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.

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"?

Growth of EV Sales

Worldwide, about 6.75 EV's were sold in 2021, which was more than twice the 2020 total of 3.3 million, which itself was a 60% increase over 2019's total of 2 million. In the first quarter of 2022, 2 million units were sold, almost twice the 1.1 million sold in Q1 2021. 

 

No one knows how quickly EV sales will increase in the future, and no one I've seen is predicting that sales will continue to double every year -- but just for fun, just for the moment, let's pretend they will. Double 2022's global total of 6.75 million would be 13.5 million in 2023, 27 million in 2024, 54 million in 2025, 108 million in 2026 and hold it, hold it, because as far as I know, there have never been as many as 108 million motor vehicles sold in any calendar year. If I've got it right, the worldwide record so far was under 80 million, in 2017, and few if any people are predicting as many as 108 by 2026.

I'm sure that a lot of you, including many hardcore EV advocates, are yelling at your screens about now, saying that I'm an idiot and that 100% growth of EV sales every year is impossible. 

Yes, I'm an idiot, you've got no argument from me there. Where we disagree is in the use of this term "impossible." I've long believed that it's an overused term, and that many more things are possible than most of us tend to think most of the time.

The growth of the EV sector over the past couple of years has happened in spite of COVID, in spite of supply chain issues -- and in spite of very, very few EV's having been sold outside of China, Europe and North America. Lots of vehicles were sold in Central and South America, Africa, India. Very, very few EV's. 

About 90% of recent EV sales have been in China and Europe. Why? It's very simple: because laws in China and Europe said that higher percentages of vehicles had to be EV's. Because people decided that EV sales were going to grow.

What's the biggest obstacle to the growth of solar and wind power to run all these EV's, real present-day one plus the imaginary future ones? It's the legal situation again, with the fossil fuel industry and so-called "utilities" hindering the growth of solar and wind, and thus the death of fossil fuels. 

From one perspective it all seems very complicated, and it's true that there are a lot of moving parts here, and that EV sales are just a part of it: exposing the ties between fossil fuels and government, building up solar and wind, smartening up the grid, improving public transportation, encouraging people to walk more and eat less meat, afforestation, re-forestation, rebuilding wetlands, etc etc. Yes, you could say that it's complicated.

From another perspective, though, it's as simple as anything could ever be: do we want to save our own lives? How much do we want it? Do we want it bad enough, or not?

I'm not going to save the world all by myself, one isolated autistic weirdo with a silly blog. How many people are working on these things, how many will join them? People with the brains to make better batteries and smarter grids? People with power, people in positions to pass laws that get more EV's and less ICE vehicles built, laws that speed the growth of solar and wind and kill off fossil fuels, laws which improve education so that everyone is better equipped to improve all of these things? People with the patience and eloquence and intelligence to explain, better than I can, why all of these things are necessary and how important they are?

Alernat/ive Histories and Energy

I think about alternate histories. For example, an alternative history where Archduke Franz Ferdinand  avoids assassination, thus avoiding World War I and unlocking greater powers of science. I've done this one before on this blog, but let me go deeper this time. 

In my alternate reality, people all over the world, astonished by the spectacle of Franz Ferdinand and Gavrilo Princip talking to and learning from one another, drop all sorts of opposition: ethnicity against ethnicity, prince against peasant, boss against worker. In place of fear and hatred come fascination, knowledge, hope.

In our "reality," electric vehicles first appeared in the 1830's, and were quite viable by the turn of the century, but by 1914 they were being overtaken by the gasoline-powered stinkers we're familiar with. But in this alternate reality, where Franz Ferdinand lives and saves the life of his would be assassin Gavrilo Princip, scientists not only successfully discourage any dangerous accumulations of radioactive materials, but also are successful in arguing the merits of electric vehicles. Coal, oil and gas stay in the ground alongside uranium. Inner cities only very briefly go from the stink of horse poop to the stink of gasoline, before relatively odorless electrical motors and batteries take over.

In "reality," photovoltaic cells were invented in the 19th century. In my alternative timeline, with the petrochemical lobby strangled in its crib by those very same helpful scientists, solar generation of electricity is mankind's primary source of power by 1920, followed by wind, tidal and geothermal. Burning stuff on a large scale now seems somewhat remote, like living in caves.

Is there a point to such enjoyable mental games? I think so. I think they show us how much power we have to stop destroying ourselves.  We could've done it in 1914, we can do it now. The biggest obstacles to the adoption of solar and wind and other clean sources aren't technological, they're various forms of human stupidity. They're the lobbies of oil, coal and gas, buying laws which stand in the way of the spread of better ways of doing things. It's the attitude that says we have to put up with people like Elon Musk in order to transition to clean energy. It's the acceptance of limitations in general. The primary obstacle to progress in between people's ears.

