Brad Ideas - Going Green - Comments

Demand for electricity is

Orion — Fri, 09 May 2008 18:10:08 -0700

Demand for electricity is only going to go UP so to meet that demand utility companies will either have to build new plants or buy power from someone else. Citizenre et al = "someone else". In effect these alternative energy companies offset the long-term capital expenditures that utility companies pay to satify their customers.

Most utility companies would rather be distributors rather than generators anyway. That is, they charge the players a monthly fee to connect to the grid, and let someone else move power across their grid. "Commercial" solar installations pay a monthly connection fee while, at the moment, "residential" solar installations don't and that raises a red flag with me for this kind of scheme. It would take a very small change in policy to declare a scheme like Citizenre's a commercial solar enterprise and start billing the homeowners for access to the grid. That could blow their business model all to smithereens, leaving the company bankrupt and the homeowners with obsolete grid-tied solar systems on their roofs that they can't legally keep connected to the grid.

ebikes

Leigh — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:56:01 -0700

A similar argument, on a slightly different topic, is made about ebikes by Justin Lemire-Elmore on ebikes dot ca.

http://www.ebikes.ca/sustainability/Ebike_Energy.pdf

Citizenre-Solar

Anonymous — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 19:12:06 -0700

What I can't find anywhere is what happens if solar does really catch on. Eventually, peak demand will be at nighttime when everyone has to buy. Also too many secretes scares me. A ligitimate company with a great plan could share a lot more facts and info.

We're addicted to the automobile.

Jeff (no, the other one) — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 10:25:54 -0700

I see state motor pool cars with the E85 sticker every day. Sad.

Alabama, in particular, has less than zero city planning, nearly everywhere you go. You MUST have a car to go anywhere. "Only poor people take the bus, and who wants to be seen as poor...?"

The sprawl is driven by development and profit. Those of us who ride bicycles are only risking our lives. But we keep trying. I'd love one of those hydrogen-powered motorcycles, if there were any convenient ways to refuel it.

Meanwhile, I'm working to telecommute as much as possible.

?!

Sara — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 07:04:11 -0700

"We eat, on average about 2700 Calories/day in the USA"

OINK!

OCR

brad — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 00:57:29 -0700

Off topic, and I haven’t yet tried it, but omnipage 16 says it will handle photos including the curvature that comes near the spine. I am cutting spines for my sheetfed, though, but only on books like old computer manuals.

Vegetarian option is of course better. Eat food from your own garden would be tops.

Vegetarian Cyclists of the world, untie!

Moz — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 16:21:00 -0700

Even in Oz it's not good, although we haven't yet achieved the true hideousness of the US food chain. So our food costs are lower but still obscene (total cost, not dollar cost).

The one thing you slid past was the vegetarian option - if a higher meat component pushes the cost up, lowering it pushes the cost down. For the most part, anyway - me eating roadkill when I'm cycle touring is probably fairly neutral, in that few people farm animals specifically to make them into roadkill, but a lot of native animals become roadkill.

Also, talk to us about packaging, Brad, that's another exciting area of "just how dumb are we, really?"

And finally, have you looked at scanning/OCR recently? I've bought a Sony PRS-505 (my first ever Sony {hoik spit} product), and I'm struggling to find some books online, so I'm using my 30D and a sheet of glass to scan books and OCR them. Slow, but beats paying another $2000 for a decent sheet-feed scanner and cutting the spines off my books. There's got to be a better way...

Misses the point

brad — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 10:25:52 -0700

The point is not to tell people to drive rather than walk. It's a point about the food system and the oil it consumes. That people who drive go farther isn't relevant to this analysis, because this is a per mile analysis to make a point, not an argument against walking. (Though in fact, I've often made the walk/bike vs. drive choice, especially when I worked 2 miles away and would bike commute half the time and drive half the time, depending on schedules and weather. But I made the choice for fitness reasons, not simply to be green.)

The point is how surprisingly inefficient we are as a system, using 400 gallons of fossil fuel every year to feed ourselves. (Because I don't commute, I probably burn about that every year to drive myself, but much more to fly.) What's amazing is that the comparison is even possible, not the fine points of it.

That is factored

brad — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 10:20:16 -0700

As noted, when I did the calculation, I worked out the extra calories consumed walking or biking compared to sitting down. So of course drivers eat. This analysis applies only if the walk/bike for transport was special exercise. For example, if you exercise every day, some days on a stationary bike and some days to get somewhere, you aren't changing your energy budget. If you decide to walk somewhere and otherwise you would not have done that exercise, then it takes extra energy.

However, again, this misses the point, which is not that we should sit down all day and not walk places. The point is we have created a system of agriculture where feeding ourselves consumes large amounts of oil, no matter what we do with the energy.

uh? don't drivers eat?

dave — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 23:30:27 -0700

I may be missing something (math makes me nervous and I might have blacked out during the presentation), but who said that bikers eat more than drivers? Assuming american bikers and american drivers eat the same 2700 cal pile o food, how is it you only add it to the biker's spreadsheet?

This comparison criticized numerous times

Anonymous — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 19:43:35 -0700

I'll probably end up in the spam-blocker for posting several links, but the driving vs. walking comparison has been made and criticized before. See:

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2008/03/the_all_...

and

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/08/ask_the_ecogeek_6.php

with some of the key points being that people who drive, drive farther than people who walk, walk, and that if one considers all carbon wasted in our inefficient food supply system, it's certainly discouraging, but if one compares it to the carbon cost of creating and maintaining a car, the latter ends up the larger environmental loser.

CitizenRe

andreea360 — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 04:40:52 -0800

And the most fundamental question is, is CitizenRe out to put all other solar businesses out of business, is it beneficial since who will “buy” a system when they can just pay the electric bill at whatever level they are at?

What's carpooling

brad — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 12:16:21 -0800

There may be some number of couple-carpoolers who would otherwise have taken two cars, but I would have to guess that's a tiny minority. Given the goal -- getting cars off the road -- allowing couples to be carpools is a very poor way of doing it. Which is more "fair" -- letting 99 couples who were already carpooling into the lane (at a cost to other users of the lane, and unfairly to all the other people not allowed in) and not allowing 1 truly carpooling couple, or the other way around?

Of course in places where 3 is a Carpool this is much less of an issue.

And the other issue is that it's almost impossible to enforce a rule declaring couples not to be a carpool. So in spite of the fact that it would be better, it's not really practical. In the reverse, not allowing kidpooling, because it removes very few cars from the road makes things easier to enforce, as you no longer have all the cars that look solo but have a baby in the back.

Another Red Herring, a reason to be unfair, and co-domicile

Paneuro — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 08:46:06 -0800

Might the "bias toward richer drivers" be a red herring? After all, limiting the sticker availability to hybrids already presents a bias toward those who can afford a hybrid.

Since the carpool lane is largely an incentive to reduce the number of vehicles (directly reducing energy consumption, emissions and congestion - plus some of congestion's associated energy and emissions), and that incentive is reduced as more vehicles use the lane, selling permits to those who will seldom use them may be the desired outcome....

On the issue of co-domiciled occupants, I think there are some who carpool because the lane can be used. I know of one example, a couple with a long commute, whose work schedules are offset by two hours - but they save enough time by being able to use the carpool lane to make it workable and worthwhile.

Pretty simple

brad — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 13:15:31 -0800

While there are a fair number who will spend more on their power to "do the right thing" environmentally, they are still too few to make the real difference that must be made. Thus, unfortunately, what really matters is making it economically competitive. Cheaper than fossil fuels is best, though something can be done if you get nearer to them, especially if the fossil fuels get externality taxes put on them.