No, my first paragraph attempts to spell out why solar PV is a dud for people who do it the worst way possible, by selling all the electricity produced at drastically reduced rates to the grid, then buying it back at exorbitant rates, you are wasting well over 75% of what you could be saving. Of course it looks bad when you waste that much.
I have no mechanism needed to make it financially viable, and the idea that it might take more energy to produce a panel than it will produce itself is ridiculous.
I didn't 'make time' for anything, it just so happened that my lifestyle was perfect for solar, since I already did my housework during the daytime.
I have what's called a 'time of use' meter, which means it splits the day into 3 time zones, and keeps track of what I produce vs what I use from the grid. That means I essentially do get 1:1 for my production, which never reaches the point where they owe me money, but does offset almost all the juice I use (during the daytime) At night, we use normal grid power at normal grid rates. Too bad Australia doesn't do it that way.

yes, there are costs to an array, but they are one time costs, and FAR less than what's saved. That part is simple math. My system cost around $34K after rebates, maybe $40 without them, and it saves me around $5K per year in electric costs (based on 2007 rates, which have gone up). That includes production costs, installation cost, shipping cost, permit cost, etc.
Here in the US, daytime IS peak power use time. it's when business are using the most power, and when AC units are on, so the grid uses the power I feed in without problem. Industry uses WAY more power than homes. Solar offsets them using the hydro, gas turbines, and ramping up nuclear plants during the day, when they are used the most.
If my bill is lower, it means I used less fossil fuel generated electricity, so it IS working like a charm. How do you think otherwise? it's not perfect, and doesn't erase all other production, and is not a solution to ALL energy production problems, but it is a good part of the solution, unless it's done in the least productive manner possible.

What are you talking about, 2-3X the energy input? If you actually only count the costs, not the profit made at each stage in selling/installing panels, they probably come in more like 5-10 times the energy input, with little or no carbon footprint (many factories make the panels using power produced by other panels...as in pure solar factories).
My calculations (verified by my bills) put it at <1/2 the cost of buying (mostly coal produced) electricity from the grid at 2007 prices (even without any rebates), so how do you figure coal power production is cheaper, even ignoring all the other costs/problems? Coal may give a 30 to 1 return if you ignore ALL the other costs involved in using coal. If you count them, it's more like 1 to 2, because the effects of coal are so incredibly expensive, as is the cost of digging it up, transporting it, storing it, burning it, and disposing/storing the toxic waste products.

The cost of restoring a river is far more than the value of 100% of the power generated by a dam during it's lifetime.

Put simply, if solar PV is such a bad deal, how are they saving me so much money even without any rebates?

Because Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the rest... "CO2 is good for the Earth, it helps plants" (ignoring that most plants are absorbing about as much CO2 as they can already, and ignoring the bigger problem that very little of the Earth is green, and no walls or ceilings to keep the CO2 where plants are), "compact fluorescent bulbs are stupid, they have mercury in them!" (ignoring that the mercury in them and the mercury put into the air by the power plant is less than the mercury put into the air by the power plant to power regular bulbs). And the news media paints it as a debate, having one climate change scientist debate one climate change denier (though the media still refuses to call them deniers and paints them as skeptics) and this isn't just the right wing media, almost all the media in the US presents it as a debate. They don't present the fact that a 97% consensus exists.

Then there is religion. They talk how insane it is to assume that humans, made of God could destroy God's work. That we can't damage the Earth as God made it... of course they take the idea of destruction literal, and not in the way people actually mean when they say it's destroying the Earth. They also don't care about the repercussions of future generations as "Jesus is coming soon, well before any of this will matter"... more or less an actual quote. They believe also that God has granted mankind all authority over the Earth and not that it was stewardship over the Earth, so we can and should do whatever we want.

There's also ignorance. The media, especially the right wing media, portray the idea of climate change as presented is being presented as being only 100% caused by humans, they claim that the pro climate change scientists won't acknowledge any part of it might be natural. The media is playing it as an all or nothing scenario, either humans caused it all, or caused none of it. This isn't what any scientists are saying. They are just pointing out the natural uptick vs the uptick we are seeing is explained by human burning of fossil fuels, and that's what the 97% consensus is about, the uptick we are observing vs what would be expected naturally. But not understanding, and thinking science is ignoring all possible natural causes, they deny the whole thing.