Dream Log: Economic Mediocrity in Manhattan

I dreamed I was in a department store in Manhattan when my G-Shock alerted me that a package had been fired at the store like a bullet from far away, and was about to fly through an open window. Quickly I grabbed a drone from a shelf, took it out of its package, assembled it, and got it into the air where if deflected the package, knocking it to the ground and avoiding injury or collision with other goods.

A store manager saw this, assumed that I was already an employee, and set me to work deflecting more packages which flew in through the store's one open window.

I quit this job and got a delivery job, delivering bags of candy from a storefront. However, I felt sure that the commissions for these deliveries must be very low, so when I saw a bunch of people going onto an office to start a day's work on another delivery job, and they said they were always hiring, I tagged along. 

In this job, every single package delivered by anybody contained one Three Musketeers candy bar. We were each given a bag of packages and a list of addresses and sent out. 

I found myself walking in Upper Manhattan looking for 176th St. Other delivery people from the same company, each with a bag of Three Musketeers, were walking along beside me. The streets were filled with a mixture of sea salt left by evaporation from the nearby Atlantic, and toxic waste. There were no sidewalks in this region of warehouses. We dodged speeding semi trucks. The salty poison piled high in the streets was beginning to melt the rubber in the soles of our sneakers. We were afraid it would burn right through our shoes and burn our feet. 

We managed to get out of that area uninjured. But I still hadn't found a single address. I was beginning to wonder what kind of commission I could possibly expect from such a job. I had neglected to ask how much I was going to be paid. 

The boss of my previous job, where I had been delivering bags of candy, and where I had also not asked about the pay, spotted me walking along and yelled at me angrily for disappearing. However, he also made it clear that I was not fired. He was a big burly guy with black handlebar moustaches.

Then things became much more abstract. For example, I was holding a tennis ball inside a steel protective case. Then, I was inside a beauty shop, and a women held my head between her hands as she murmured incantations which I didn't understand. Then, I was in Wisconsin for just a moment. I don't know how I knew it was Wisconsin. It was a rural area, autumn, and the trees were full of firy-bright red and orange and yellow leaves. Very few leaves had fallen yet from the trees. Then I was back in the department store were the dream began, and the store manager was yelling at me for pretending to be an employee. Then I was sitting on the ground in African grasslands among some lions, and I wasn't afraid of them and they weren't afraid of me. Then I was back in NYC, on the sidewalk, with some people I've only met on Facebook. Then I was playing basketball in what appeared to a comfortably-old NYC YMCA or school gym. Then I was testifying before a legislative body in favor of massive expansion of public funding for rooftop-solar, and also in favor of 100% net metering. Then I woke up.

Update on Green Energy

Around 2.6 million EV's were sold in the first half of 2021. For some perspective on this, the total number of EV's on the road in the world passed 2.6 million during 2016. At the end of 2019 there were about 7.5 million. That number has probably doubled since then. It's possible that the total sales for 2021 alone will exceed 7.5, although most predictions are closer to 6 million.

 

So, yes, graphs of EV's sales currently show a line going almost straight up. The numbers in the US are much smaller than in Europe and China -- approximately 350,000 in 2020 in the US and around 1.5 each in Europe and China -- but in all 3 regions, 2021 are expected to double the figures from 2020. 

Why are more EV's being sold in Europe and China than in the US? The answer is: the Republican Party and gas, coal and oil companies. There's no big mystery or debate about this: the numbers since 1990 speed up when Democrats are in charge and slow down when Republicans are in power. And the same, unsurprisingly, is true of solar and wind power: the US lead the world, by a large margin, several decades ago, and since then, the GOP, bought and paid for by Big Oil and Coal and Gas, have slowed down progress just as much as they can. The GOP, plus a few Democrats in places like West Virginia and Oklahoma.

Globally, however, there has been a lot a progress. Vote Democratic and help the US join in on this good stuff. 

Other regions which have been held back by the fossil fuel industry include Brasil and Australia.

Globally, we can see a lot of improvement, and a lot of room for improvement. The human race might just survive its habit of burning stuff. Wouldn't that be something.

Dream Log: A Piece of Urban Real Estate, Status Uncertain

I dreamed that I and a few other poor people were living in abandoned cars parked on a rectangular patch which was about fifty yards wide and jutted out about twenty yards, like a cliff, from the middle of the downtown of a city with many tall buildings. One of the fifty-yard-long sides of the area was level with the developed city around it; off of the other three sides, there was a fifty-foot drop to another relatively-flat area covered with limited-access roads.

