Posts by Tom Reg 70 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jan 2008
In the US, each Tesla is subsidized $50,000, in Norway its $130,000 subsidy!
I guess the only way he can pull this off is if the governments of the world don't wake up and pull out the rug, while in the meantime his infrastructure plans execute perfectly.
http://insideevs.com/tax-exemptions-in-norway-cut-tesla-model-s-price-in-half/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmichaels/2013/05/27/if-tesla-would-stop-selling-cars-wed-all-save-some-money/
Electric demand is inelastic - people just want to turn the lights on, and prices charged are largely a a fixed rate per MWh.
So when you shut down enough thermal plants to supply only 90% of the required power on windless nights, the wholesale cost for power does not merely double, it goes up 10 fold, or more.
California went through this:
"The California electricity crisis, also known as the Western U.S. Energy Crisis of 2000 and 2001, was a situation in which California had a shortage of electricity caused by market manipulations, illegal shutdowns of pipelines by the Texas energy consortium Enron, and capped retail electricity prices. "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis
My guess would be that these companies are playing more honestly than the Americans were, so they will try to contain price hikes to an average of 3x or so.
$0.60+ USD per kWh in Germany is the result.
I am sure that the people at Apple are a happy bunch, everyone smiles as they take money away from the poor. :) Look up fuel poverty. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-20751708
The 'subsidies' on almost all industries are negative. They all pay taxes, lots of taxes. Except for 'Green Energy'.
Ever wondered why the biggest energy companies in the world own and run 80% of the wind and solar? The answer is because it makes lots of money. Gasoline and Oil are not really tied to any green energy projects, as they do different things. Only 0.001% of cars are electric.
Apple will make money directly, like all other green energy providers. In addition they are scoring a huge PR win. How come none of their website PR stuff mentions that this is all done on the backs of the taxpayer? Yes of course the government wants these silly projects to go ahead, as comments like your proves that these programs garner votes, at least until the bills need to be paid.
Look at Germany, a 'green energy leader. They are in the process of adding coal plants - up to 25 of them. But the US - with no Kyoto or anything to push them other than economics, is lowering carbon output, all from replacing coal with natural gas.
Had the millions that Apple spent been spent on a natural gas plant instead of solar, carbon output would have dropped more. But solar is a PR and subsidy win. Hence the 'great green swindle'.
Biogas:
Directed biogas is a buzzword for natural gas that has a long paper trail. Perhaps even a few cow farts. directedbiogas.com
Money:
Apple is probably making money on this - at the expense of other electric ratepayers in the state, as is customary for all 'green' energy initiatives.
'Just' troll through this page to try and figure out how much all this benefits Apple.
http://www.cleanenergyauthority.com/solar-rebates-and-incentives/north-carolina/
"A maximum of $2.5 million* per installation for all solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, combined heat and power (as defined by Section 48 of the U.S. Tax Code), and biomass applications** used for a business purpose***, including PV, daylighting, solar water-heating and space-heating technologies."
PLUS, If you have the legal people willing to wade through all these programs, you can see how it might pay off.
NC GreenPower Production Incentive
TVA - Green Power Switch Generation Partners Program
Property Tax Abatement for Solar Electric Systems
Active Solar Heating and Cooling Systems Exemption
Sales Tax Holiday for Energy-Efficient Appliances
North Carolina Green Business Fund
Energy Improvement Loan Program (EILP)
A press release full of lies, but perhaps the largest is comparing the cost of on - demand power with intermittent, low quality, power, as if the two had some what equal values in the market place.
The market value for wind power is about 1/4 that of on demand power, experience has shown.
Wind power scales as wind speed to the power 2.5, which means that its either at full blast or almost nothing. Then when it gets really windy, the backup power has to be hot and ready, incase the wind turbines switch off into self protection mode.
They are pulling out all the stops to have the stock trend upward for the next three weeks. On Nov 14, a billion shares are released to their owners. Some large fraction of these people will then sell.
Who would buy at this point? The answer to that is whoever has fund managers that roll under the Goldman Sachs pressure to buy this into your account. You have been warned.
The pings are huge. Its about 40,000km from earth to satellite. So to ping a webserver you need 40,000 up to the sat, then 40,000k down to the ground, over to the server, then 40,000 km back up to the sat, and 40,000 down to the client. I think that the sat providers can cut this down by running an edge server on the satellite, but that only speeds up downloading pictures from the latest hollywood divorce.
