Posted on 01/17/2009 5:05:53 PM PST by CedarDave
Heat loss calcs required us to heat our garage as well as the house and shop in order to make the smallest heat pump efficient. We have a 3.5 ton heat pump and a 5 ton closed loop geo-field. We light the fireplace when we get below -10F.
Greyfoxx39 is keeper of the NM list; please FReepmail her to be added.
I bought my current house ~20 years ago. It came with solar collectors to heat the home and provide low cost hot water.
The solar heating assist lowers my heating bill by ~ 1/3. (I know this because the blower motor for the heating side went out ~ 7 years ago, and our bills spiked drastically, before I replaced the motor.)
Solar power is our friend. Do not let your contempt of the left blind you to the benefits of solar heating and power gathering.
God bless.
Sursum Corda
Is that a Weber Performer?
I don’t understand the question, and therefore, apparently not.
Ah, the Weber...no idea what model, sorry.
Ping me when you can cook dinner and watch a movie after dinner with the solar and wind energy. Caveat: it has to be cheaper than current generation costs. Taxing the hell out of current methods is not a legitimate means of achieving a competitive cost.
I’m in agreement with cripplecreek who earlier in the thread said: “I’m all for alternatives as long as its your choice, more power to you.”
Indeed, when I built my house in NM, I took advantage of the warm winter sun to light and warm a sunroom which is bright and cozy. Solar panels for water heating could have been added too, though subdivision rules prohibit rooftop structures (such as evaporative coolers) without shielding. This was 15 years ago when energy was cheap. I suspect panels are available that do not look like the ugly black glass ones back then.
“Did you fall out of a tree?? Do you have any ideal what it would cost the private sector to build nuclear power plants. You could not sell the power for enough money to cover 10% of the cost of the liability insurance.”
Here in Michigan the only effective use of solar I get is with the big low e glass picture window. On a nice sunny day it really makes a big difference.
In hindsight, I should have realized that I would NEVER amortize the cost of that system vs simply using the natural gas heater in the house. Now I do the economic analysis FIRST. If that fails, nothing else matters.
BTW, I did do the economic analysis on my 2008 Mercury Mariner Hybrid. It was a wash with the promised $3,000 tax rebate. When I did my taxes, the $3000 rebate became $1202. Further, the promised mileage only works in mild climates with level roads. It's optimized for stop and go commuting. In the real world of Idaho, it gets 21 MPG during the winter and 25 MPG in the summer. Fall and Spring bump it to 27 MPG. EPA now claims 28 MPG combined/29 city/27 highway. The EPA estimate is less than honest. This is my last hybrid.
God bless.
Sursum Corda
I think you overestimate the liability insurance requirements ($300 million per facility primary insurance, and then secondary insurance) and how much it costs.
The Price-Anderson Act set up a pooling of liability across all operating reactors in the US. Right now, their pooled liability account is worth over $10 billion. Since the insurance requirements are based on a per-facility basis, and not on a size of the facility, the costs of the insurance are easily reduced by increasing the size of the reactor’s generation capacity.
The economics of nukes play out like this: the up-front capital costs are very high, but the ongoing operational costs on a per-MWH basis are lower than fueled power plants, and the economics become only better if we see $14/MMbtu natural gas, or high coal prices.
Here’s an example of the bizarre economics of power generation with our cheapest and most plentiful fuel: Due to the sulphur reduction requirements, coal in many areas of the US becomes uneconomical when one counts up the scrubbers and retrofits necessary to meet modern EPA requirements. Powder River Basin coal is cheap (because it has less BTU content than eastern coal), but it is low in sulphur. The problem is the transport cost - PRB coal could come out of Wyoming at, oh, $14/short ton, but by the time it reached the east cost, rail costs might have turned that into $60/ton. That’s still better than the $100/ton for local Appalachian coal, even with the higher BTU content, because the costs for emissions retrofit drives the capital and operational costs up with the higher S content.
Ah, but what happens if these plants convert to PRB coal... but then the price of diesel goes up to $5/gal in the future? Well, they’re screwed, and so are their ratepayers. There’s nothing the power company can do but pass the costs of coal+transport (which would likely be, oh, $70+/ton) through.
With a nuke? Pfah. It just keeps churning along, impervious to most all changes in oil/coal/natural gas prices. Can they recoup their costs in the future high fuel cost environment? Yes, they can, provided they could get sufficiently attractive financing for their capital costs.
All of the foregoing does not take into account the costs of carbon cap-n-trade scams, which would simply raise the price of coal/NG/oil plants even further. And nukes would be sitting there, smiling all the way to the bank, because they would have to pay no emissions trading fees.
The liability insurance costs for nukes will disappear into the noise in the future promised to us by The One and his acolytes.
Myrrdin’s experience is not atypical for alternative energy system customers. Too many of the AE system companies have “true believers” as their founders and promoters, and nowhere near enough actual engineers.
This is why so many of us engineers hold these alternative energy schemes in contempt. I’ve seen so many schemes and had so many pitched at me by “true believers” (most all of whom had liberal arts degrees and a big passion for alternative energy) that I now have a stock response/speech I give to these people, and a well-rehearsed checklist of things they must prove before I will waste five minutes evaluating their wonderful new system(s). The first item I require some of these people answer is “Does your system depend on a deliberate or unspoken violation of the second law of thermodynamics?”
If they come back with “What’s that?!” the conversation is over.
I’ve worked on PV systems for people, and while the PV systems I worked on were the only power option (short of a diesel genset) for remote ranches in Nevada, the people selling these systems always seemed to over-promise and under-deliver, and their installation of the systems always seemed to come up short on reliability and shorter yet on economics.
#1 issue I have with most PV shops: they get the system cost down by using “deep cycle truck batteries.” What a false economy. The only viable storage cells I still see out there are the old, beastly L-16 batteries, and only the most competent PV shops seem to convince people of the long-term economy of these units.
Right there, in your pics, is the type of “alternative energy” that I keep pointing out to people is THE best starting point: using the earth to reduce heating/cooling requirements in a completely passive fashion. Using ICF’s gets you an added bonus.
Next, I’d recommend that people look at some of the most recent studies on heat loss in domestic structures coming out of various labs. One of the biggest causes of heat loss (once we get by the obvious: doors/windows/insufficient insulation) is the technique of using wall studs that connect to both the inside wall and outside wall. I’ve seen some papers recently on a house constructed with 8” walls, but using 2x6” studs. They alternate the studs - every other stud is nailed to the inside wall, but not the outside wall, and vice-versa. Turns out that when we get into thicker walls with modern insulation, the studs connecting the inside wall to the outside wall conduct more heat out of the house in winters than one might imagine - until we look at it with an IR camera. Then the relative insufficiency of the wood as an insulation compared to the wall fill stands out like a sore thumb...
With an end to governments stupid regulations we would indeed be able to provide it cheaper. Government subsidies don’t make it cheaper, its guaranteed to do the opposite because no-one is aware of how much is flying out of their pocket in other places to pay for it. They ARE paying full price through taxes and higher prices, better for it to be upfront and honest. Then consumers can make informed decisions about how much electricity to use.
solar cannot be a primary power source, we do not have the level of technology to make that even near feasible.
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