At the beginning of the dream there were three abandoned vehicles on this patch of ground, and five of us living in them. But more people kept moving in, some bringing vehicles or tents with them.

It was entirely unclear how much the ground we were living on was man-made and built up from the lower level, and how much had been there, with the upper level of ground, before humans built anything there. The mix of concrete and earth, and of jumbles of pipes and trees sticking out from the concrete and earth, made it very hard to tell which was more primary, and which had been added on.

At some point it started to seem to me like a good idea to encourage the homeless people who were passing through to stay and to build up actual homes here, and to invite other people to do the same. There was a vague feeling that developers were going to come and claim the -- the land? the building? whatever it was -- and have us all kicked out. They hadn't tried to do that so far, but it seemed to me that the more of us there were, and the more we had done to make the place a real home, the harder it would be to remove us, when and if someone tried.

Someone donated some solar panels and batteries to us, and soon that led to our having electrical heat on cold nights, and cold for storing food, and heat for cooking it without having to build a campfire. Some lawyers started working building a case for our right to stay, when and if someone challenged that right. We started to hold free classes on engineering, architecture and law, and used what we learned in those classes to strengthen our hold on the area, physically and legally.

Television news crews stopped in now and then to film and to talk to us. Republicans sometimes yelled and threw rocks or beer cans at us out of the windows of their trucks as they drove past on the street adjacent to and level with us. Democrats walked past and were much friendlier. Often they waved and flashed peace signs or held up clenched fists. Sometimes they stopped to talk.

No one was charged any money to stay there as long as they wanted, or to eat some of our food, or to take something else if they needed or wanted it: clothes, or books, or a phone, or what have you. It got to the point where the thing which most frequently made people want to move on was overcrowding. Ordinarily, I'm one of the first to feel crowded. But in this place, my fascination with everything that was going on outweighed my discomfort over the crowding.

A lot of what was going on was high-level education. It had started out with engineering, architecture, law and medicine, for purposes of the self-preservation of the community, and although classes quickly branched out into many other subjects, those four areas remained prominent among the things we taught. It had started out with people coming and helping us, but soon we were going out into the city to help people install solar power or repair their dwellings, or to represent them in court, or to check on their physical health, or to volunteer in other ways.

One area of the law in which we soon became well-known was advocating in favor of the legalization of marijuana. Some of the people who lived with us began to complain about the pot smoke, and so we agreed to smoke pot only in one designated area, which was designed to ventilate and blow the smoke away from the rest of the community, puffing merrily out through a smokestack and carried by the prevailing winds safely away from those who chose not to partake. If you wanted to get high, and you went to the designated smoking area, at some times it wasn't necessary to puff on anything, because enough people were in there going to town on bongs and joints, and the smoke was so thick, that if you just stood or sat there for a few minutes, you'd definitely get high.

Vegans were very prominent in our community. Some of them, unfortunately, were intolerant in their rhetoric about non-vegans. It was very tiresome. On the other hand, they made vegan food which, everyone agreed, was amazingly delicious.

I had begun there as a homeless person who'd crawled into an abandoned car to try to keep from freezing to death. But soon -- despite the overcrowding, which was definitely an issue for me -- it became the best home I had ever had.

And then I woke up.

All Solar All The Time

I have an unusual relationship with the sun. I don't like bright sunlight. This has to do with my autism. Even with me avoiding bright sunshine as much as I can, I still get very tan very quickly. Maybe this is a sign that my body doesn't NEED as much sun as the average body does.

So, I stay out of the sun, and find it unpleasant when I have to be outside on a sunny day -- pretty much the exact opposite of most people. It has been this way my entire life.

But lately a new element has been added: my enthusiasm for solar energy. This enthusiasm, much like the solar-power industry, has just kept rapidly growing and growing over the past few years. But despite the steady growth in solar power, I've been getting steadily more and more frustrated because it isn't growing faster. I see the bright sunlight falling down all around (usually looking out from inside through a window), and all I can think of is how that tremendous amount of energy is being wasted every second, because there aren't solar panels everywhere. You know how in movies sometimes there's a character who knows something very important, and he goes around yelling about it, but nobody understands this very important thing, and so everybody thinks he's crazy? I haven't gotten to the point yet where I go around screaming about solar power all the time. But I've gotten to the point where I can very easily picture myself doing it: "Put the solar panels everywhere! Smash the power of the private utilities! We don't need coal! We don't need it! Aaaarrrghh!"

Except that more and more people would understand exactly what I was talking about, and fewer and fewer would think I was crazy.

Maybe I should do it: just start flipping out and screaming about it in public. Maybe if I do, lots of others will join me.

This is a global issue, as you may have heard, but it's been much easier for me to find statistics on US solar power than on global solar power.