That's 160,000 km, or about 0.55 seconds - 550 ms are added onto each ping. (speed of light is 300,000 km/sec) Here in the Canadian countryside, on a WiFi 4G I get 'terrible' pings - 100ms seems added, etc. But on satellite which I had for several years, I was getting real world pings of 900 ms.
So don't use satellite unless you can't get any form of real internet.
The extras are a C++ development stack. Plus the balance thing.
Android is for the most part Java, and feels like it.
They could do alright. It may be cheaper to license RIM than it is to get the Google blessed inside track that the Android club pays for. Amazon comes to mind as a possible licensor.
Because all the storage systems are very very expensive, and to get to 50% penetration, (even just for electrical) you need to be able to store power to run a country for a week.
Raw wind clocks in at about $0.25 per kWh, (which looks expensive too, and is covered up by subsidies and tax breaks to current wind developers).
So what's the cost? 131 trillion per year at the $2 rate, and saying that someone makes storage cheaper, say 50 cents - then we are still at 30 trillion per year. About 1/2 the current GDP of the world. With the other half we need to make the rest of the power, eat and go to movies.
Wind does not work at any scale, but as soon as you pass 5 - 10% penetration, costs skyrocket past the raw wind cost.
One wonders why this is all of a sudden news, or why a major paper had to be written about it?
http://www.drroyspencer.com/global-warming-background-articles/carbon-dioxide-growth-rate-at-mauna-loa/
"This means that Mother Nature takes out about 50% of the ‘excess’ CO2 that we pump into the atmosphere every year. And it seem like it doesn’t matter how much MORE we put in each year…nature still takes out an average of 50% of that amount."
--Tom
Are there any studies showing that the public cloud goes down more often than private internal ones? Lots of internal networks are much less robust than Amazon's data centres.
When Amazon goes down for an hour, its news, when some 500 person company goes down for 12 hours, new of it never leaves the building.
Which is what many large industrial customers do anyway. Then you use the grid for the times your power plant dies. You can make power for about the same cost as grid using 100% nat gas. Then you get 0.001% times 0.001% failure likelihood. Actually not that good, cause real big events might knock everything out, I guess.
The reliability of the North American grid is dropping over the next decade as more de-stabililizing wind comes on line. So its wise to plan for that now.
Or is it the author? GM has been placing ads in everything from newspapers to bubble gum for decades - I think that they know how to measure an ROI in a campaign of any type, be it brand marketing or discount offer sales drives.
If there is one thing Americans shine at, its selling. I think that most people can agree on that.
It seems that all these regulations - likely over 50 meters of them if stacked, do nothing more than create the illusion of trust.
The stock market is more like a wild west gambling casino than a bank.
If you took all rules away, good honest companies would still seek to be known as such, and a network of trust would quickly evolve - companies would exist solely to rate the claims and ethics of other companies. The system would be more accurate and less costly than the current one, which is a mess.
No one (at least no climate scientist) would deny that. It has not warmed in over 10 years, but that's a trifle of time. It has warmed since the turn of the century, for sure. There some graphs / science that suggest cooling for the next decade, but we will have to wait.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/
A warming earth would mean less ice, but less ice does not support the case that humans are the cause for its loss.
Whether or not its CO2 is the cause of global warming is the issue. There are lots of reputable scientists who doubt the Anthropogenic cause of the warming. Nomenclature has now changed to be future proof: 'Global Warming' has been replaced by 'Climate Change'.
Even if CO2 is the cause of global warming, we have little control over it with existing technologies, other than nuclear power. No country, even Denmark, has made any real progress with renewable energy.
The companies installing wind turbines are by and large those same companies that the eco - nuts call 'Big Oil". They get to double the price of things like electricity, and make more money.
We are now finishing with the Military Industrial Complex, having moved to the "Green Industrial Complex". Same profits, different verbiage.
The video http://youtu.be/Fq8P9RhEpiQ shows what the IPCC wants as a take away - they refuse to say that there has been no recorded increase in storms or other climate events, but rather they use smarmy wording to dance around what their own report says.
The IPCC runs on fear. Fear brings them money.
