Quotulatiousness

September 18, 2011

Solyndra: not just crony capitalism as usual

Filed under: Environment, Government, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:28

Andrew C. McCarthy shows the difference between the collapse of Solyndra and ordinary crony capitalist use of government funds:

Homing in on one of the several shocking aspects of the Solyndra scandal, lawmakers noted that, a few months before the “clean energy” enterprise went belly-up last week, the Obama Energy Department signed off on a sweetheart deal. In the event of bankruptcy — the destination to which it was screamingly obvious Solyndra was headed despite the president’s injection of $535 million in federal loans — the cozily connected private investors would be given priority over American taxpayers. In other words, when the busted company’s assets were sold off, Obama pals would recoup some of their losses, while you would be left holding the half-billion-dollar bag.

As Andrew Stiles reported here at NRO, Republicans on the Oversight and Investigations subcommittee say this arrangement ran afoul of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. This law — compassionate conservatism in green bunting — is a monstrosity, under which Leviathan, which can’t run a post office, uses your money to pick winners and losers in the economy’s energy sector. The idea is cockamamie, but Congress did at least write in a mandate that taxpayers who fund these “investments” must be prioritized over other stakeholders. The idea is to prevent cronies from pushing ahead of the public if things go awry — as they are wont to do when pols fancy themselves venture capitalists.

[. . .]

The criminal law, by contrast, is not content to assume the good faith of government officials. It targets anyone — from low-level swindlers to top elective officeholders — who attempts to influence the issuance of government loans by making false statements; who engages in schemes to defraud the United States; or who conspires “to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof, in any manner or for any purpose.” The penalties are steep: Fraud in connection with government loans, for example, can be punished by up to 30 years in the slammer.

September 15, 2011

Why first-gen electric vehicles will be a hard sell for Canadians

Filed under: Cancon, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:24

It’s not just that (at least in Ontario) we’re facing potentially huge electricity price hikes to pay for our new alternative energy strategy, it’s also that electric cars don’t handle winter weather very well:

On Wednesday, Jan. 26 a major snowstorm hit Washington D.C. Ten-mile homeward commutes took four hours. If there had been a million electric cars on American roads at the time, every single one of them in the DC area would have ended up stranded on the side of the road, dead. And, before they ran out of power, their drivers would have been forced to turn off the heat and the headlights in a desperate effort to eek out a few more miles of range.

This illustrates the biggest drawback of BEVs, which is not range, but refueling time. A few minutes spent at a gas station will give a conventional car 300 to 400 miles of range. In contrast, it takes 20 hours to completely recharge a Nissan Leaf from 110V house current. An extra-cost 240V charger shortens this time to 8 hours. There are expensive 480V chargers that can cut this time to 4 hours, but Nissan cautions that using them very often will shorten the life of the car’s batteries.

No doubt some conventional cars ran out of gas while trapped in the massive traffic jams that occurred in and around the nation’s capital the night of January 26. However, a two-gallon can of gasoline can get a stalled conventional car moving again in a few minutes. In contrast, every dead BEV would have had to be loaded on flatbed tow truck and taken somewhere for many hours of recharging before it could be driven again.

Nissan claims that the range of a Leaf is about 100 miles. However, in their three-month extended road test, Car and Driver magazine obtained an average range from a full charge of 58 miles. Cold weather and fast driving can shorten this to as little as 30 miles.

September 14, 2011

Broken CFL? “The four-page document that followed read more like reactor-core meltdown protocols than simple reassurance”

Filed under: Environment, Health, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:49

As the compact fluorescent lightbulb (CFL) becomes the only readily available replacement for boring old incandescent bulbs, more people are discovering that cleanup after breaking a CFL is not child’s play:

Not long ago, Dan Perkins was in his New Haven home when his wife told him that she’d broken a lightbulb. She’d been cleaning in the attic bedroom of their seven-year-old son when she knocked over a lamp. The bulb, one of those twisty compact fluorescents, shattered onto the carpet next to their son’s bed.

Perkins, who draws the political comic This Modern World under the name Tom Tomorrow, was vaguely aware that a broken compact fluorescent bulb might be more problematic than a broken conventional incandescent.

“I knew that they had some mercury in them,” Perkins says. “That had been kind of a propaganda point for the right wing in the debate over bulb efficiency, so that was on my radar.”

To learn what kind of risk the broken bulb posed and what he ought to do about it, Perkins turned to Google, which sent him to a fact sheet put out by the Connecticut Department of Public Health entitled “Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs: What to Do If a Bulb Breaks.”