And even the US statistics aren't always entirely clear. For example, I've read that 1.3 million rooftops in the US have solar panels, including nearly 400,000 installations in 2016 alone. But are those all residential rooftops, or does that include the rooftops of factories and warehouses and office buildings and restaurants and malls and gas stations and other buildings? And among residential rooftops, how do the logistics of solar for single-family houses compare to those of solar for apartment buildings of various sizes? Not to mention the logistics for non-residential buildings?

There are lots and lots of figures and stats involved here, and in case it isn't already completely obvious: I'm not up to speed yet on all of them. I apologize for being lazy about that even though I understand how important it is to give you the best information I can.

One figure that you see very often is that between 40% and 50% of America's electricity could be generated by solar. Frankly, I don't trust that figure, because I think they're not counting all of the places where solar panels could be put. I know, I know, it's not cost-efficient to put solar panels everywhere, or to completely cover every roof with PV (photovoltaic, light-to-electricity) panels. But let's put 'em everywhere anyway. Let's over-do it.

Plus, the technology is making the PV panels more efficient, and all of the other related technology more effective, such as batteries which keep more power longer. So I think we can go way past 50% of our electricity from solar.

And then there's still wind and geothermal and tidal and so forth.

Also: a lot of the projections about the future of solar power (and other renewable sources of energy) have to do with energy utility policy: utilities could decide to screw people over and minimize the benefits of renewables, legislatures could continue to give big incentives to oil and gas, etc.

In short: politics will have a lot to do with it.

Which means that we the people can grab this issue and make it ours. We can take over all the utilities, and vote for people who will run them for the greatest possible benefit to health and sanity, and pass laws which are friendly to methods of generating power which are friendly to living things. We can do that. In the US, that means: vote Democratic, and in the primaries, vote for the Democrats who're most progressive on energy. Don't throw your votes away by voting Green, because this is much too important. This post attempts to explain to American Green Party voters how it is that they are throwing their votes away while Green Party voters in other countries are not, and what changes we need to make to the US Constitution so that we can vote Green here too without throwing our votes away. The idea of doing away with the Electoral College has gotten very popular, and we should do that. But in addition to that, we can make a lot of other huge improvements in the way our government functions.

I'm Having A Nice Day

This is my Seiko 5:

There are many others like it, but this one is mine. This is what it looks like today. Some of you may sense that there is some difference from the previous photo of it which I shared:

(Let me know if I'm moving too fast for you.)

One thing that's nice about today is that several different people volunteered to help me with my watch, and between all of us, it now has a strap long enough to fit comfortably all the way around my wrist. Another nice thing is that I know I can make each of those people smile just by showing them the Seiko 5 on my wrist the next time I see them.

A lot of people are really nice. They're not trying to defraud or deport or assault anyone. And I know some nice ones. Maybe all together we can instigate some progress.

Look, riddle me this: just who TF exactly do Putin and Trump think they're going to sell all that oil to? Solar and wind just keep getting bigger and bigger in the US. And some countries are doing it a lot faster than us. Like the Netherlands, where sales of non-electric vehicles will be banned after 2025. Like China, that's right I said China, whose Longyangxia Dam Solar Park is big enough to be very easily seen from outer space. China invested $103 billion in renewable energy in 2015, they're going to invest over $300 billion between 2017 and 2020, I don't know how much they invested in 2016 but I bet it was a lot, they're now the world's biggest producer of solar energy. You get the feeling maybe they don't want any of Vladimir and Donald's oil? Remember when opponents of renewables said, "Hey, China isn't doing it!"? That was then. You get the feeling the renewables sector is accelerating more quickly than a lot of people thought, although not as quickly as you personally would like? Me too.

Remember how I told you all how I compose terrible music in my sleep? I'm working on a song right now which I actually like. The chorus is: "Oh Amanda, I'm your panda/Oh Amanda, I'm your panda." The verses go into more detail about the ways in which I am Amanda's panda. I don't really know a woman named Amanda. I'm just using the name "Amanda" because it rhymes with "panda." And I'm using the word "panda" because I'm big and cuddly.

Trump And Alternative Energy

Bloomberg News, Nov 9, 2016: "Trump's Win 'A Disaster' for Plunging Renewable Energy Sector"

Bloomberg News, Nov 23, 2016: "Economics to Keep Wind and Solar Energy Thriving With Trump"

More headlines seem to agree with the second headline than with the first. A third headline, from fiverthirtyeight.com on Nov 14, seems to cover the prevailing opinion pretty well: "It's Hard To Tell Whether Trump Supports Renewable Energy — And That May not Matter Much"

It may not matter much, because wind and solar and other green energy options may very soon be so much more attractive economically than oil and coal that Trump and the petrochemical sector won't be able to kill them. The technology just keeps getting more efficient and cheaper. The tech geniuses just keep thinking stuff up, as Bruce Willis put it in Armageddon. Transparent solar panels, which can cover the entire exterior of a building because they double as windows. Rotating solar panels.

