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.

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"?

EV's By Themselves Will Not Save the World. But They Are an Improvement. Here are Some More Things We Can Do

I saw a story linked on Reddit, whose author had figured out that Tesla is bad, and concluded that EV's are bad. I commented that I hope this sort of simplemindedness wasn't widespread, and I hope people will actually judge EV manufacturers individually. 

 

I got some severe pushback for that remark, with people saying that EV's aren't going to save the planet by themselves, and that it would be better if people didn't drive at all. 

Well, I didn't say that EV's would save us all by themselves. And I agree that it would be better if people drove less. 

But I don't see a feasible way to get people to give up privately-owned cars and private trucks altogether. But driving less would be good, and it would be better if people drove EV's rather than ICE. 

And replacing ICE with electricity in public transportation, and in cargo railroad trains, and in ships and aircraft, wood be good.

And solar, and wind, and geothermal power, and tidal. And smarter grids, and smarter agriculture, and smarter manufacturing, and smarter architecture.

And reforestation, and afforestation. 

And restoring wetlands!

And just as I don't see a way, short term, to make all people go without driving, I don't see a way to persuade them all to go completely vegan right now. But still, it would be better if they ate less meat. We can't make everything perfect right now, but we can make improvements.

It would be better if we generated less household waste. Better waste management, better recycling, better land management, better water management, better city management. Everywhere you look, there are things we're doing that we could be doing in a more efficient, healthier way. Which is where we came in: manufacturing EV's can be done in a cleaner or dirtier way. Tesla does it in a dirty way. That's no reason not to see whether other companies aren't doing it more cleanly. As if somebody in those companies actually cared about reducing greenhouse gasses.

It's not always 100% clear which way is best. For example, are plug-in hybrids the best way to go for the moment? Are they speeding the transition to pure EV, or slowing it down? I think they're slowing down. But I realize that I might be wrong. And either way, a plug-in hybrid pollutes much less than an ICE car. 

And if BEV advocates spend too much time squabbling with plug-in hybrid drivers, it could distract them from lobbying for that bike path they both want. Denouncing all EV's, because you want nobody to drive at all, could persuade people to just keep driving ICE. Again, there's a question of efficiency. Your energy and eloquence are yet another resource which can be allocated more efficiently, or less.

Speaking of driving, there sure has to be a more environmentally-friendly way of making roads than our current asphalt-based approach. 

And hopefully I've helped you think of many more things to do.

The Answer is, There is No One Answer

Sometimes when you come across something stupid, the best thing you can do is forget it and move on.

However, sometimes it just keeps gnawing at your brain like a stupid rodent. I suppose that's one of the things blogs are for.

Someone (I'll do him the kindness of not saying who) who seems to think he's extraordinarily intelligent, and has a considerable following who seem to agree, recently made an elaborate online presentation of all of the reasons why evs are not the answer and are not going to solve the climate crisis all by themselves: they are better than ice vehicles, he says, but they still have tires and drive on roads and other very bad things.

 

The thing is, I literally can't think of anyone, offhand, who has claimed that evs, all by themselves, are the answer. It seems to me that almost everyone bright enough to realize that evs actually are cleaner than ice vehicles, also knows that they are not perfect from an ecological standpoint, and also is in favor of addressing the climate crisis in a number of ways: not just with evs, but also with public transportation, solar power, wind power, geothermal, tidal, sustainable agriculture, a sustainable timber industry, afforestation, reforestation, veganism, smarter architecture, cleaner concrete, cleaner steel, cleaner rubber, better science, better education, better politicians, etc, etc, etc.

I say almost everyone, because this guy, after listing all of the reasons why evs aren't the answer,  said that trains, public transportation by rail, ARE the answer.

Maybe he was making a joke and I missed it. I've missed a few jokes in my lifetime. 

And public transportation by rail will be very helpful in decreasing humanity's carbon footprint. Along with with evs and many, many other things. As you very likely already knew. 

Making it questionable whether this blog post accomplished a thing. Except perhaps to warn you against those who believe that there is one single thing which, all by itself, will repair the Earth's climate. 

If there actually are any such people. There probably are at least a few here and there. Possibly even including the train-obsessed jerk who impelled me to write this.