“Stay calm,” the fact sheet instructed. But the four-page document that followed read more like reactor-core meltdown protocols than simple reassurance. It cautioned that small children, pregnant women, and pets should be sequestered from the breakage site and called for an immediate shutdown of any ventilation systems.

Here’s a post on the incandescent bulb ban and CFL breakage from earlier this year. Tom Kelley posted an informative comment to that post, addressing several issues including the energy efficiency of CFLs:

I don’t use enough of the CFLs to notice a difference in the electric bill, but in a straight-across, lumen for lumen, hour for hour comparison, these bulbs should lower one’s kW/hr electricity consumption (so says the Mythbusters tv show).

BUT, and this is a real big BUT, that does not translate into a reduction in the raw energy needed to create the electricity, due to a small detail known as “power factor.” While resistive loads like an incandescent bulb (typically) have a power factor of 1.0, the CFL bulbs have a 0.5 to 0.6 power factor rating, meaning that the CFL consumes as much as twice the raw “energy” (VA (Volt Amps) at the generator), as the electric meter measures in W (Watts).

So, one can go ahead and buy CFLs if one thinks the bulbs may lower one’s electric bill, but one should not be under any illusion that the CFLs are saving any consumption of coal, oil, gas, etc.

September 7, 2011

How much more will “green” renewable power cost?

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Environment, Government, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:37

In short, lots more than ordinary power generation:

The Telegraph has obtained a policy document, dated July, that seems to suggest that the government is considering a walk away from the most expensive renewables — and now we can see the full copy online. Two No 10 advisers challenge the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s utopian cost predictions, and say energy bills will be much bigger than we’ve been told.

What isn’t in contention is that energy itself will be much more expensive. DECC’s argument is that we’ll all start insulating our homes more — so our utility bills won’t reflect the higher per-unit energy costs. No 10’s energy expert thinks this is nonsense.

The Cameron advisors also suggest that government policy should be “open” to ditching some of the most expensive renewables — such as offshore wind power.

What’s the real cost of wind and solar?

     The former power director of the National Grid, Colin Gibson, now estimates that the lifetime per unit cost of onshore wind is £178 per megawatt hour (MWh), and offshore wind at £254/MWh. Nuclear is £60/MWh. The figures DECC provides don’t account for the huge additional transmission costs of wind.

     Note how much more expensive reality is than the clean, green vision. Government figures reckoned onshore wind cost £55/MWh and offshore wind £84/Mwh [. . .] compared to gas at £44/Mwh. Politicians seeking to dump the renewables policy could argue that green-minded civil servants sold them a pup. They’d be right.

September 4, 2011

James Delingpole forced to offer an apology

Filed under: Britain, Environment — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:45

Yes, it’s true. Delingpole made an error in a recent column and has to make a full apology for the error:

It has been brought to my attention that this blog owes Sir Reginald Sheffield, Bt. an apology. In a recent column entitled Green Jobs? Wot Green Jobs? (Pt 242), I carelessly suggested that Sir Reg — beloved dad of the famous environmentalist “Sam Cam”; distinguished father-in-law of the Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, no less — is making nearly £1000 a week from the wind turbines on his estates.

The correct figure is, of course, nearly £1000 a day.

In other words, Sir Reginald is making the equivalent of roughly 1000 looted widescreen plasma TV screens every year from the eight 400 foot wind turbines now enhancing the view for miles around on his 3,000 acre Normanby Hall estate, near Scunthorpe.

There will be those who suggest that my mistake is a resigning matter. I do share their concern. However it is my view that if a journalist is going to resign on a point of principle these days, it has to be over something immeasurably trivial, rather than over something merely quite trivial. What I do nevertheless agree is that I owe Sir Reginald Sheffield, Bt, an apology.

A big apology.

UK “will lose 2 to 3 per cent GDP a year for around 20 years” on renewable energy subsidies

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Environment, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:01

A report in The Register says that the subsidies for green renewable energy will be a big net drain on the national economy:

The UK’s headlong rush into renewable energy — one ignored by the rest of the world — will hit British jobs and then general incomes, an economic study finds.

The report, The Myth of Green Jobs by economist Professor Gordon Hughes of Edinburgh University, examines the long-term impacts of subsidising expensive “green” renewable energy projects. It says that if the UK continues to do so, it will lose 2 to 3 per cent GDP a year for around 20 years. If reducing CO2 emissions is your goal, says Hughes, your economy really can’t afford renewable energy.