When I said "more attractive economically" above, I was referring to conventional economics, and to the kind of investor whose biggest hero is Adam Smith. Conventional economics or paleoeconomic theory, exemplified by Trump and Big Oil, create a theoretical model of the entire world in which things such as the environment are treated as "externals," as secondary factors, not to be treated as the primary things under consideration when investing. Of course, this is completely insane: conventional economics is an arbitrary way of doing things which functions only because enough people have agreed to do things that way. It can be completely scrapped and replaced by a totally different economic model whenever people agree to do so, and such a change will not harm the atmosphere or the oceans one bit. On the other hand, if the oceans die or the atmosphere becomes too polluted or temperatures rise too much, all of the people will die, and every form of economics on Earth will die with them. Conventional economic theory regards buying and selling and currencies and loans and interest and so forth as essential things, and environment and health as secondary. The plain and obvious truth is that conventional economics has this completely backwards.

It's dawning on more and more people that conventional economics has this completely backwards. Nevertheless, it continues to function in terms of rewarding those who follow its rules with greater accumulations of money than those who don't. It's either dawned on Democrats much more often than on Republicans, or Republicans pretend that it hasn't dawned on them because they're making money with that pretense. "We are what we pretend to be," as Kurt Vonnegut pointed out.

The ironic thing is that solar and wind energy and other clean energies are beginning to win, not because of their ecological benefit, but because of their appeal to those who continue to follow conventional economics and to treat the environment as if it were secondary to buying and selling and loaning and interest rates and wages and so forth. These clean energies are rapidly growing in appeal to those who seem to believe that conventional economics consists of laws of nature rather than completely arbitrary agreements between people, agreements which can be, and are, modified, re-invented or scrapped whenever people agree to do so. Green energy is growing in appeal to those appeal because it's making money and not because of anything to do with the environment or with the health of living things.

Presumably, if clean energies grow by several hundred percent in the next few years, resulting in petrochemical shrinking to a small fraction of the market share they now enjoy, Trump will take credit for the bluer skies and gentler weather and our greater ability to see the stars at night, and claim it was all his idea right from the start, whether he's still president or whether he was impeached and removed from office early in 2017.

Nevada Will Keep Net Metering For Solar At Least Until The End Of 2015

Regulators in Nevada today decided to keep net metering for utilities customers with solar panels on their homes, at least until the end of 2015.

Net metering is what it's called when utilities customers with home solar generate excess electricity from their solar panels, and sell the excess to the utility at the same rate at which people buy electricity from the utility. Over 40 of the 50 states in the US follow the net metering model. Recently one of Arizona's utilities rescinded its net metering policy. Michigan's state Senate is currently considering a bill which would overturn the state's net metering policy.

It appears that privately-owned utilities' attitude toward free enterprise is like that of most big corporations: they're for it as long as it includes monopolies and big government subsidies for them, and regulations against anyone trying to compete with them. Regulations against net metering -- even attempts at such regulations -- are one more argument for publicly owned and operated utilities. Search Google News and other information sources for net metering. It should make you angry at privately-owned utilities. Find out political candidates' stances on net metering. As I mention frequently on this blog, many politicians in the US, mostly Republicans, are owned and operated by the petrochemical industry. Petrochemical companies are still the biggest source of energy for utilities, and they want to stay that way, and they don't play fair or take climate or people's health into account.

Only Republicans Can See The Problems With Solar Energy, The Rest Of Us Are Blind To Them

In my last post I mentioned Forbes sadly telling its readers that this solar craze is based on bad math and gummit handouts. Since then, researching the topic, the only additional naysayers I've found are the Wall Street Journal, Howard C Hayden, author of The Solar Fraud: Why Solar Energy Won't Run the World, and the Heartland Institute, a wonderful buncha guys who, like Hayden, whom they love, say that humans aren't affecting the climate, and have advocated for Big Tobacco and fracking. Recently they've decided they're not going to disclose their sources of funding anymore, and they disrupted the Pope's Council on Climate Change... they're just a bunch of peaches, I tell ya!

Only Republicans can see what a huge disaster and waste solar energy is. Everyone else, each and every one of us, has been duped. And I don't believe that the Amazon customer reviewers who gave Hayden's book 5-stars even though they're hard-core environmentalists who've worked in the solar-energy industry for 40 years -- are actually hard-core environmentalists who've worked in the solar-energy industry for 40 years. Cry wolf often enough and people can start to tell that you're lying sacks of crap.