Energy Usage is Changing Fast. It Needs to Change Faster

Things are changing fast in the world's energy consumption. For over half a decade, the oil industry and people who observe it have debated when peak oil would come: the point when global oil production would begin to decline -- the point when the world began to run out of oil. More recently, a growing number of people have expressed the opinion that peak oil demand would come before peak oil: that the global demand for oil would begin to decline. Some foresaw peak oil demand in 2050, others predicted 2035. Recent estimates have been around 2025.

 

And some say that peak oil demand has actually happened. They say the decline in demand during the COVID pandemic is the beginning of the end of the growth of the oil industry, that the world will never burn fossil fuel at a fster rate than it did in 2019.

It's not such a crazy opinion. Sales of EV's are surging, sales of vehicles which burn gasoline or diesel oil are declining. Solar and wind power are growing rapidly too, and every kilowatt of electricity produced by solar, or wind, or geothermal, or nuclear, or hydro, or tidal, or biomass, represent less demand for fossil fuels. 

Some of this change is being driven by free markets, by consumers and entrepreneurs who believe that clean energy will save them and make them more money than fossil fuels. (They're right about that, by the way.) 

Much more change can be caused by laws. Governments intervened and gave us seat beats, air bags, catalytic converters, gas mileage standards, scrubbers on smokestacks and a lot of other healthy things. Free industry didn't ask  for any of those things. They resisted all of them. 

We can wait for free industry to change the world over to clean energy, and the human race can die waiting, or we can pass laws to make it happen faster. It's about as simple as that. 

What about all the workers on oil rigs and in refineries? Climate change will kill them too, along with everyone else. That's one thing about them. 

This is all pretty simple, and very serious, and none of it is a secret. Vote for people who support the Green New Deal, and whoever your representatives are, call their offices and bug them, tell them to make these changes happen faster. 

Call them every day. Let them know you're very serious about this.

Energy Efficiency: Fossil Fuels vs Solar and Wind

In the process of powering things with fossil fuels, first geologists make guesses about where exactly oil, coal and gas deposits may be; then miners dig to where they hope the deposits are. Sometimes they have to dig several times before they find anything, because the geologists, after all, were just guessing. 

Once the fuel is found, it is transported, by ship, train, truck, or, in the case of oil and gas, pipeline, to refineries, where the raw material is made into usable products. Then coal, oil and gas are sent, again, by ship, train or truck, or, in the case of oil and gas, pipeline, to power stations, which burn them to generate electricity, which is sent to the grid, where utilities distribute it to businesses and homes. 

In addition, diesel oil and gasoline are sent, by pipeline, tanker ship, railroad or tanker truck, to gas stations and other users. Coal and kerosene are still burned by millions of people for heat and cooking in some of the poorer regions of the world.

The entire trip, from being in the ground to where it is burned for energy or heat, can be dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of miles. Just think for a moment about the distance from Saudi Arabia to the United States. 

Now compare this to solar or wind energy. In the simplest example, the journey is measured in feet, from where sunlight is converted to electricity by the rooftop solar panels on a house and then travels to the house's wiring and to its battery storage. The electricity may travel as much as several miles if there is some left over and it is fed into the grid. Or the distance may be dozens or, in rare cases, hundreds of miles, if the electricity is generated by solar and wind farms operated by utilities. But no ships, pipelines or trains are needed, and the only trucks involved are the ones carrying workers who build, install and maintain the electrical infrastructure. 

Building, operating and maintaining solar cells and wind turbines is a very simple and inexpensive thing compared to mining, refining and distributing fossil fuels. And solar and wind energy keep getting less and less expensive as more of it is generated, while fossil fuels keep getting more expensive. The point where electricity from solar or wind will be cheaper than electricity from fossil fuels? That point is several years ago, and the gap just keeps growing.

Plus with fossil fuels, there are those pesky little details of pollution and global warming. And also accidental fires and explosions.

Global Electrical Production and Use

In this post I'm citing random figures given on the Internet. Reliability of these figures: completely unknown to me. If someone can tell me where to get reliable figures, that would be wonderful. If someone can tell me why RECENT figures are so hard to find, that would be awesome. Because these figures are changing rapidly.