[. . .]

“All forms of green energy tend to be substantially more expensive than conventional energy, so there is a trade-off between higher costs and lower emissions,” writes Hughes. “This trade-off is not specific to green energy, since there are many ways of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. Hence, the starting point of any assessment of such programmes should be the total cost per tonne of carbon dioxide saved — or its equivalent — which will be incurred by relying upon different measures or policies to reduce emissions.”

September 2, 2011

Christopher Howse welcomes the new dark (ages)

Filed under: Environment, Europe, Humour, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:20

A welcoming column on the new “lights” of modern Europe:

Normally, to read a book, one turns on the light. I had thought of that, but the numerous light switches in the room only brought a dim glow from various lengths of compact fluorescent lamps, some shaped like paperclips, others coiled like something from the pavements of dog-loving Dijon. You could tell that they were switched on, but it was as if someone had given the lights several coats of opalescent lacquer. It almost seemed as if the lamps attracted light gravitationally from nearby parts of the room, which were consequently left in shadow.

[. . .]

Except for not emitting light, there is little wrong with the new energy-saving bulbs, apart from their causing night-time falls, triggering epilepsy and storing up deadly poisons. But we must expect to make little sacrifices to save energy.

All over Europe, people are tumbling down the stairs in the small hours, snapping their femurs like breadsticks when they venture out of their bedrooms, perhaps to go to the loo – it isn’t unknown. That is because the energy-saving bulbs in the landing light take time to warm up. Those who survive the nocturnal pitfall soon notice that the new kind of bulbs flicker. For some, this triggers migraine; for others, epileptic fits. For me, it merely induces nausea and a sensation that the room is moving backwards and forwards. So I should count my blessings.

As for the mercury that the energy-saving bulbs contain, I have always found it a most beautiful metal, aptly named quicksilver, shining like the moon. Certainly, the effects of mercury poisoning are no fun: shedding of skin, loss of teeth and hair, salivation, sweating and forgetfulness. Yet anxiety about such matters is soon dispelled by the FAQs on the Energy Saving Trust website. “Energy-saving bulbs contain only tiny traces of mercury,” it says soothingly. “Imagine a pellet smaller than the tip of a Biro.” Yes, I’ve imagined that. It sounds ideal for the tip of a blowpipe-arrow or a Bulgarian secret service umbrella.

So remember to be very careful when you dispose of these wonderful new high-tech devices.

     . . . each fluorescent light bulb contains about 5 milligrams of mercury. Though the amount is tiny, 5 milligrams of mercury is enough to contaminate 6,000 gallons of drinking water, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

     Low level mercury exposure (under 5 milligrams) can cause tremors, mood shifts, sleeplessness, muscle fatigue, and headaches. High level or extended length exposure can lead to learning disabilities, altered personality, deafness, loss of memory, chromosomal damage, and nerve, brain, and kidney damage, as stated by the EPA. There is a particular risk to the nervous systems of unborn babies and young children.

H/T to Chris Greaves for the link.

August 7, 2011

Wind turbines totally dominate the skyline over Wolfe Island

Filed under: Cancon, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 18:39


Click to see full-size (very wide) image

I took this photo from the Wolfe Island ferry on Friday. It amazed me how many wind turbines were in view (32, I think). I kept having images of James Blish’s “spindizzies“.

July 4, 2011

British Green activist recants opposition to nuclear power

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:51

Unlike Germany, which has announced it will be shutting down its nuclear power plants, Britain is considering a new generation of plants to provide an even greater share of their electricity needs. Even a few green activists are changing their tune:

Also, as much as Greens are enthusiastic about solar electricity, in cloudy countries such as ours it is extremely inefficient and expensive. Nuclear power, on the other hand, is one of the cheapest ways of producing electricity, and it is much safer than many environmentalists would have us believe.

The objection of environmentalists to nuclear power — fears about the dangers of nuclear waste and the cost of decommissioning it — are overblown, which explains why many people don’t like the Greens.

[. . .]

Solving many of the world’s most critical environmental challenges will, in some cases, involve doing the exact opposite of what most environmentalists want.

Rather than retreating into hair-shirt austerity, I believe that, just as technology got us into this mess, technology is vital to get us out of it.

That means embracing some things that will make a lot of Green believers choke on their organic muesli.

