Aug 20 2008
Ranty McRantpants strikes again
There was a pamphlet enclosed with the electric bill, explaining why rates are so high. They’re actually doing us a huge favor. According to their graph, they’re losing money by giving us a break. Were they not such humanitarians, our bills would be five times what they are now, so we should all be thankful for this latest rate hike.
Burning coal is cheap, but it’s filthy.
Burning natural gas (which they do) is clean, but it’s increasingly expensive.
They’re working to lift the ban on nuclear power plants because that will be cheaper, too. Potentially dangerous on an epic scale, but cheaper.
We live in the Sunshine State. Not one word was mentioned about solar power.
We live in a state with hundreds of miles of coastline, along which there is a perpetual breeze. Not one word was mentioned about windmills.
We live in a state with hundreds of miles of coastline, along which there is a constant movement of water. Not one mention was made of hydroelectric power, or whatever they call it when it’s wave power instead of dammed rivers.
No, we’re just going to keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them for the past 50 years and hope something magically changes. Instead of trying something new, which would be inconvenient, we’re going to wait until the day we completely exhaust all the nonrenewable resources we’ve been relying on and then say, “Oh, shit. Now what? Didn’t those environmental crackpots say something a while back about ‘harnessing the power of the sun’? Stupid hippies. I like the sound of forcing everyone in the world to pay for something that’s free, like those other guys did with bottled water. Let’s sell ‘em sunlight!”
We should have begun implementing alternative power sources 50 years ago. It didn’t have to be 100 percent alternative power overnight. If we’d converted a measly 1 percent a year, we could now be at a point where a significant portion of the energy burden was not dependent on finite resources.
We didn’t start 50 years ago, or 40 or 30 or 20 or 10. It’s not too late, but there’s no indication we’re going to start tomorrow, either. The attitude remains: “*pfft* Tomorrow is somebody else’s problem!”
Kinda makes me want to buy a shack in the boonies, cover the roof with solar panels, erect a wind turbine in the back yard (they run about 40 grand, hence the shack), and go completely off-grid.
Did you know, if you generate more power than you can use yourself, the electric company will buy the surplus from you? So they know it works. They just want somebody else to take responsibility for it.
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August 20th, 2008 at 6:17 am
According to my dad, who’s all crazy about solar power because they live in Arizona and it’s sunny 300+ days out of the year, there’s been a recent breakthrough with solar which will make it way cheaper for the average Joe to buy–like paint-on solar power.
You could get it for your house once it’s around. Cut your electricity bills in half.
August 20th, 2008 at 8:09 am
I’ll start saving up for a house so I don’t incur the Wrath of the Landlord for altering his slum.
I read a book by P.J. Tracy a few weeks ago in which the bad guys’ schtick was that when the system has failed, the individual needs to take matters into his own hands. While I’m not on board with deploying a truckload of nerve gas in front of the local mosque to get rid of those durn furiners (like the aforementioned bad guys), the idea of reclaiming personal responsibility from a system that encourages dependence and then fails/neglects/abuses those dependent on it has stuck with me.
As it stands, the power industry has a monopoly going. If you’re dissatisfied, too bad for you, it’s not like you can switch providers. The only way to avoid getting assraped by them until the day you die is to eliminate your need for what they provide by generating your own electricity.
Why stop there? Grow your own food so you’re not paying $4 for lettuce (because it had to be transported using $$$$$$ gas) covered in hormones and pesticides and E. coli. Home school your kids, since the schools have abandoned academics. Quit supporting a bloated healthcare system by seeking medical attention for anything short of a life-threatening illness or injury.
Then I think, “If I made up a religion, that would be so David Koresh of me.” Couple years from now, you’ll be seeing me on the news, defending the Federated Republic of Kerrynesia from the American despots…
August 21st, 2008 at 5:24 pm
Back in the eighties (I forget exactly when) they were all ready to go on the Solar Power Satellite project — the technology was there, the money was there, everything was set to go.
If you collect solar power from orbit, weather and all are irrelevant, and you don’t get the atmospheric scattering so it’s more efficient all around. The plan was to collect solar energy at the satellite, then beam it down to antenna farms as low-power microwaves. And just to be extra cool, they planned to mount the antennas on tallish masts so the land beneath could still be used to graze livestock. Bonus!
Of course, it was not to be. Ads started appearing which stirred up hysterical panic in the general public (easy to do since your average American is a complete moron when it comes to science, and not too bright when it comes to general logic or critical thinking, either) over radioactive cows and glow-in-the-dark hamburgers and other such crap. They got an initiative on the ballot and killed the SPS project. So there you go.
Rumor had it that the scare campaign was backed by the traditional power players, whose income was (and still is) based on oil and coal. I believe it, because there was just way too much ad campaign to have been financed by a handful of whack-jobs; there was serious money behind it all. And of course, the voting public was just stupid enough to buy into it.
If it’d gone through, we could’ve had a dozen satellites up by now, and a huge chunk of our electricity could’ve been solar — and usefully, reliably solar. Panels will only get you so far.
Wind turbines are great too, if the conditions are right for them. When my husband and I flew to Europe last year, one thing I noticed looking out the airplane windows was that there were little clumps of wind turbines all over the place, anywhere for twenty or more in an open field to just one or two near a highway. You don’t have to have a huge chunk of open land to use wind power.
And yeah, you can sell energy back to the power company; I read an article a few years ago about a school that put up a wind turbine and had free electricity and an income from the extra. It’s a great idea, although the initial investment makes it something most individuals aren’t willing to get into.
I don’t think we’ll get into sustainable energy in any large-scale way any time soon. We’ll go on the way we always have, with the vast majority of our energy needs coming from coal and oil because the infrastructure is there for it and American businesses are too focused on this quarter’s bottom line to think about what’s good for everyone, or even for their own company ten or twenty years from now. Any corporate officers who sacrifice today’s profits for advantages a decade or more down the road will be fired, so you can’t really even blame them; the ones who are willing to take action to make sure the company can sustain itself and prosper in 2030 won’t be around long enough to make any difference. The shareholders want their profits Right Now, and that’s the end of it. [shrug]
We’ll struggle along until the economy’s about to collapse. We’ll only switch to solar, wind or wave power when it’s actually less expensive than power from coal and oil. And as much as energy prices have increased lately, we still have quite a while to go before that happens. :/
Angie
August 22nd, 2008 at 9:42 am
Am I the only one who finds it terribly depressing that visionary concepts are no longer heralded as brilliance? We reached a certain technological threshhold a few decades ago, and that put a select few in a position of tremendous wealth/power, and they wield that wealth/power to ensure nothing happens to knock them down a peg. The vast majority of our “science” now appears to be focused on vanity items—shoes that make you jump higher, cooler movie special effects, smaller MP3 players with more memory, bigger TVs with a thinner profile, a more powerful, more gas-guzzling engine for that pimped-out SUV—nothing that’s going to change the world, much less improve it.
And there’s no incentive for anyone with the know-how to develop something revolutionary that will change the world because you can’t change a lightbulb anymore without the government (there’s your highest concentration of absence of general logic or critical thinking right there) putting their grubby little hands all over it because GAWD FORBID anything should happen to displease the people who fund their campaigns.
I hate politics, starting with the PTA and going all the way up to the UN. Half popularity contest, half pissing contest, complete neglect of serving the best interests of the people supposedly represented.
And I’m sure that has something to do with my electric bill, but I’m too morose now to figure it out.