Heck, just look at the media uproar over the supposed mini ice age that is coming in 2030 or so. Of course the actual paper never mentions an ice age or climate at all, and neither did the presentation. The problem was the press release for presentation mentioned the Maunder Minimum and linked to the Wikipedia article about it, and from there the media assumed that would mean a new mini ice age, even though the mini ice age during that time was started before the Maunder Minimum. Nobody in the climate change community is really calling for a mini ice age (just like it was never widely thought in the 70s that we were heading for global cooling, it was understood even then it was warming, the cooling thing came from an article in Time if I recall correctly, not exactly a peer reviewed science journal) come the 2030's, at best we may get a very small slow down of the warming, but CO2 levels are 40% higher than during the Maunder Minimum. Anyhow the media tends to mislead the public with things that wasn't actually said. The right wing media machines especially know that their audience won't vet their sources or information and will trust them and talk about conspiracies to hide the truth. Heck most of the media never even cleared the air over climategate emails, so most of the deniers still cite the climategate emails as a valid thing, even though in context and with scientific understanding none of the climategate claims are valid, and in fact still point to global warming... (http://www.iflscience.com/environment/mini-ice-age-hoopla-giant-failure-science-communication)

There's also the change from "global warming" to "climate change" which they don't understand to be an escalation of the term, and think instead it's toning it down.

I can watch that for hours.

Some of those things are feisty fuckers what seemed more interested in vengeance against their mammal captor than food.

He's wearing glasses because there are spitting cobras that could blind him.

Did you ever realize that snakes used to have legs? I just saw some photos of a fossilized snake with legs.

Fossilized poop mislabeled. Gotta love it.

Because we want racist, homophobic, ostensibly "straight" but showing all the signs of being a closeted self loather morons like yourself to suffer under the gay tyranny!!

Change is coming/has come/will keep coming, and there's not a fucking thing you can do about it. You're impotent, flaccid, unable to become erect, a floppy fossil that has already passed in to irrelevance. You can rant and rave and troll to your hearts content, but if you really feel that strongly about it, prepare to be fucking disappointed bitch! ; )

You want to see racism still in full force, check out the difference in punishment between usage of crack cocaine vs powder cocaine and the work of Prof Carl Hart on how they are basically the same thing...

Drug addiction has been proven to be exacerbated by poor socio economic conditions.

Drug punishment is more punitive for black people.

More black people live in poor socioeconomic circumstances.

To try and rise above that, a decent portion turn to crime. Surprise surprise, you're dirt poor with no job opportunity so you run with the gang.

Meanwhile, the republican party works as hard as possible to keep socialist policy (at least, socialist policy that helps black people, you can keep farm subsidies and corp bailouts to the whites) a demonised concept that might actually help reform these areas.

Fix the inequality, fix the socio economic problems, job discrimination etc, you fix most of the drug and crime problems. Less crime = less spending on cops, less spending on healthcare, less spending on incarceration etc = more money for more social inequality fixing...

Amazing right?

And yeah Genji, Lantern and co are bigots and racists (who will play the "oh I'm being ad hom'ed" card when you realistically describe them) who go out of their way to bait people. Keep giving them shit, they don't deserve (and probably wouldn't comprehend or even condescend to rationally respond to) legitimate discourse.

It's sad but the best thing to hope for imo is generational change, eventually Lantern and co. will be the last fossils hanging on to an era we should move on from. Then they'll die and the world will be a better place... ; )

Your video, Ask a Mortician - Last Meals & Fossilized Poop, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

While I will say this guy is talented and makes great art...in my mind he's not doing "drywall sculpture", he's making "3d plaster wall art".
I totally expected to see a video of a guy taking a sheet of drywall and sculpting/carving his art by removing material. Instead he just glops some plaster on the drywall and molds it into shape. Totally different process with different results.
...but maybe I'm just nit picking.

EDIT: I was interested because we are about to start using stencils to create a fossil bed pattern on some of our walls, much like his art, but made with a stencil.

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We are dependant on fossil fuels, and they are killing us at the same time. This is why we need LFTR as soon as humanly possible http://videosift.com/video/Liquid-Fluoride-Thorium-Reactor-Google-Tech-Talk-Remix

Fucking ridiculous video hiding a somewhat significant point.

The human race can't break up with fossil fuels...

All the wonderful renewable tech we're banking on just isn't capable of supplying enough energy to support our modern post developmental lifestyle. Sure, solar thermal, PV etc are interesting, but unless you have some developing country (aka China atm, but might be India in the future) absorbing the carbon cost of building the panels and tech, the sums don't work out for people personally, and the return on energy invested doesn't work out for the planet.

If you've seen the current state of the Chinese air quality or general environment, you'll understand that for every clean tech device we set up in the west, there is a terrible hidden cost being dumped somewhere else in the world. Except "global warming" is global, so sweeping this shit under a foreign rug isn't going to save us..

With 1.8bn ppl with zero power and another 700+m with intermittent, unreliable power, and a bunch of countries switching off their nukes (and replacing the load mostly with gas/coal), no matter how much we want to break up with the lousy bitch, we can't and won't...

Your video, Don't break up with fossil fuels, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

This is why you need to kill fossil fuels and bury her in your backyard. Then, once we starve to death, future generations can dig her up again.

They forgot to mention that your girlfriend, fossil fuels, is putting anti freeze in your coffee every morning and slowly killing you....but stick with that bitch, yeah, good idea.

Can a newt get a *WTF