It has taken me a long time to reach this conclusion. I used to passionately oppose not only nuclear power but GM crops. I once even threw a pie in the face of a Danish scientist who dared to question the orthodox environmental line. So what changed?

Through research, I found that much of what I believed about environmental issues had little, if any, basis in science. Put simply, though my concerns were right, my solutions were wrong.

June 11, 2011

They “buried the ban in the 300-plus pages of the 2007 energy bill, and very few talked about it in public”

Filed under: Economics, Government, Law, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:28

Virginia Postrel talks about the looming ban-that-isn’t-a-ban on incandescent lightbulbs:

One serious technophile, University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds, spent much of 2007 flogging compact fluorescents on his popular Instapundit blog, eventually persuading more than 1,900 readers to swap 19,871 incandescent bulbs for CFLs. To this day, the Instapundit group is by far the largest participant at OneBillionBulbs.com, a bulb-switching campaign organized by the consulting firm Symmetric Technologies. But Reynolds himself has changed his mind.

“I’m deeply, deeply disappointed with CFL bulbs,” he wrote last month on his blog. “I replaced pretty much every regular bulb in the house with CFLs, but they’ve been failing at about the same rate as ordinary long-life bulbs, despite the promises of multiyear service. And I can’t tell any difference in my electric bill. Plus, the Insta-Wife hates the light.”

That was our experience with the early CFL bulbs, too: they didn’t come close to achieving the longevity we were supposedly paying all the extra money for. And, as I’ve posted before, they’re not as easy to clean up after breakage as the older bulbs.

So the activists offended by the public’s presumed wastefulness took a more direct approach. They joined forces with the big bulb producers, who had an interest in replacing low-margin commodities with high-margin specialty wares, and, with help from Congress and President George W. Bush, banned the bulbs people prefer.

It was an inside job. Neither ordinary consumers nor even organized interior designers had a say. Lawmakers buried the ban in the 300-plus pages of the 2007 energy bill, and very few talked about it in public. It was crony capitalism with a touch of green.

Crony capitalism is what the general public is coming to think is the only kind of capitalism, because they have seen so much of it during the last few presidencies. Your business can be plagued with petty regulators enforcing nitpicking rules, while Congress showers money and special privileges on big businesses and banks.

But, as she points out, it’s not technically a true ban:

Now, I realize that by complaining about the bulb ban — indeed, by calling it a ban — I am declaring myself an unsophisticated rube, the sort of person who supposedly takes marching orders from Rush Limbaugh. In a New York Times article last month, Penelope Green set people like me straight. The law, she patiently explained, “simply requires that companies make some of their incandescent bulbs work a bit better, meeting a series of rolling deadlines between 2012 and 2014.”

True, the law doesn’t affect all bulbs — just the vast majority. (It exempts certain special types, like the one in your refrigerator.) The domed halogen bulbs meet the new standards yet are technically incandescents; judging from my personal experiments, they produce light similar to that of old- fashioned bulbs. They do, however, cost twice as much as traditional bulbs and, if the packages are to be believed, don’t last as long.

I keep hoping that LED lights will be able to produce the kind of long-life that we used to be able to depend upon from incandescents, as CFLs and halogen bulbs have not come close to living up to the promises. However, LEDs have not yet managed that trick in commercial applications.

So, aside from allowing lobbyists to flex their muscles, what is the ban attempting to achieve? That’s not quite clear-cut:

Though anti-populist in the extreme, the bulb ban in fact evinces none of the polished wonkery you’d expect from sophisticated technocrats. For starters, it’s not clear what the point is. Why should the government try to make consumers use less electricity? There’s no foreign policy reason. Electricity comes mostly from coal, natural gas and nuclear plants, all domestic sources. So presumably the reason has something to do with air pollution or carbon-dioxide emissions.

But banning light bulbs is one of the least efficient ways imaginable to attack those problems. A lamp using power from a clean source is treated the same as a lamp using power from a dirty source. A ban gives electricity producers no incentive to reduce emissions.

China finally admits to (some) problems at the Three Gorges megadam

Filed under: China, Environment, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:47

It’s been “officially” a wonderful thing with absolutely no negative attributes for so long that it’s almost refreshing that the Chinese government is finally admitting it’s not all good news around the massive Three Gorges dam and reservoir:

In private, officials have worried about the project for some time and occasionally their doubts have surfaced in the official media. But the government itself has refused to acknowledge them. When the project was approved by the rubber-stamp parliament in 1992, debate was stifled by the oppressive political atmosphere of the time, following the Tiananmen Square massacre three years earlier. Last July, with the dam facing its biggest flood crest since completion in 2006, officials hinted that they might have overstated its ability to control flooding. On May 18th, with the dam again in the spotlight because of the drought, a cabinet meeting chaired by the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, went further in acknowledging drawbacks.

