David Both

Save the environment.

Save the Earth.

Save ourselves.

Duke Energy is exploring a new (for the energy industry at least) a way to provide solar power as a significant power generation method. The model would be to use solar panels installed on commercial and residential roofs as the source of power to reduce (and perhaps someday eliminate??) other types of power generating plants.

The basic idea is that the power company installs the solar panels on your roof and you pay a fixed rate for the power you use for twenty years, locking in today’s rate. The power company pays the up-front costs so the homeowner does not have to. You use the power you need during the day and the excess goes to the grid. At night you get your power from the grid, when less power is needed.

The News and Observer ran this story today. http://www.newsobserver.com/business/story/1042628.html

This is a similar financial arrangement to the one used by The Citizenre Corporation to provide solar power to homeowners. See my post on this, Solar Energy for Everyone?? I wonder if Duke Energy and other energy utilities will use this model to prevent entry to the market for these newcomers?

I do believe that this is truly the future of the energy industry. The power companies will install the generating equipment on the properties with the energy sources, whether solar, wind, geothermal and even small hydro, and use any excess generating capacity to reduce dependencies on coal, oil, and nuclear plants. I can only hope that Progress Energy, which provides our power here in Raleigh, moves in this direction as well. I would sign up in a New York second for this if it becomes available here.

I also believe that there will be no way to completely eliminate those other, dirty types of power generation with the technology we have today, but any reduction at all is a very good thing.

Executives of poorly performing and criminally negligent companies rake in millions of dollars in bonuses and stock options not to mention grotesquely inflated salaries while they cut wages and benefits for U.S. workers and move many jobs overseas. At the same time they use offshore shell corporations to hide billions in income and profits so that they can evade U.S. income taxes.

Even the bozos who rip off a company and its shareholders, or who are just plain incompetent get away with golden parachutes worth tens to hundreds of millions of dollars and never have to be held accountable for their actions. We worker bees are held accountable when we spend $49.00 for a book we need to do our jobs. Is that fair – or even reasonable?

I have just one question: if all the meaningful and correspondingly well-paid jobs go overseas to where they can pay less, and the jobs remaining in the U.S. pay a pittance, who do these corporations think will purchase their products? No one will have the wherewithal to do so.

No wonder the economy is all screwed up. Can anyone fix it?

I have just upgraded to WordPress 2.5 which now contains a very much improved search feature. Searches now included both posts, as before, and pages so that your search will find search terms wherever they appear on my site.

Back on October 20, of 2007, I installed WordPress as an experiment to see whether it would work well for my needs. It has, and I intend to keep using it. In the nearly six months since I started using WordPress, there have been two updates. Those two updates have brought WordPress a long way even though it was eminently usable as it was.

WordPress is flexible and powerful so I have also installed and started using it in the network lab where I work. We use it to manage important data such as Q&As for the users and to post notifications of outages.

I plan to continue using WordPress.

Here is an interesting post that offers a way to obtain “real” gasoline from plant matter. Why wait for nature to convert plants and dinosaurs into oil when we can go straight there?

Green Tech Blog – Green gasoline from plant matter

Of course there is always a downside. We could convert all of our forests to liquid fuel in the form of this new gasoline. Perhaps burning the Amazon rain forest could at least produce fuel instead of merely pollution.

However, we cannot just keep using more and more. While this is a great step forward in some ways, conservation and more efficient vehicles is critical. And as the quote says, solar is the ultimate energy form. Get it right from the source.

“I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”

 - Thomas Edison, in conversation with Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone, 1931

Well there might be snake oil after all. The Citizenre Corporation uses a multilevel marketing scheme (MLM) to sell its products. Does that make it bad all by itself? No, but it does raise some flags.

Despite that I have registered on the company’s web site and will see what transpires.

 I found this interesting link a couple days ago. This company, The Citizenre Corporation has a new idea for supplying solar energy to residential users.

After evaluating your home and the environment surrounding it with respect to solar energy potential, they will install a photo-voltaic system and charge you only what you are currently paying (an average of the last three years of your power bills) for a contract term of 25 years. This is whether your local electric rates go up or not.

So you are basically guaranteed today’s energy costs for 25 years. Interesting.

Is there any snake-oil here? I don’t know. I plan to look into this and see if it makes sense for us. We have lots of roof, but we bought our house for the shade trees.

More to come…