More BS from the greenies...

[ray1970]

Why would you buy a new home with no A/C?

I thought that was pretty standard these days.

Oh, and I'd kill to have a $90 bill. On a slow month it usually runs me around $150 and when the heat or AC are really working it is just north of $250. Sucks in the summer because the water bill is usually around $275 so I'm forking out over $500 a month just for utilities.

I guess when you have an older, less efficient home and like to keep it about 68 degrees year round then that's the price you pay.

[Great-Kazoo]

Why would you buy a new home with no A/C?

I thought that was pretty standard these days.

Oh, and I'd kill to have a $90 bill. On a slow month it usually runs me around $150 and when the heat or AC are really working it is just north of $250. Sucks in the summer because the water bill is usually around $275 so I'm forking out over $500 a month just for utilities.

I guess when you have an older, less efficient home and like to keep it about 68 degrees year round then that's the price you pay.

68* That's a heat wave in this house. AC is set for 76. heat @ 65

[Irving]

Why would you buy a new home with no A/C?

I thought that was pretty standard these days.

Oh, and I'd kill to have a $90 bill. On a slow month it usually runs me around $150 and when the heat or AC are really working it is just north of $250. Sucks in the summer because the water bill is usually around $275 so I'm forking out over $500 a month just for utilities.

I guess when you have an older, less efficient home and like to keep it about 68 degrees year round then that's the price you pay.

Looks like you answered your own question.

My bill for 5/13/16-6/14/16 is $71.25.
That's $45.13 electricity and $26.12 natural gas.

Month before that was $72.75.

[SAnd]

Green is the new Red. That's all.

Not so new.
Watermelons. Green on the outside, Red on the inside. I first heard that at least 45 years ago. Maybe they aren't hiding as much now.

[Not_A_Llama]

I've seen various memes and perused various articles concluding that wind turbines will never pay for their own "carbon footprint" if you consider the hundreds of tons of steel that is required for their production (which must be mined, transported, formed, etc., probably with coal-burning furnaces haha) and other associated costs, like producing, transporting, and installing the actual turbines, along with the regular required maintenance, which is all performed by fossil-fuel burning vehicles, the required infrastructure, etc. Is this remotely accurate?

I think more people are looking at wind as a Renewable Energy play more than a carbon play, given the incentives out there, but there's not really a question that turbines do also have a carbon-offsetting role.

NREL did a harmonization study some time ago, where they looked at lifecycle emissions: http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/sustain_lca_wind.html

Their harmonized lifecycle (all-in) estimates of carbon emissions show 3-45 g CO2e/KWh (0.003-0.045 Metric Tons/MWh). California's cap&trade program assigns a default emissions rate for imported power of 0.428 Tons/MWh. That number's debated enough and still stands, so I'm comfy using it. If you believe that each MWh of wind displaces a MWh of other (mostly fossil fuel) generation, the implication is that each MWh generated of wind displaces something like 0.4 tons of CO2 emission.

On an incremental basis, a 1 MW slice of turbine running at 30% capacity factor for a year will offset something like 1000 tons of CO2 (1 MW*8760 hrs/year*30%*0.40 tons/MWh). You can expect something like 20 years of service from a windfarm. 20,000 tons of CO2 should readily cover the construction of a turbine, even by relatively alarmist standards: ( https://stopthesethings.com/2014/08/...-wind-turbine/ )

I've given pretty wide berth for exacerbatory/mitigatory factors, and you do run into a lot of philosophical questions about what should count for CO2 in the manufacturing process, but saving 20k tons leaves a lot of slack to cover manufacture/install/maintain footprint, IMO.


ETA: Sensitivity analysis around the NREL lifecycle figure.. if you take the highest surveyed value of 80g/KWh vs the harmonized mean of 24g/KWh (the number I used), the difference is 56 g/KWh. This leads to 147 fewer tons per year offset, or 3,000 tons/20 years (three kilotons per score?) less than the number I conjured above. 17,000 tons saved vs 20,000 tons probably doesn't change the balance much.

[ColoradoTJ]

Want to know what a person with a regular income pays?

I live in a 1500 sqft single level brand new house with no A/C and all of the most efficient appliances. Our electric bill is usually $90+ every month. I would consider us to be pretty energy-conscious, mostly because we pay (on average) 2.1x more per KWh here than we did in Colorado Springs and we can't afford to leave the lights on. Of course, I'm too "rich" to get subsidized utilities (read: My basic Air Force income is too much to use the government to force someone else to pay for my financial decisions.)



ETA: Do we have an industry experts on wind power?

I've seen various memes and perused various articles concluding that wind turbines will never pay for their own "carbon footprint" if you consider the hundreds of tons of steel that is required for their production (which must be mined, transported, formed, etc., probably with coal-burning furnaces haha) and other associated costs, like producing, transporting, and installing the actual turbines, along with the regular required maintenance, which is all performed by fossil-fuel burning vehicles, the required infrastructure, etc. Is this remotely accurate?

My utility bill for the month was 145.00 for all 4 utilities with a bit more square footage. I have a wife and two girls that love to leave every damn light on in the house, a wife that takes long hot showers and kids that take bath/showers every day due to swimming. Since it has been Africa out lately, my AC has been running non-stop. We have very reasonable rates in Colorado Springs. I had someone bitching about the rates today in fact when I was picking up my welding supplies. It never fails....

Not_a_Llama had a good post on wind generation.

[Gman]

CO2 is plant food. Healthy plants mean healthy cows. Healthy cows mean a healthy me.

[UncleDave]

CO2 is plant food. Healthy plants mean healthy cows. Healthy cows mean a healthy me.

+1,000,000

[Aloha_Shooter]

I'm not saying Solar is not the way to go, just that this particular project has yet to produce even a large fraction of what it was designed to(much like many nuke plants), yet the greenies are hailing it as a huge success. Conceptually, this design has considerable merit, but it has not yet realized that potential.

Photovoltaic generation, on the other hand, is a deep dark rabbit hole. Between the ecological impacts and energy required to manufacture the systems make these unworkable on a large scale, and uneconomical for most applications on a smaller scale.

Well, I am saying solar is not the way to go, not in broad application like envisioned by greenies and Obamabots. If Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are successful in dramatically lowering the cost of launch then solar power satellites become viable and change the equation because they can safely beam the collected power through clouds via continuous wave microwaves (not pulsing like your microwave oven).

Solar is certainly an option and should be used in areas where you can count on low cloud cover (like Nevada, Arizona, much of Colorado, Hawaii, etc.) but it's highly uneconomical in most developed areas of the world. IIRC, BP or BT make a big deal about solar power generation at their London HQ, even to the point of having a board in the lobby providing a running tally on the power generated by their solar panels on the roof. What they don't tell you is how much of that electricity they're burning to run the fancy board or (and thiis is the kicker) that they run light bubls up to the solar panel to keep it illuminated so it can show electricity "production".

I'm all for solar and wind generation where it makes sense -- however, the numbers don't work in most circumstances without a HUGE deus ex machina.

[TFOGGER]

Solar has great potential in the areas where it makes sense, like the big, empty deserts of the world. In the most populated portions, not so much. If someone can solve the demand/production levelling issues, it might , make more sense. The big issue I have is that it doesn't make sense from an economic standpoint, and transmitting power from the areas of production to the areas of greatest consumption is horribly inefficient. Perhaps a decentralized power distribution system using something like Bloom Boxes, powered by natural gas would make more sense. Smarter guys than me, please chime in!