Having called the dam “hugely beneficial overall”, the cabinet’s statement said there were problems relating to the resettlement of 1.4m people, to the environment and to the “prevention of geological disasters” that urgently needed addressing. The dam, it said, had had “a certain impact” on navigation, irrigation and water-supply downstream. Some of these problems had been forecast at the design stage or spotted during construction. But they had been “difficult to resolve effectively because of limitations imposed by conditions at the time.” It did not elaborate.

June 1, 2011

New report from the Obviousness Bureau: TEPCO underestimated earthquake/tsunami risks

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Japan, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:55

Hands up, anyone who didn’t see this coming? Okay, put your hands down board members of TEPCO:

Japan underestimated the risk of a tsunami hitting a nuclear power plant, the UN nuclear energy agency has said.

However, the response to the nuclear crisis that followed the 11 March quake and tsunami was “exemplary”, it said.

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, which was badly damaged by the tsunami, is still leaking radiation.

Japan’s Prime Minister Naoto Kan is facing a no-confidence vote submitted by three opposition parties over his handling of the crisis.

They say he lacks the ability to lead rebuilding efforts and to end the crisis at the Fukushima plant, public broadcaster NHK reported.

Some politicians from Mr Kan’s governing Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), including former Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, are backing the motion.

If it is passed in a vote expected on Thursday, Mr Kan would be forced to resign or call a snap election.

However, given the thousands of dead and missing from the earthquake and tsunami, the attention paid to Fukushima has been rather disproportional. As someone joked yesterday, radiation from Fukushima has killed fewer people (none) than e.coli tainted food in Germany (16 at last report).

Update: In case I’m being too obscure, the “this” I refer to in the initial paragraph is the with-the-benefit-of-hindsight conclusion that the Fukushima plant was inadequately prepared for the earthquake and subsequent tsunami.

May 12, 2011

“It should have been called The Cell”

Filed under: Economics, Environment — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:30

That’s Rob Lyons and he’s talking about an eco-residence called The Cube:

I think estate agents would refer to it as ‘compact and bijou’. It’s The Cube, the eco-home that’s showing just what sustainable living is all about. It should have been called The Cell.

The tiny house, which was on show at April’s Edinburgh Science Festival and is the brainchild of Dr Mike Page of the University of Hertfordshire, has an internal footprint of just three metres by three metres, yet has all the modern conveniences. There’s a tiny lounge with a flat-panel TV. If you want to dine with a friend, you need to swap half the sofa round with the sliding table. On the next level — reachable by a staircase so tiny that there’s only enough room for one foot at a time — you’ll find the composting toilet, the walk-in shower and the kitchen. (Is that even legal?) From there, you can clamber into the narrow bed, which could only accommodate two people if they both happen to be skinny vegans who don’t suffer from claustrophobia.

Everything is extremely well-insulated, including triple-glazed windows. Heat is provided by a heat-pump attached to the outside wall while electricity is generated through solar panels on the roof. Of course, they won’t work during the night, but you’ll have made so much money flogging electricity to the grid during the day — thanks to the insane prices at which electricity companies are obliged to buy micro-generated power — that you could actually earn £1000 per year.

All this could be yours for £50,000, assuming you’ve got some land to stick it on and you’re prepared to live in such cramped conditions. Considering you could buy a far larger luxury caravan with better facilities for less money (though not so well insulated), you may wonder why you would bother. But Page isn’t really interested in building eco-homes; in fact, he’s a psychologist. What he’s really interested in is why there is no demand for such eco-living, given that we now have lots of technology available to reduce our ‘impact’ — our ‘ecological footprint’.

April 18, 2011

The Magic Washing Machine, by Hans Rosling

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Health, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:49

H/T to Jon for the link.

April 16, 2011

Sorry for the lack of blogging

Filed under: Administrivia — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 22:32

Sorry for the lack of blogging today: just after I posted the Guild Wars 2 round-up, we had a power outage that lasted a few hours. By the time the power came back on, I didn’t get any opportunity to get back to the blog. Normal blogging will resume on Sunday (I hope).

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