or, if you're a do-it-yourself sort of person, save some more money and do it yourself. Jehu Garcia, a fascinating individual, has a popular You Tube channel, where many of the videos have to do with showing do-it-yourselfer's how to make and improve their own home solar energy storage units. Some of Garcia's other videos have to do with the 2 vintage Volkswagen Buses he has converted from gasoline to electric; some others show him working with the company EV West -- here is their popular YouTube channel -- which converts all sorts of internal-combustion engines to electric. I'm not sure whether Garcia's day job is at EV West, or if he just collaborates with them from time to time, or what. In any case, Garcia made a solar energy storage unit for EV West's main building, which is a very large building.

In that EV West storage unit, and in the storage unit which Garcia makes for one-family homes, and in the portable, suitcase-sized storage units he makes, and in those VW Buses he converted to electric, and in most of the conversions EV West does -- and, for that matter, in most Teslas and most other electric vehicles -- the batteries used are the same ones used in personal computers and laptops. The very same batteries.

A house just uses more of them than a computer does. You can think of an electric vehicle as a mobile energy storage unit, or of an laptop computer as an energy storage unit that also computes.

A do-it-yourself home solar energy storage unit can use brand-new batteries, or it can use 2nd-hand batteries which have lost a bit of their capacity and are no longer appropriate for use in computers or cars. So there's an answer to the guys asking, so, whaddya gonna do with all them batteries in them electric cars when they run down? Huh? Smart guy?

The answer is, there are all sorts of things you can do with a lot of those run-down batteries, dumb guy. Actually, that's the second answer. The first answer is that the batteries last a lot longer in the cars than people thought they would.

I'm not able to keep up with all of the tech when someone explains how to put solar panels on a roof or make a solar energy storage unit -- I didn't pay attention in shop or science classes in school, and I'm old and tired, so how about you cut me some slack, eh? -- but there are a lot of people on YouTube showing the DIY (Do It Yourself) types how to do all sorts of things with solar and storage and electric vehicles, and a lot of how-to books being sold covering the same ground. There are a lot of people learning how to do these things, the same way that people have learned how to fix their own internal-combustion cars and trucks, and fix and improve their own homes. They are the very same people, in many cases, and of course in other cases, new people are coming into the DIY sector because the environmental benefits of some of these technologies are adding a new fascination to it all.

Alternative-Energy Developments in Ann Arbor

Christopher Taylor, Mayor of Ann Arbor, has announced -- well, I don't know whether he's announced a "resolve," or actual concrete plans, to put solar panels on the rooftops of all the public buildings in town. Either way, part of that project was completed four days ago, when volunteers from the University of Michigan and the Ann Arbor community helped to install rooftop solar panels on the roof of one of the stations of the Ann Arbor Fire Department.

US Representative Debbie Dingell was there, and posted about it on Facebook, and, of course, one of the right-wing trolls who are all over Michigan Democrats on Facebook immediately complained about this "waste of taxpayer money," and why didn't Dingell yada yada instead. I read a few of the replies to this troll, which of course pointed out that these solar panels will save taxpayer money by generating electricity which the taxpayers have been buying from a utility. I stopped reading the replies to the troll before I noticed any mention that Dingell had linked a story about people volunteering to install the panels, which of course saved the taxpayers even more money. And if you've read the news story I linked above, you already know that in addition to working for free, students and local residents also raised several thousand dollars toward the cost of the installation.

In the past several months I have suddenly ratcheted my interest in electric vehicles, known to us aficionados as EV's, way up. I've been paying a lot more attention to the vehicles within a mile or so of where I live, which I suppose is one of the more left-wing 2-miles circles in the US, but which is also very close to downtown Detroit, and has always had a very deeply-entrenched internal-combustion culture. I've seen quite a few Tesla Model 3's since June. How many is "quite a few"? I don't know. I'm sorry. I've seen at least one Tesla Model X. I've seen several Toyota Leaf's, several Chevrolet Bolts and several Chevrolet Volts, and some BMW i3's, and a few other EV's.

