worth thinking about – grid vs load vs renewables, particularly PV.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9205#more

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.co.nz/

a wee taste:

Still, that’s not a popular message just now, and I’m guessing that it’s going to become a great deal more unpopular as industrial civilization stumbles deeper into crisis. It doesn’t require a witch’s curse to make people cling frantically to exactly those things that are destroying them and their future, just the psychology of previous investment and a few other standard self-defeating habits of the human mind.  Still, there’s the choice: share the feast and share the fall, or wake up and walk away. Which will you do?

 

He’s a good fellow – – it’s well worth the read.

Jim Mora – credit where credit’s due. And solar voltaic water heating.

My ears pricked up when I heard Jim Mora mentioning ‘powerdown’ coming up as a Panel discussion. Made sure I listened. Stephen Franks was the usual mantra you’d ewxpect from that kind, Findlay Macdonald was better – even thoughtful. It is rare to hear ‘Steady-State economies’ being seriously raised by media folk; a big step in the right direction.

  The sad inclusion was a fellow from the National Business Review, as the ‘ring-in’. Straight mantra; all things can apparently be substituted, should the become scarce, t’will always be thus (because it’s been like that for tha last 200 years). The last 200 years have seen a continuous non-lneal use of energy, all finite fossil energy. Sure, he mentioned solar, but transmitted by which conductor? At the end of the day, these folk remind me of Rumplestiltskin – straw into gold, no worries. It’ll happen, you just need the price to be right.

Makes you weep, really. I was toying with a complaint – that an economist had been rung-in to address a physics issue – when Mora suggested the subject might need revisiting in a ‘part2’.

Good on you Jim – I volunteer!

We went to a presentation last night, re solar voltaics as a water-heating source. I’ve been to many a lecture and learned less, the lady sure knew her stuff. Essentially, PV is now so cheap (she was quoting 50c AU$ a Watt) that it beats grid power, which means we will never see another hydro dam. We may well see a plethora of companies installing PV, both water-heating and as power, and inevitably the power companies will buy into the action, Interesting times!

The lady suggested her business model would be a modest upfront deposit, then monthly repayments pegged below the grid cost until repaid; this on an expected outlay cheaper than equivalent water-heaters today.

Better do an Update!

Given the exposure on Jim Mora’s programme yesterday, I thought I’d better do an update.

 

As far as the family is concerned, Ishmael nowadays is the mate/engineer on a 150-foot super-yacht, which shuttles between the Med and the Caribbean. Jaryd is skydiving in Chch tomorrow, then flying to Rarotonga to join Evohe, trailing the Wakas (google: Ocean Voyaging.com, I think). Jennie and I are not long home from doing the Rail Trail (article will be in the Mag about two months hence.

 

Otherwise, we just watch the slow-motion train-wreck which we have for so long predicted. And still the nonsense comes – Morning Report this morning talking of “plenty of money in Europe”. So help me, when was negative money (debt) ever money? It’s not lies, but it is ignorance. Sigh.

 

Anyway – it was fun yesterday, looks like a lot of folk enjoyed it. Has to be good.