Global energy consumption in 2016: 21.8 terawatt hrs. That's 21.8 trillion watt hours. 21,800,000,000,000 watt hours.

Global installed electrical capacity (the most which could be generated at one time, theoretically, if everything was working, but it's never all working at the same time) was 4.15 terawatts in 2017.

Of that, 1.01 terawatts was renewable.

Global installation of new solar capacity in 2019 was 105 gigawatts. That's 105 billion watts. 105,000,000,000 watts. The total capacity of solar at the end of 2019 was 509.3 gigawatts.

If I have my figures straight, that would mean that about half of the renewable generating capacity, and about 1/8 of all capacity, worldwide, is solar. I have no idea whether my figures are even halfway straight. I also don't know the ratio of capacity to actual electricity generated. I'm sure it varies greatly from one type of generation to another. As opponents of alternative energy love to point out to us, is if we hadn't figured it out on our own, the sun doesn't shine at night and the wind doesn't always blow everywhere.

However, some things are completely clear: Solar power is growing at a very fast pace. It's cheaper than coal, oil or gas, and it keeps getting cheaper, while generating electricity with fossil fuels gets more expensive. Utilities, at least ones which are privately owned and operated, would rather generate that cheap solar energy themselves and sell it to the public than have Mr and Mrs Joe Blow Homeowner own solar panels on their roofs and compete with the utilities for the profits from selling solar electricity, if Mr and Mrs have any left over. The regulations about who can generate and sell how much of what type of energy very wildly from place to place across the US. Quite a few oil companies are among the companies who are building huge solar generating plants. Two very key factors which will determine whether or not humanity kills itself off with pollution and climate change, are information and politics.

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.

Peak Oil and Peak Oil Demand

The term "peak oil" has been used since the 1950's to refer to the time in the future when mankind will begin to run out of petroleum. The "peak" refers to the point where maximum production of oil no longer keeps pace with worldwide demand. Since the 1950's some economists and oil-industry analysts, sometimes regarded as chronic pessimists by their colleagues, have been warning about this time when the world will begin to run out of oil, foreseeing massive worldwide economic collapse in a world which needs oil to live. People like Bob Lutz had phrases like "$60 a gallon for gasoline" and "fighting in the streets over scraps of meat" on their lips. When Lutz spearheaded the project to make the Chevrolet Volt, the first electric vehicle ever willingly manufactured by General Motors, he didn't believe global warming was real. I don't know what he thinks about it now. He's not a complete moron, by no means. He's just spent his entire long life in a very conservative culture.

More recently, however, another term has begun to be used: "peak oil demand." This refers to the time in the future when worldwide demand for oil will begin to decrease. When it came to peak oil, there was always great disagreement among experts. It's hard to tell how much of the world's oil can be practically mined. There are factors such as future improvement in oil-extraction technology. There is now much more of a consensus about peak oil demand: the great majority of those who specialize in such things predict that somewhere between the 2020's and the 2040's, demand will begin to decrease. There are a few who say that peak oil demand will NEVER occur. These people are either lying, to prop up oil futures or for some other reasons, or they are awfully optimistic, if they really believe that the global demand for and consumption of oil will rise FOREVER. I think such optimism would just about have to include the belief that climate change is a Chinese hoax.

I think we can disregard the peak-oil-demand-will-never-happen crowd as a crazy fringe, although their numbers may be large enough to be a problem, like the numbers of climate-change deniers.

The richest people in the world may lie now and then about what they believe, but their beliefs tend to be pretty practical. When they discuss peak oil demand in the financial media, they routinely mention factors such as changing technology. Trains and ships have been converting to electric-hybrid engines for some time, and are on their way to all-electric. Why? Because the people who own and operate trains and ships don't like to waste money. And of course, many trains have already been all-electric for a very long time. Amurrkins, note the wires just above the trains:

Electric cars will replace ones that burn gasoline or diesel, the only question is, how quickly. Solar and wind are already rapidly replacing coal, oil and gas for the purpose of generating electricity, why? Same as the answer about the trains and ships: because solar and wind are cheaper, and their cost savings over coal, oil and gas keep getting bigger.

Strangely, though, when experts get together in places like CNBC to discuss when peak oil demand will occur, there are certain very relevant things which they tend not to mention. Things like climate change, wetlands, lung cancer, wildfires, biodiversity and catastrophic storms.