Even the 'science paper' dances hard to say that there is no data to support an increase in extreme weather events:
" Most studies of long-term disaster loss records attribute these increases in losses to increasing exposure of people and assets in at-risk areas, and to underlying societal trends – demographic economic, political, and social – that shape vulnerability to impacts. Some authors suggest that a (natural or anthropogenic) climate change signal can be found in the records of disaster losses, but their work is in the nature of reviews and commentary rather than empirical research."
By and large, in order to figure out current draw and daily usage, consumers must visit a web site, which no one bothers to do.
A real meter - which I have - like the TED5000 shows a $/hr reading all the time on a display we keep by the kitchen table. The kids and I pick up on that info, and have lowered electricity usage by about 20%. Even I, a 'cheap dad' hardly ever visit the web site.
That's the real thing the electrical companies fear - that usage DROPS because that will cause a drop in profits. So they hide behind clumsy web interfaces. A law that puts these readouts in every new or newly renovated house would save at least 10% of electricity usage. (more in places like North America where waste is much worse). Don't expect the green - industrial - complex to allow them, though.
There may or may not be AGW, but Germany and Denmark have proved that the most expensive systems ever deployed do absolutely nothing to abate CO2.
So other than nuclear and conservation, we really have no tools available. Nuclear is unpopular with voters, and conservation is unpopular with big companies.
It makes sense at this point to take a decade break from wind and solar subsidies, and see what the science and economics say. The earth has not warmed for over 10 years at this point.
As transmitter power goes down, aggregate bandwidth - bandwidth per square km goes up, way up. So with a 100,000 watt TV transmitter, you have a bandwidth of 6 Mhz spread over hundreds of sq km. Break that into cells 100 m across, and bandwidth goes up by a factor of well over a million. Total power used also drops - even a million wifi routers only use about 50,000 watts.
You can even break these 100m cells down, as a microwatt powered transmitter (say on a phone inside a house) can use a 10m cell size. Combine that with all the other windows of bandwidth and the fact that as power goes down, battery life goes up along with bandwidth, and you can see the end of comm wires for many devices.
Solar power usually caries about a 40c / kWh taxpayer supplied bonus, so that means that Apple will be grossing about 82 million kWh * 0.4 = $32 million per year.
In other words, if the set up is a 'normal' solar/ biomass setup, Apple will get income of $32 million from the plant, which it can use to purchase power on the open market at about 0.06 / kWh, so that will pay for almost all the electricity they use. Plus they get to issue press releases about 'break even' and reducing the bill to zero.
Of course the environmental benefits are about zero or worse.
Putting the facility in upstate NY, and using 100% carbon free Quebec hydro power would have made more environmental sense, but its all about kickbacks and tax breaks, now isn't it?
Solar power is not clean. In the UK, at the 43p per kWh, it produces about the same carbon footprint as natural gas, and only about 2 times cleaner than coal.
Just take the 43p and look up carbon per $1000 of economic activity. That gets you to a number about 10 times higher than nuclear. Then add in the other side of the comic activity to get Solar Power going - interconnection, government legal costs, and you get another huge amount - (40p) per kWh - which also adds to the footprint.
If all electricity was subsidized at that same rate, the cost of delivered electricity would be over 100p /kwh - which would mean that either the entire economy would revolve around plugging stuff in (which would not happen), or everyone would simply not use the grid (which is already happening).
As the subsidizations of electricity rise, on - site co-gen using natural gas takes over - from the large customers down to the smaller ones. Nat gas co gen at home costs about 10p / kWh and you get free hot water and heat!
You can't play god with the economy. The Soviets proved that.
There is no law that says that you can have 'standing room only' passengers (yet - look up Ryan Air on that), so likely the airline would face fines that would make a voucher look pretty small.
So the guy that was standing was at an excess risk of being clobbered by galley parts and flying stewards.
He should definitely phone the FAA about it. What it means is that they cannot fill a plane until they see how many 'two seaters' they have on board. So thats about 2 tickets less sold per 100 - a 2% fare rise to pay for the obese passengers who choose not to buy two seats.
Electricity in the UK is largely CO2 based - at least all added load is almost 100% fossil fuel based.
