Michael Reynolds

He build passive solar homes that use sustainable building materials. You can find his work at earthship.net.

I think I am going to save up to buy the water reclamation kit for this house. That ought to save us a bundle...

Anthony Edwards

I haven't seen him in much of anything lately. I guess he is taking a long-deserved sabbatical after the modern-day portrayal of Job channeled through Mark Greene...

Well, it's Saturday. The lawn has been mowed, the lawn pond has been tended to, the wash is hanging on the clothesline, and I am at home. You know, I think it was like, last April or so since I have posted photos. Hey, guess what? You are gonna get photos today.



This is the new and improved solar array. Those are 15 watt 12 volt DC panels, bought on eBay. seven panels equals 105 watts at peak performance, which is about six hours during the summer months, with... oh, let's say an hour and a half of low power in the morning and evening. That's uh... 630 watt hours during peak, maybe 200 more during the inclination and declination. That's enough to power quite a bit, actually.

One of those things that we power now is a pump for the lawn pond. We just have two gold fish right now, and the pump is not positioned out of the way, but as this photo suggests, we have more than enough wattage to make quite a bitchin' water fall when we get around to setting it up right.
Right now, we are just pumping the water into a filter... I should take a more recent photo. Both of these are from last week.

Any ways, that's what I am doing with the back yard, this year. Well, a couple of things among many things. I also helped to set up the clothesline, but that kind of solar power isn't nearly as exciting as the electrical kind...

Thomas Alva Edison

When the electric chair was first introduced, it used alternating current. Edison was a proponent of direct current, while his rival, George Westinghouse, supported alternating current. Edison once suggested that the term "Westinghoused" be used to describe a person killed by the electric chair. George did not find that funny in the least.

All right, gas prices are starting to hurt. Well, they are starting to hurt some people. Me, on the other hand, I return forty bottles for the deposit, and I can drive for a week on my fifty mile an hour scooter. Er, fifty miles an hour, downhill.

Any ways, the average lifespan for a vehicle is 13 years or so, with a final mileage of 145,000 miles or so. The average age of vehicles on the road in America is eight years. That means that our current fleet of vehicles has a "half-life" of five years.

The average fuel economy for our passenger car fleet is 22.4 miles to the gallon. The average fuel economy for "other four wheeled two axle vehicles" (trucks and SUVs, mostly) is 18.0 miles to the gallon. That's for 2006, the latest year available.

So, what can be done to dramatically increase the fuel economy of our current fleet, in a hurry? Well, one idea would be to offer tax credits for hybrid conversion kits to the owners of front wheel drive passenger cars. Here is a link to an article on one such conversion kit.

Now, it ain't pretty, and it kills your trunk storage, but it works. For people that have less than a 25 mile commute and at least five years left in the lifetime of their vehicle, this is something to consider. Moreover, if someone lives in say, Phoenix, in a house, if they have solar panels and net metering, they could pretty much eliminate the cost of the electricity that they use to power their car, instead of gas...

Kate Mulgrew

She made Star Trek safe for strong women.

Ok, so I am going out to Parvovirus for trivia tonight, so I don't really have all that time for a deep essay into whatever facet of the human condition that happens to strike my fancy. So, I am going to be lazy and just point back to posts that I have already made. Kim and I were talking about conservation, and seeing as it is Earth week, I might as well round up all of my posts on being green.

Stanford Ovshinsky

Edward Teller

Robert Lutz

Don Gillespie

PFC Jessica Dawn Lynch, ret.

Christian Friedrich Schonbein

Steven Rosansky

Brian Appel

There are a few more, but those are my latest.

Oh, discordant thought! Think about a cartoon gerbil picking its nose with its toes, that look like they belong on the feet of a refugee from Somalia.

Edward Teller

Seriously, when you have hallucinatory visions of nuclear physicists in the dance wear of ballerinas while ill from influenza, chances are you are not altogether normal. I'm speaking of myself here.

Any ways, I thought I would write about nuclear policy, and its current resurgence in the last-gasp budget of President Bush. Oh, you didn't know that George W. Bush submitted his 2009 budget to congress? Well, he did.

Aside from the fact that the man has submitted a budget that is the first in history to surpass three trillion dollars, indeed, three point one trillion dollars, it also has some rather annoying provisions in it in regards to energy policy. Since energy policy is my particular fetish, I thought I would write a couple paragraphs about it.

Yes, I said fetish. Read a dictionary some time, and expand your grasp of the meaning of words. Not everything is sex, and we are not all thirteen years old.

Any ways, in George W. Bush's bloated and altogether insultingly wasteful budget, we have increases in funding for coal, nuclear, and biomass. We also see cuts to solar, hydrogen, and vehicle technology.

Now, I am not a fan of nuclear energy. Intellectually, I know that with over a hundred reactors in the United States with fifty years of operation, nuclear energy has probably killed less people than coal did in January. I also know that fourth generation nuclear reactors essentially eliminate the whole nuclear waste and fuel problem.