Those are all vehicles running strictly on electricity, Although the Volt also has a small gasoline engine which isn't really necessary, except, presumably, to reassure buyers who don't really know how EV's work. (They work just fine without any gasoline at all, believe it or not.)

Then there are the hybrids in Ann Arbor. The city buses are biodiesel hybrids. I have noticed a few hybrids from Ford and Honda, and one BMW i8 which looks like it wandered onto the street off of a seriously-fast racetrack. I talked to the driver, who said, yes, it was very very fast and fun to drive, but who seemed tired of talking about it, as if strangers were constantly asking him about his car, so I tried to give him a break, said thanks and broke off the conversation early. [ PS, 24 October 2019: I forgot to mention that I've seen a couple of Toyota Camry hybrids and one Hyundai Ioniq hybrid.]

And then there are the Priuses. Toyota has manufactured millions of units of the Prius since 1997 -- how many million? I don't know, and I don't know why I'm having such difficulty finding a reliable figure. And I certainly don't know why so many statistics on Wikipedia having to do with things like solar and wind energy and EV's and hybrids stop at around 2016 or 2017. That's ridiculous. It's like having statistics about computers up until 1983.

Be all of that as it may: there are about 3 million Priuses within a one mile radius of my home. I'm kidding, but there are a lot. A lot.

A few days ago I spoke to a nice lady who drives a Toyota Prius+ and does not seem at all tired of talking about it. I asked her what sort of mileage she got. She said 30 or 40 miles. At first I thought she meant 30 or 40 miles per gallon of gasoline, but no, what she meant was that she charges the car overnight in her garage, and then it goes 30 or 40 miles before the gasoline engine starts. The + in the car's name means you can plug it in. (Does her house run on solar, I wondered but didn't ask.) And, she added, the gasoline engine doesn't start very often. She rarely drives that far in a day. She said she got a full tank of gas four months ago, and still has 3/4 of a tank.

If this nice lady has driven 3000 miles in the past four months, an average of 24 miles a day for 125 days, and if her Prius has used 5 gallons of gasoline over those 3000 miles -- that's 600 miles per gallon.

A lot of the EV enthusiasts I've been hanging out with lately are obsessed with getting longer range per charge from EV's, and the range of EV's is increasing very rapidly. 5 years ago, 100 per charge was pretty good. For a brand-new EV today, in a lot people's opinions, 200 miles is pathetic. This would make sense if they were all driving across Alaska, the Yukon and British Columbia all the time, or across Mongolia, but they're not. I'm one of a vocal minority, but definitely still a minority, who think that the obsession with range is sort of getting out of hand. For longe-range vacations and business trips, charging stations are beginning to sprout everywhere like gas stations, and they're not stopping. The EV revolution is underway.

For these EV enthusiasts, among whom it is usual to want more, more, MORE RANGE!!!!! it is also usual to be very frustrated at the continued success of the Prius, when there are completely gasoline-free EV's are available. I wonder how many Prius+ owners get 600 miles to the gallon, and I wonder how much the EV enthusiasts know about real-world Prius gas consumption.

Also on the topic of opinions and awareness: it seems that the general public don't realize how fast EV's are. A new Tesla is faster from 0-60 than any internal-combustion car which costs less than a million dollars or so. But also very sedate-looking EV's like the Chevy Bolt

accelerate more quickly than just about any ICEV's (as we call internal-combustion-engine vehicles) which can be had for less than six figures. Priuses are slow, as people tend to know by now because there are 35 million of them (I'm exaggerating, but I don't know by how much), but EV's are an entirely different thing. They tend to be ridiculously quick, which is among the reasons to stop obsessively loading them with such large battery packs, which give them the lusted-after long range per change, and make them ridiculously quick, and also very heavy, and also more expensive than they really need to be.

Still, ridiculously fast, overweight and all, a new EV doesn't necessarily have to be very expensive any more. Especially not after a big fat Federal rebate, and possibly state and local rebates as well. It's like with solar energy: people need to resort to more and more ridiculous arguments in order to put EV's down.