The bullshit they make up: that electric cars, sadly, aren't actually environmentally friendly because the lithium-ion batteries cause... some sort of huge ecological disaster. Ask a Republican about it. (No-one else has has heard of this problem, because we're all blind, blind, yaaaarggghh!) That smoking hasn't ever made anybody sick. And second-hand smoke much, much less than that! That electric windmills are killing vast quantities of birds who apparently think the windmills are their mothers. (Or something. Again, you'll have to ask a Republican. They're the only ones alert to this environmental danger.) That fracking is safe, that natural gas is clean and that nuclear power is ultra-safe. (I don't know how Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima don't directly contradict that last point, but that's okay: just ask a Republican!)

That solar energy will either make a pitifully tiny amount of electricity, or so much electricity that it will overload and blow up all the grids -- cause, it's not as if an electrical generator could ever be turned off, or anything like that.

Republicans were glad when Angela Merkel of the conservative CDU became Chancellor of Germany in 2005. But I bet that since 2005 meetings between Merkel and Republicans have occasionally been tense, because Merkel has spearheaded a massive increase of government-subsidized solar energy in Germany, which now has more overall installed photovoltaic capacity than any other country on Earth and generates more than 30% of all of its electricity from renewable sources. Somehow those well-meaning, abysmally-ignorant environmentalists got to Merkel. It's only a matter of time now before Germany explodes. (Or something. Once again, you're going to have to ask a Republican, because the horrible dangers inherent in these developments in Germany are way over everybody else's heads.)

$1 Per Watt And Other Things I Don't Understand

I don't know squat about the logistics and prices of energy. I've got to study up on this stuff. Like when people talking about solar panels costing $1 per watt -- do they mean $1 gets you 1 watt all year round? And wouldn't the wattage completely depend on how sunny it is where the panel is installed? And how many watts does an average home run on? Good question. And how much does gas or electric from a utility cost per watt?

Another thing I don't know is who's telling the truth about such things and who's lying and who thinks they're telling the truth but is wrong. What I've heard is things like: people are getting solar panels on the roofs of their houses and it's costing them

NOTHING

because they pay no money down, and their savings on electricity are more than the monthly payments on the installation. And of course, once those payments are all made -- this is what I'm hearing -- people are left paying nothing to their utilities, and selling their left-over electricity to the utilities for over $200 a month.

I don't know what to believe. I mean, I'm sure that some people who get an exceptional amount on sunlight on their panels and are exceptionally frugal in their electrical usage are making money by having solar panels on the roofs of their homes. What I don't know is how many people could be in that position right now. What seems fairly clear is that the prices of solar panels, installation and maintenance are plummeting, while the efficiency of photovoltaic systems -- the amount of wattage generated by a square whatever of solar panel in a given climate -- is soaring, so that the number of people who can cover all their power needs and then some with solar is going to soar.

Another thing seems pretty clear: everybody who says that the current enthusiasm about solar energy is based on faulty arithmetic, and that it's not a great deal which is getting much better, and that costs aren't plummeting and efficiancy isn't soaring -- is a Republican.

But it seems that not even all Republicans are still down on solar. Republicans tend to like money, and when economics tends to contradict what is said inside of one's socio-political bubble, one often starts to say: screw the bubble on this point, my friends and colleagues, I'm taking the money! Last I heard, Rush Limbaugh still has not come to Jesus about solar. Forbes magazine may be down on it too, but it seems that their readers aren't necessarily. I did a Google search for solar energy cost, and I found exactly one hit which was downbeat about it, by a columnist who writes about energy for Forbes. It was published about a year ago, and the guy said he didn't think that solar energy costs were going to continue to plummet. But almost all of the readers' comments completely disagreed with the guy and refuted him point for point, and Forbes' readership is not mostly hippies and Goths. And even for someone like me who started researching energy logistics about 5 minutes ago and hasn't gotten very far into it yet, some of his points seemed very easy to refute. Like: the columnist mentioned an American solar energy company and a Chinese solar energy company, both of which failed despite big government subsidies. What I didn't need anybody to point out to me was: he didn't mention any other solar energy companies in the entire column. If you can tell me about two restaurants which went out of business shortly after opening, you haven't proven to me that the entire idea of the restaurant industry is economically unsound, Duh!

And anyway, a year later and so far the guy seems entirely wrong: in the last year solar energy costs have continued to plummet. Oh, it looks like Forbes has come at least partway to Jesus about solar since the summer of 2014, to judge by more recent headlines.