Yet, every time I think of nuclear power, I imagine permanent orange afros and all of the paint getting sucked off the side of my house. To say that nuclear energy has a P. R. problem is to be understated.

As for coal... coal plants pretty much are ATMs for the coal industry. You can assign whichever words for that acronym you would like. Seriously, for the coal executives, one set of words works, and for the folks downwind of the plant, an entirely different set of words works perfectly fine, as well.

Any ways, we do not need to subsidize coal in any way, manner, or fashion in this country. When geologists call certain parts of the carboniferous era the "Pennsylvanian epoch", one can assume that North America has a few pounds of coal lying around.

What needs to be done, is to monetize the carbon coming out of smokestacks and tailpipes. The coal and oil industries are so phenomenally profitable, the industries will learn how to make money off of sequestration and carbon offsets. Yes, India and China need to play ball too. When they see that North Americans are getting rich off of what was once considered waste, they'll fall in line.

Capitalism works. Mandates set by a single country or continent... don't.

Biomass... let's not bullshit ourselves. Biomass means corn ethanol. Corn ethanol is the biggest scam ever conceived by one set of human beings and perpetrated on the others. First off, butanol, a four carbon alcohol and pretty much identical to 87 octane, is ever so much better than fucking moonshine. Secondly, it is a 1 to 1.61 energy conversion. That is incredibly shitty. Algal biodiesel, fuck SOY biodiesel exceeds that quite considerably.

Do you have any idea how many more gallons per acre sugar beet ethanol produces compared to corn? I am writing this free-form, so I can't come up with it off of the top of my head, but I am going to tell you right now, it kicks corn ethanol's output in the nuts and calls it "Sally".

Finally, the budget cuts... CUTS funding to solar, hydrogen, and vehicle technology. Jesus Christ in a box car discussing Proust with a hobo. This is getting kind of long, so I am going to explain, in detail, why cutting funding to solar, hydrogen, and vehicle technology pisses me off to no end tomorrow.

Seriously, if The Shrub and Cheney resigned tomorrow, I would start carving their faces in to Rushmore next fucking week.

John Hieftje

He's a bright spark.

Well, I have been talking about them for years. It's finally happening, right in my back yard. Ann Arbor is replacing all of her street lights with LEDs. This is incredibly good news.

First off, it will save the city 100,000 dollars a year in lighting costs. The LEDs are cleaner than the old light bulbs; there is no mercury in the LEDs. They can last for as long as ten years, and are warrantied for seven. They produce a better light than the old bulbs, and require 54 watts compared to the old bulbs that needed 100.

Now, Ypsilanti can't afford them right now, but hopefully, our rich sister will spark an economies of scale price reduction, and it will simply one day be cheaper out right to buy the LEDs. Right now, they pay for themselves in four years; the old bulbs only lasted for two years.

Now, we just need the quantum dots to get out of the lab...

Don Gillespie

He's a tool for the natural gas industry.

All right, so in the August 1 2007 issue of the Ann Arbor News, there was a front page story on ammonia fuel for transportation. Shawn Grannell, a doctoral student in applied physics, and Don Gillespie of El Don Engineering, are going to drive from Detroit to San Francisco on an 80 / 20 ammonia gasoline mix in their converted Chevy S-10 pickup.

They have 930 pounds of ammonia, and that, along with the gasoline they will buy along the way, will get them to Wyoming, where they will pick up more ammonia.

Now, ammonia has no carbon. Indeed, you can run a vehicle on 100 percent ammonia. It's only exhaust would be water vapor and nitrogen.

Or rather, its only exhaust from the tailpipe will be water vapor and nitrogen. Do you know where ammonia comes from? It comes from natural gas.

Now, not all ammonia comes from natural gas. I suppose with all of the agricultural waste produced in America, some 6 billion tons of it, could be converted into ammonia. Indeed, most of the ammonia in Alberta comes from agricultural waste.

However, There is no such thing as a free lunch. Most of that agricultural waste was created because of cheap and plentiful nitrogen fertilizer... made from petroleum products.

Yeah... don't think about it too hard, you might cry.

I know I have been harping on this for the longest time, but it bears repeating. Solar, nuclear, and wind power is the way forward. We can use the electricity to extract the nitrogen from the air and salt water from the oceans to create all of the nitrogen fertilizer and ammonia we would ever need.

However, right now, all an ammonia powered truck is just a secondhand natural gas powered truck. Don Gillespie is a smart man, but in the end, his truck is less fuel efficient and more harmful to the environment than a regular Chevy S-10.

PFC Jessica Dawn Lynch, ret.

She could have went along with the lies and gained glory and fame. She instead chose to tell the truth, and live humbly. Truly, she is an American hero.

Ok, when it comes to intellectual arguments, I am a frickin' bulldog. Perhaps it is my light frame and sometimes subdued manner in real life, but when I am convinced I am correct on an issue, I don't give up. Any ways, Chud's personality complements mine very nicely, and so when I can argue with him on technical, esoteric, and obscure subjects, I get all warm and fuzzy inside. Yeah, I am a geek.