Maybe they're only half-smart.

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.

If I Had $18 Billion --

-- it would be good for other people, too. Not just me.

I've mentioned before on this blog that if I were suddenly to receive $18 billion somehow, it would be good for me. And I believe that. I know, I've heard the horror stories about people who've won the Powerball jackpot, and 3 years later they're broke and more miserable than ever. But I think I could handle huge sudden wealth.

If I suddenly received $18 billion somehow, I would be a nice guy -- let me re-phrase that: I am a nice guy, and I don't think sudden immense wealth would change that.

Paying for 100% of the cost of converting 1000 houses to solar power would barely put a dent into $18 billion. That'd be like a couple days' worth of dividends. But if each one of those 1000 houses was owned and resided in by low-income people, so low that they might be at risk of losing the house, switching to solar could make a huge difference to them. Several hundred dollars a month is a huge difference to some people.

In addition to converting those 1000 houses, I could easily afford to buy a lot of advertising space to publicize what I was doing, and to challenge other billionaires to try to top it. I think maybe some billionaires have a sense of competition and don't like to be out-done by other billionaires, so maybe a few of them would take up my challenge, and transform the lives of many more low-income people.

(Also, it would result in cleaner air and fewer greenhouse gasses.)

I could point out in those advertisements that what I did, converting 1000 houses, cost much less than funding an America's Cup racing yacht for one year.

Some of the billionaires would probably cheat because, c'mon -- they're billionaires -- and do things like put huge solar arrays onto properties which they themselves own, as opposed to the homes of people in danger of losing their homes. And then they'd claim that they had outdone me because they'd installed more electrical capacity than I had. Which in one respect would be bullshit. But in another respect, a billionaire would have paid for a lot of solar installation, so from the climate's perspective it would still be a win.

I could also give huge contributions to other forms of sustainable power and environmentally-minded projects, and to education, and the arts, and education, and education.

Education is important, and lately, in the US, it's been getting shafted. One of the reasons for that is because the current President loves stupid people, because you have to be stupid to support the current President.

And I could have my own AM radio station, a news station with a heavy emphasis on news about the climate and things to do about it, and another heavy emphasis on politics. Have you listened to AM radio lately? Do you realize how easy it would be to out-shine most of my competition?

I'm just saying, this is not just all about me and my greed for $18 billion.

Dream Log: Renewable Energy Hero

I dreamed that the renewable-energy revolution was winning, worldwide. I was an electrical engineer who traveled the world helping people to set up solar and wind power, people who in some cases had previously had no access to electricity, and in other cases had relied on electrical generation which polluted heavily. I was world-famous for doing this. Many individual people, NGO's and actual governments gave money and other assistance to the projects with which I was involved.

Because of such projects, worldwide demand for oil, gas and coal was rapidly disappearing, and because so often I was a public face of such projects, petrochemical corporations kept sending assassins to kill me. But this fact was so well-known, and I was so well-liked, that the assassins were typically stopped long before they got to me. Some former assassins were now my allies. Some former petrochemical executives who had sent assassins after me had given up, and converted to the cause of renewable energy, and were now among the biggest donors. One of these former oil execs was famous for having publicly said, "It's just a lot more satisfying not to be a son of a bitch." Others were said to have given up fighting me and my colleagues and started planning their exit from the industry, although they had not yet publicly said so.

I and my team of engineers landed in an electric airplane in Central Africa to meet a group of local engineers who were working on the construction of a high-rise building which would contain public housing. We believed that when it was finished it would be the first high-rise in the world to be sheathed by transparent solar cells. Besides generating all of its own electricity, it would provide electricity to a wide surrounding region, and to a water-recovery plant which was being built next to it.

A crowd of joyously screaming children ran to greet us as we got out of the plane. We were used to that sort of thing. We made a conscious effort both to appropriately appreciate such kind welcomes, and to keep them from going to our heads. When we made speeches, we kept emphasizing that we were not essentially different in our outlook and actions from many other people who were getting much less attention. While we were being mobbed by the children, we could see a couple of petrochemical-industry assassins near the runway, being surrounded, disarmed and taken into custody by a crowd of local adults and juveniles.