Some of this stuff seems like no-brainer territory. Some of the long term economic effects of solar energy seem somewhat more complicated. For example: if every building with solar panels on its roof will eventually produce more electricity than it uses, even after tanking up all the electric cars in the garage, then at a certain point the owners of those buildings will stop making money selling the surplus electricity, because if everybody has surplus electricity then there will be literally no-one to sell it to, Duh. At what point will solar energy start to cause the price of electricity to plummet -- when there are solar panels on 10% of the world's buildings? 20%? When will electrical utilities start to shrink? At what point will there simply be too much practically-free electricity in the world, so that everybody will just have to shut off their generators part of time cause there's nothing to do with all that juice?

And we haven't even started to talk about wind, geothermal, etc.

Wave goodbye to Hydrocarbon Man, everybody! Goodbye, Hydrocarbon Man!

Even If You Hate The Planet, You Might Want To Go Solar Just To Save Money

Google's Project Sunroof uses Google Maps information to measure the size of a house's roof and the amount of sunlight it receive yearly to calculate the annual value of the electricity which solar panels of that roof would provide. And they can also connect you with local businesses who install solar panels. Right now Project Sunroof is brand-new and it only covers the San Francisco area, Fresno and Boston, but Google has plans to expand its coverage. Here is an article on Project Sunroof from Wired, and here is one from TNW News.

Here is a great article from the Nation which goes into some depth about the economics and politics of oil, coal, gas, wind, solar and other sources of energy. A key sentence from that article:

"Solar and wind are technologies and not fuels, and as such they typically become cheaper with scale and time."

Think about computers and smart phones: the materials used to make them, including various metals, have become more expensive over the past 30 years. But what's happened to the prices of computers made of those materials? That's right. Oil, coal and gas are materials, like those metals and other materials, are only going to continue to get more expensive. Solar and wind energy are technologies. Wake up and smell the 21st century. If we can stop oil companies from continuing to sabotage alternative energies and misinform the public about them, the 21st century just might smell a lot better than the 20th.

Nonsense Used To Disparage Alternative Energy

Remember the claims that the manufacture of lithium-ion batteries used in hybrid and electric cars would generate much more pollution than would be averted by lower vehicle emissions? Or that Wind-electric turbines were killing massive amounts of birds, or that solar panels were killing turtles?

You don't? I suppose more of you might remember those claims if there had ever been anything to them.

How about this: people going with remarkable speed from claiming that wind and solar would never generate enough electricity to be significant, to claiming that they will generate too much electricity and overload the grids, leading to catastrophe?

I'm no engineer, but I can easily imagine a grid which would automatically switch off a source of electricity if and when it produced too much electricity.

Unfortunately, it's more difficult for me to imagine an end to sheer oil-industry-funded nonsense used against the spread of green energy.

We Can Cut Down On Petrochemical Consumption Right Now

Did I hear that correctly on Chris Hayes' show last week -- you can get solar panels installed on your house for free and pay for them later out of the money you make selling surplus electricity back to the grid? Maybe I didn't hear that correctly, or maybe I did, and it was a bit of solar-energy-industry hype which doesn't apply to every potential home-solar customer. Much of Hayes' segment on solar consisted of businessmen saying this and that and Chris reacting: Really? Wow! without seeming to have done a lot of fact checking before putting it all on the air.

However, it does seem that if it's not true for every house right now, it will be pretty soon.

Hayes pointed out that utilities don't like this. One more reason for utilities to be publicly-owned and like what's good for the public. I did hear someone say -- again, this didn't seem to have been fact-checked -- that utilities had brought brought something like 40 lawsuits against people who dared to try to free themselves from them, and had won in only 2 cases. 2 cases in Oklahoma, where people with solar panels on their houses must pay a tax. (Environmentalists in Oklahoma, stay strong! It MEANS something to be an environmentalist there! Alaska too!)

[PS, 30. May 2016: I heard correctly. And the information is accurate in most of the 50 states. In some states the legislatures and utilities have combined to screw you out of such possibilities -- for the present time. For the love of Clarence Darrow, educate yourself about what's going on around you and vote in state and local elections!]

Alfred Doeblin's novel Berlin Alexanderplatz was published in 1929. Had I remembered correctly, were the passenger trains electric in Berlin in 1929? I had: on the 1st page of the 1st chapter, it reads: "Er ließ Elektrische auf Elektrische vorbeifahren[...]" ("He let electric after electric go by[...]") They called them "electrics," maybe because electric trains were still a novelty in 1929? Maybe not: London's Tube had electric trains in 1890, the Paris Métro had them in 1900, Cleveland and Denver in the 1880's. So why are some trains in the US, not just in the Punjab and Mexico, but also in the "Home of the Brave," still burning diesel oil in the year Two Thousand And For Crying Out Loud?