Say your electricity is Nat Gas made. Better than coal, say average for the UK. To make 1000kwh of electricity with nat gas, you need to burn about times that worth of gas. Then that electricity goes down the wire, and feeds into your heat pump, which is lucky if it gets a COP of 3. Which means they burn 3000kwh worth of nat gas to give you the heating ability of 3000 kWh. There are things like line loses, etc to take into account, but reasonably it will not work. You are using the Carnot cycle on both ends - a bit of a Rube Goldberg machine....
The fact that you have Solar panels on the roof does not play here - any extra power you consume with your heat pump will be created with natural gas or coal.
Don't get me wrong - I like heat pumps, and heat my house with a ground source one here in Canada, but they generally only make sense when you are away from a nat gas source, which means rural Canada/US, etc.
At least the nuclear reactor will have provided useful energy for its lifetime. The cost of a wind fleet equal to a 1GW nuclear reactor (most sites have 4 or so reactors) is about 10x the cost of building the nuclear, and blights the landscape with 30,000 wind turbines. They are 5 million each. Even with 30,000 there would be 1/4 the time with no lights or hospitals, 1/2 the time with about enough, and 1/4 of the time with so much power as to have no where to put it.
There are no alternatives right now to nuclear, unless you like pollution, or live in some hydro bonanza place like Quebec.
I don't believe for a second the 70 billion mark. I think it can be done way cheaper.
As soon as the kids hit Uni, with 80 Mbit connection to his room, they no longer have to download anything. Just get what you want when you want it.
In other words, at 80Mbit, a TB hard drive fills fast.
After about 24 Mbit, (3 HD channels at once), what more do you need? Everything is on demand.
The big worry with internet providers is that 500GB a month only costs about $10 to deliver, so how can they charge 5 to 10 times that? The answer is the 'smart' network.
Good luck goes out to the LIghtSquared types out there.
We in Canada (pop 35 million) will pay $200 billion over the next 20 years for about $15 billion worth of green electricity. It works out to several thousand dollars per tonne of CO2, in the best case scenario. It does get urban voters excited, though.
You can make a phone call, someone comes over installs PV panels - no money leaves your pocket, and you are 'guaranteed' about $1200 per year.
Keep the 'guaranteed' part in mind - Spain broke all its wind and solar contracts last year, cutting payments.
Wind does not even work well in Ontario, where we have several GW of water power from Niagara falls, etc.
Basically there _is_ only a limited amount of spectrum, but what the doomsayers don't like to think about is the fact that bandwidth is spectrum/((cell size)**2). I don't only mean cell phones - a cell is just the range of a radio... . So if you have a cell that was 1 km across, then making it 100 m in size not only saves 95% of the transmission power, but it also increases bandwidth by 100 times. In actual fact in tall tower regions of cities the formula is cell size cubed, as you can stack cells up.
If you make devices smarter, so they only talk to the closest device, and use all the reflected stuff that makes wireless n work, etc - then as you add devices bandwidth naturally goes up, power required goes down and everyone is happy.
The trick is the smart devices. But 'they' are getting nearer on them. It will soon be really really fast everywhere, then faster as more devices pile on.
You could run your own silk on your own ec2 instance, and have all company machines use that as a proxy.
Could also be a private service, but it would depend on how cheap of a machine you could run silk on.
They don't have to open source it, just provide an installer for Linux.
Of course the other way is for open source software to do make something with the silk API, then point your fire tablet at that.
If its a good idea, then this will be done. The AWS team have good API, so it's likely the silk API is also easy to understand.
When you LOG OUT we don' track you. But you know - closing the Facebook window does not log you out, which is all that 99% of people do. So when you are logged in - which most people are all the time, all the cookies taste even better to the Facebook people.
Plus after reading all the posts, we can surmise that they have the technology to do it, even if some random engineer thinks they can't - its a big company - there are other people working there.
These are Goldman Sachs spinners out to sell the company. Since Facebook is privately held, they can leak any 'info' they want. I'd bet the revenue is closer to being correct, but the real net income - profit is actually much much lower the advert (leak) that they published. The $500m income is likely one of those non GAAP accounting trick numbers.
They have 750 Million users, and they get $4 revenue per user on average per year? They have horrible click through rates (see the wiki article 400 per million) on ads, for instance. I for instance found an article claiming that at 300 m users they were 'break even'. http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2009/09/16/tech-facebook-300-million-users.html
Big brother for the Oinon ONN news report:
http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-dramatically-cut-agencys-cos,19753/
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