After touring the construction site of the high rise and water recovery plant, I asked if we could be shown some typical homes in the region. Not places that had been dressed up for our visit, but actual average homes. We were shown huts with grass-burning fireplaces, with sewage ditches dug outside. We were carrying backpacks loaded with hand-cranked electrical devices which we distributed to the poor people we met. When I handed these radios and phones to people who kept bowing to me and thanking me profusely -- I knew what "thank you" sounded like in dozens of languages -- I felt like a phony who was vastly over-appreciated. Then I woke up.

Batteries

Batteries are what I've been thinking about lately.

For one thing: the thing which will make solar power the answer to everything and the source of all the power we need, would be: if batteries got a lot better. And: batteries are getting a lot better, in large part because lots of people are very excited about not burning Earth to a crisp by continuing with fossil fuels. When it comes to large batteries: according to the Washington Post,

Less than a month after Tesla unveiled a new backup power system in South Australia, the world's largest lithium-ion battery is already being put to the test. And it appears to be far exceeding expectations: In the past three weeks alone, the Hornsdale Power Reserve has smoothed out at least two major energy outages, responding even more quickly than the coal-fired backups that were supposed to provide emergency power.

When it comes to somewhat smaller batteries than that: an individual home can combine rooftop solar with batteries to not only be impervious to grid blackouts, but also to help provide power to others during grid blackouts. Between the huge batteries like the one Tesla just installed in Australia, and the ones for individual homes, what we're talking about here is, eventually, and maybe quite soon, and end to grid blackouts. This makes me want solar even much more than I had. I think that imagining an end to blackouts might just make people in general want solar very much. So imagine that, and spread the word.

Speaking of grid blackouts, and smaller batteries than the ones which go with home rooftop solar: earlier today, while I was sitting before this PC, the power went out for about 2 seconds. The PC didn't know why it was now on battery power, and it told me that I might want to think about re-charging my battery because it was at 12%. I'd been worry about blackouts because I'd noticed that my battery was always at around 12%, plugged in and not charging, according to my desktop battery icon. I couldn't figure out why it never seemed to be higher than 12%. Anyhow, after that 2-second blackout, it occurred to me to see whether the problem was that the battery wasn't plugged in all the way. I fumbled around with it for a second, wasn't sure whether or not I pushed it in farther than it was, and now, whether I did anything to it or not, it's at 95% and charging.

Speaking of even smaller batteries: I noticed some pictures of Devon watches:

And I like the way they look. (Yes, my friend, that's a wristwatch.) So I researched them, and found, to my great disappointment, that they run on batteries. Not the kind of batteries which are in most battery-powered watches, which have to be replaced when they run down. The Devon batteries are rechargeable. But still, ewwwww.

That's right: I'm talking about batteries being a large part of our being able to refrain from wiping out our own species, but I still don't want one in my watch. Some watchmakers agree, and manage to combine the waycool styling with a movement that runs because you wind up a spring, manufacturers like Hublot:

and Urwerk:

But maybe I'll keep Devon in mind since their batteries are rechargeable, and since we might be just this far away from running the whole planet on renewable electricity, with the help of modern battery technology.

Does Devon make mechanical timepieces in addition to the battery-powered kind? The first FAQ on their website, and I quote: "How often should I charge my Devon watch?" does not make me hopeful about that. The website gives a list of authorized retailers, which in the US includes an online watch store in addition to some brick-and-mortar locations. The online store carries a whole lot of watch brands I've never heard of. One I had heard of is Shinola (made near where I live, hugely hyped, all-battery). And they don't carry Detroit Watch Company (made near where I live, relatively tiny company compared to Shinola, lots of really nice-looking mechanical watches.)

It seems that once again I've written an essay which was supposed to be about something else but ended up being mostly about mechanical watches. What can I say, I think they're really cool.

So support battery R&D, and just maybe we'll avoid that climate-change apocalypse. In conclusion, France is a land of many contrasts.

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.

Really Sick Of People Equating Hillary And Trump

Recently glimpsed:

"[...]neither candidate advanced their interests, but[...]"