Any ways, I am convinced that for some people, generally those paying more than fifty dollars a month in electricity, solar power is an excellent complemnt to grid electricity.

The fact is, the average price of electricity in America is around 13, 14 cents a Kwh. In Detroit, it's .096 dollars a Kwh. For now. However, natural gas prices continue to rise, and will continue to rise. 85 per cent of the electricity produced in Greater Detroit is from fossil fuel projects, mostly coal. Now, America is the Saudi Arabia of coal, and it is not impossible to totally sequester all CO2 emmissions from DTE's coal plants. However, that will cost a great deal, and will most likely either be subsidized by federal tax dollars, or with increased Kwh prices, or, most likely, both.

So, our electricity comes from dirty sources, and it will cost a great deal to clean them up.

It is also entirely possible for DTE to simply decommission our coal plants and go nuclear. However, Nuke plants are at least a decade away, and while the electricity is damn cheap coming from them, building the plant... ain't cheap.

So, more than likely, the cost of new nuke plants will be subsidized with higher Kwh prices.

What I am trying to get at, here, is that to assume that grid electricity will continue to be cheap in Greater Detroit is really, really foolish.

Finally, paying for grid electricity, when you are a homeowner, is really silly. Now, people still paying off their mortgages, or college loans, or something like that, have more pressing financial issues than their electricity bills. However, to rely entirely on the grid for your power, is to always lose money.

Ok, let's say a family in Greater Detroit consumes 700 Kwh a month. They've done everything to lower their consumption; they have Compact fluorescent lights, they have timers for their outdoor lights... they turn off the TV when they are done watching it, et cetera. Let's just say it's a big family.

700 Kwh a month comes out to 67.2 dollars in outgo every month. That means that this family "buys" a 150 watt, square meter solar panel in grid electricity every 11 months and few days. Neglecting the costs of paperwork and the 2,000 dollar grid-tied inverter, that panel will pay itself off, at a flat rate of .096 Kwh, in 21 years and nine months. Solar panels last for at least 25 years, and some people have, with proper maintenance, gotten panels to last as much as forty years.

The fact of the matter is, if you are already "paying" for a panel within a reasonable time frame, you might as well buy one. And then later, another one, and so on. It will lower your outgo, reduce the amount of pollution being released into the air, increase the security of your electricity supply (the most electricity is consumed during the summer, WHEN THE SUN IS SHINING), and... will not only pay for itself, but actually pay for future panels.

Now, you should also remember that the 150 watt, square meter panel is not the end-all, be-all of panels. There are panels coming that are forty per cent efficient. However, they are REALLY expensive (right now), and not nearly as prevalent as the panels I have been using in my examples. Still, the world is not going to run out of silicon any time soon, and silicon refining and solar panel fabrication plants can and are coming online at a much more rapid rate than major power installations are coming online.

It simply makes sense to me to advocate for solar power.

Christian Friedrich Schönbein

Methanol and ethanol fuel cells make MUCH more sense than hydrogen.

Ok, everybody is wondering about the land bridge. Well, one of the ideas is to surround it with polyethylene lawn ponds, except for the paths leading to and from it. If we ever get around to it, we could have koi in several hundred gallon ponds with pump powered waterfalls circulating the water in between the ponds. However, right now, we are just trying to get the one twenty five gallon pond up and running. Right now its only residents are rocks and algae.

Any ways, I was trying to figure something out. So, the average square meter solar panel will produce 1 Kilowatt hour of energy a day at this latitude. The average household energy consumption in Detroit is about 500 kilowatt hours a month. That comes out to a little under 17 kilowatt hours a day. So... 17 panels at a minimum, 20 or more panels to be sure.

A square meter of solar panel runs about 750 dollars. So 20 panels, assuming you had the roof or yard space, would run you 15,000 dollars. That's a kick in the nuts. Or for you, ESC, the cervix.

However, Michigan is a net metering state. What that basically means is, you can sell your extra power to the grid. So... If you got a 3000 peak watt inverter and one panel, you could be producing one seventeenth, or about six per cent, of your power carbon free for about 3,000 dollars in equipment. Six percent is nothing to sniff at. In another six months, you can have another panel installed by not spending about five bucks a day, or 150 dollars a month. Most people might be able to eschew something in their consumption budget to save five bucks a day, especially in a two income household.

Now, you are producing 12 percent of your power carbon free. By this time, you should be seeing some kind of savings in your utility bill. More than likely, you should only need to save about 3.75, 4 dollars a day to get the third panel installed. And so it goes.

You, as a homeowner, can cut your utility costs substantially, in as little as 18 months. If you have enough roof space to produce 36 percent, or six panels, you can recoup your investment in five years. The next 20 years of the panels will be pure profit.

With careful planning, you can make money, and be part of the solution.