Things that have interested me lately

[undyingking]

• Acceptosaurus -- this, and the comments underneath, are very funny whether or not you're involved in submitting papers, evolutionary biology, etc.
• Lady GaGa is an Illuminati puppet -- does this surprise anyone at all? And the Bad Romance song and video are all about Baphomet, as they would be.
• George Monbiot slams the feed-in tariff -- my own feeling is that micro does have some place, eg. solar hot water. But he does a good job here of exposing the skewed financing behind the current plans. I'd be interested to hear your critiques, if you disagree.
• Flip Flop Fly -- an excellent collection of sport-related infographics. Mostly to do with baseball, but toward teh foot of the page there are a load to do with other sports. Not all of the data is especially interesting, but it's a great showcase of different diagramming / design techniques.
  

[Poll #1533213]

Comments

[watervole.livejournal.com]

Sadly, I think Monbiot has it spot on.

I agree with you that solar hot water heating may just about break even (unlike the others which are useless loss-makers), but those aren't being subsidised as far as I'm aware.

And not doing insulation first is criminal.

[damiancugley.livejournal.com]

The problem being that solar heating is efficient because it does not convert to electricity first—which is what makes it impossible to fit in to the feed-in tariff scheme.

Some kind of feed-in tariff system would be needed if smart grids were to take off, so perhaps this could be seen as kick-starting the grid idea now so that in 15 years when smart meters are being rolled out they seem like a natural progression.

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

I didn't realise the tariffs were so generous, making the scheme daft. Of course without them, it would make more sense to wait, as with 20 year payback and solar technology improving by 10% a year, you'd better wait for 5 years to get a much more efficient scheme. Instead you mush rush in before May.

(I love the idea of cross-wiring your mains input to the supposed solar output and making 600% profit)

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Even without cross-wiring (which I guess they would spot), it might be worthwhile to use mains elec to make your "wind" turbine go round and round, and feed back the power that it generates therefrom.

[zengineer.livejournal.com]

If I understood what was being said they don't measure what you produce they pay back based on your nominal production which is set at 5-7% of the cost of the panel. It's wasteful but not particularly lucrative to you depending on what interest rate you can get on your money for an indefinite length loan. Connecting your input to output would cost you more. It seems to me to be a normal Keynesian tax funded demand stimulus offensive to my libertarian sensibilities but not unusual.
We had the boiler man around last week. He is trained in solar water heating installation but after a few minutes discussion he opined that it didn't really make sense. It's a high complexity system with a more than 10 year payback even if it never goes wrong.

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

Steve Rothman installed solar heating 10 years ago, and seemed to have no end of problems with the plumbing.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I'm all in favour of Keynesian tax-funded demand stimuli myself, but only if they're actually creating something useful at the same time. I suspect there are alternative ways of spending this particular money whereby we might end up with some sort of investment in an actual benefit.

[zengineer.livejournal.com]

I was reading an article this week that suggested a better way to fund things and a way used more commonly in other countries is that if a government wants something it issues an invitation to tender for it. So if it wants (say) a cheap solar panel factory it should issue an ITT for every south facing government building roof to be retiled with solar panels produced from a UK factory. This is more or less the way it works in defence in which Britain is quite successful and seems less likely to create incentives for people to do perverse things.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Wouldn't that be in contravention of EU law? -- I had the feeling it was illegal to rectrict govt contracts to domestic businesses, apart from in certain security-critical areas. Although perhaps that just applies to ownership, not to location of factory.

[zengineer.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure but it does happen. All EU governments give grants for car makers to build new models in their country even with foreign based companies like Nissan and Toyota.

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

Convert your garage into a wind tunnel? Then they'd have to get weather data to ask how you generated in a flat calm.

[cardinalsin.livejournal.com]

I suspect the main reason for feed-in tariffs is the symbolic value, i.e. getting people bought into the idea of renewable energy, and tapping into good will generally.

Regarding the issue around the electricity being generated at the wrong time of day; there may actually be an answer to this. I believe the proposals are intimately linked to those around smart grids, which are meant to solve this sort of problem, and parallel problems around things like charging electric cars (which would cause a surge in demand at certain times of day). I don't know enough about them to be sure whether this would form a convincing rebuttal, but worth looking into.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Mm, I don't attach much weight to the time-of-day thing, as there are always ways of storing electricity, some of them fairly eficient.