No. No. No. If you voted for Trump, you're a -- I was going to write a very offensive synonym for "dummy," but I'll just say: if you voted for him, you're a dummy.. If you voted for Jill Stein, you're a very special and precious dummy. And if you're trying to tell me that Trump and Hillary are basically the same, you're a complete dummy.

The part about Trump not representing the interests of his voters, that part is accurate. Apart from his plans to massively embezzle from the US, apart from his exploitation of people's self-destructive hatred and stupidity -- what does this guy who's spent his whole life in big cities, most in the biggest city on the US, have to do with the rural Heartland again?

Hillary planned to expand and strengthen Social Security and other parts of the social safety net, increase funding for education, raise the minimum wage, massively expand solar and wind and other forms of clean energy, especially solar, and all of that advances not only my interests, but everybody's interests. You can't have a clearer example of advancing the interests of the entire human race than literally making it easier for everyone to breathe.

Recently I read a comment by someone who had voted for Jill Stein, addressing those of us who had voted for Hillary, showing not one bit of remorse for having supported Stein, refusing to acknowledge that Hillary was one bit less bad than Trump, and referring to

"your Saudi overlords."

The Saudi overlords of those of us who had voted for Hillary. How exactly were diabolical Saudi oil merchants supposed to have been overjoyed at the prospect of Hillary backing huge expansion of solar, wind and other non-oil forms of energy?

An Italian Leftist published an article after the election about how Italy had managed to survive Berlusconi. He advised people to focus less on Trump's personality and more on his policies. I don't know how anyone even vaguely familiar with the political platforms of both Trump and Hillary can claim that they were remotely similar. Maybe this Italian guy is right. Maybe Hillary's campaign took for granted too much that people new the difference between her plans and Trump's, and didn't talk about those differences enough. Maybe they ran too many commercials saying things like: everyone on this long list of generals doesn't want Trump anywhere near the nuclear button, and not enough commercials saying things like: Hillary wants there to be enough solar panels in the US to power every single home.

Obviously, I'm not referring to people who only think that they were familiar with Hillary's platform, but still refer to her as being a tool of the Saudis. Oh, by the way, here's her platform. I don't see anything in there that's similar to the crazy stuff Trump has in mind. Does this sound like Trump to you?

"We must continue to expand opportunities for people with disabilities."

"America's long struggle with race is far from finished."

"As president, Hillary will: Overturn Citizens United. End secret, unaccountable money in politics. Expand background checks to more gun sales. Take on the gun lobby. Keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers. Restore collective bargaining rights for unions and defend against partisan attacks on workers’ rights. Strengthen overtime rules."

Some Highlights From The History Of Solar Power

Before 600 BC someone had figured out how to start a fire using the sun's light and a magnifying glass.

In 1767, a solar oven was invented by Horace de Saussure.

In 1876, William Grylls Adams and Richard Day discovered that selenium produced electricity when exposed to sunlight. Werner von Siemens said that the discovery was very important. Selenium was not yet a cost-efficient source of power, but it was a beginning.

In 1883, Charles Fritts made selenium-based solar cells.

In a paper published in 1905, Albert Einstein formulated the photon theory of light.

In the 1920's solar warer-heating systems began to be installed in houses and apartment buildings in Florida and California.

In 1953, Calvin Fuller, Gerald Pearson and Daryl Chapin made the first silicon solar cells, efficient enough to power small electrical devices.

In 1956 solar cells were sold commercially for the first time. These were sold powering novelty devices and not yet as practical generators of electricity.

In 1961 the United Nations held a conference on "Solar Energy in the Developing World."

The Telstar satellite became the first solar-powered satellite in 1962, and in 1967, the Soyez 1 was the first manned spacecraft using only solar power while in orbit.

In 1971, J Baldwin of Integrated Living Systems developed the first building powered exclusively by solar and wind.

In 1972, a laboratory devoted exclusively to photovoltaic research opened at the University of Delaware. In 1973, the lab has created ahiuse, called Solar One, powered exclusively by solar.

In the 1990's, a grid-supported photovoltaic system was completed and installed in Kerman, California by Pacific Gas & Electric.

In 2004, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California proposed a program to have solar roofs on one million buildings in the state by 2017.

Currently, Hillary Clinton supports a plan to install 500 million solar panels nationwide by 2021.