Actually, I think most of those trains are mostly diesel-electric hybrids by now. Big new ships are hybrids too.

You may've heard about that solar-powered plane circling the Earth recently. Did you know that there's still no passenger train service to or from Columbus or Phoenix? In Europe the trains stop at just about single little town -- and they're not hybrids, they're all-electric. And there are well-tended bicycle paths all over the place, riding a bike doesn't equal dodging cars and trucks.

I'm trying to make you angry. Angry at oil companies. BP. Exxon. Gazprom, which is basically just another name for Boris Putin. Angry at the politicians, mostly Republicans in the US, who keep the companies alive and their owners rich from continuing to endanger human life. Vote the bums out! Let's get those solar panels up. Help me and Chris Hayes shine more light on things like those Oklahoma utilities taxing people for daring to put solar panels on the roofs of their homes. Ask who killed the electric car in the 1990's and who's slowing it down today, and why you can't ride a train cross-country to Columbus or Phoenix, and why Amtrak isn't all-electric with all of its electricity coming from wind or solar, and why in most places in the US you can't walk or ride a bike separately from the motorized traffic, and other questions like that, and keep on asking and asking until you get something resembling intelligent answers. What do you say, how about if we attempt to stand up for ourselves and keep some anti-social billionaire creeps from wiping out the human species?

Solar Settlement

The more I find out about sustainable energy, the more I wonder why it hasn't already become the dominant model, and the harder it is for me to believe that the petrochemical industry isn't actively blocking the flow of information. Which makes me officially a crazy conspiracy theorist, according to some people. Who no doubt work for the petrochemical industry, probably through lobbyists and shell companies and whatnot.

On the one hand we've got God damn fracking going on all over the world. On the other hand there are things like Solar Settlement, a housing development of 59 homes built in Freiburg, Germany, between 2000 and 2005, all fully occupied since then, selling an average of $5600 worth of electricity per home per year to the grid since then.



But of course this is in the extremely sunny location of Freiburg. You couldn't expect to re-produce such results elsewhere. Of course I'm joking, Freiburg is in freakin Germany and it gets an average of less than 5 hours of sunlight year-round. Imagine a setup like this in Phoenix.

This development was finished 10 years ago. What exactly is the hold-up? Why aren't newer and improved versions of this everywhere, why doesn't the world already have much more electricity than it knows what to do with after having shut down every single coal-, oil- and gas-burning and nuclear power plant in the world? What exactly are we waiting for? If the very fact that big oil is still big doesn't make you angry -- what's wrong with you?

The End Is Near, Certainly, But It's Not Here Yet

The end I'm talking about is not the judgement of a wrathful God visited upon a sinful humanity, but the end of the human species brought about by climate change and other effects of human pollution. It's interesting to me how much some green-minded people proclaiming this coming apocalypse sound like the more traditional Christians warning of the more traditional imminent doom. In both cases there's often a misanthropic satisfaction at the thought of a misbehaving humanity finally getting what it deserves.

Well, I'm an animal lover, and I think of us humans as animals, and I'm not rubbing my hands gleefully at the prospect of our doom. I'd rather try to avert that doom. Besides the occasional misanthropy, green apocalypticism also often shares with the older Christian variety a sense of the inevitable. ("It's much too late to save ourselves now, the trends toward catastrophe are irreversible.") This seems to me to irrationally ignore two huge factors in future climate conditions, both unknowns: how much human behavior will change, and how much green technology will improve. Green predictions that The End Is Near tend to assume a certain amount of continuation of current behaviors. I, on the other hand, see possibilities for huge rapid changes in human behavior as 1) people become more educated about climate science; 2) people notice that the Right's talking points about green energy have been lies: this stuff does work. They've been doing their best to get you to focus on this one wind-energy company, over here, which failed as a start-up, but eventually you're going to notice all the other green start-ups that are working. You may even notice the right-wingers who have noticed this and invested in green energy, presumably for the money and not for nobler reasons. A possible 3) could be a great dying-off of the Right. It's true that many of them have many children, but don't forget that children by no means always follow in their parents' political footsteps. Tipping points occur not only in the climate, but in human behavior as well, and in the history of human civilization such changes have not usually been forseen. They have tended to be surprising.

The sudden proliferation of wind farms and solar energy plants in the TV commercials of oil companies should make you stop and think. It certainly shouldn't make you suddenly have a warm and trusting feeling toward the oil companies, which is no doubt what they're going for, nor should it fool you into thinking that they're suddenly going green. It should demonstrate to you that even oil companies are starting to give up on trying to make green energy look ridiculous and impractical, and that should give you some idea of how drastically and suddenly the hardcore anti-green-energy demographic has shrunk.