Reminds me of this afternoon ;-)

Living and working in rural southeast Asia for so long takes the shine off of all this a little bit. I'm now much more envious of well-maintained roads, having four seasons instead of three, and clean national parks.

You certainly have a choice in how you use the electricity.

I think YOU missed the point, if you can only sell your power for 8 c perkwh, and pay 36c per kwh, and you sell ALL the power you make, then buy it back later, YOU are subsidizing the power company, who makes 28c on every kwh you sell them. No one is subsidizing that 8c they pay(I would hope, 350% profit is already insane) so what "high feed in tariff" are you talking about?

The power grid is fairly smart, and takes into account the amount being produced by ALL sources, and shuts/ramps down those not needed. For you to be sending power when it's not required would require more PV generation than the entire grid uses, because ANY other generation could be put on hold until night. The certainly DO do this on a 'few hundred times per second' basis, at least here in the US. Solar generation may jump up and down on individual systems, but the total amount fed to the grid by all solar systems in an area is fairly stable, and doesn't jump radically from a cloud...come on.
Here, peak power is at peak temperature time, mid-late afternoon, when businesses turn up the AC and people get home, exactly when PV makes the most power, I can't speak for AU.
The point being that the grid CAN and DOES adjust rapidly to account for all generation methods, and it does already shift production because some of the need is supplied by PV.

Not so, the return on energy invested is at least double the return on coal in the long term...for the consumer, that's why you save money VS the electric company in the long term.
It's certainly not cheap or easy to deal with the waste in the US where the company(s) (and the taxpayer when it goes bankrupt) has to pay for destroying major river systems because of inevitable waste releases...as happened recently and repeatedly. Only if you ignore most of the actual costs of coal can you think it's cheaper, if you count all the costs, it's FAR more expensive.

ALL the power/energy needed to produce PV panels is reflected in their cost...100%.
Again, to be a bad way to reduce carbon pollution, you MUST assume it takes more carbon to make a panel VS the amount of carbon pollution it saves VS coal power production of the same amount of KWH. That's simply not the case by a long shot, so it does significantly reduce CO2 production, by around 20-30X vs coal. Even in Germany and Denmark, where it's often overcast, they found ....
"solar PV works out to about 50g of CO2 per kWh compared to coal's 975g of CO2 per kWh, or about 20x "cleaner."" In places with better weather, it can be up to 40X.
http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/blogs/how-much-co2-does-one-solar-panel-create

Once again, my electric company doesn't pay me a dime, it trades me power based on peak and non peak hours. Yours on the other hand makes 350% profit on every kwh you produce. I save cash because making (and USING) my own power is FAR cheaper than buying (mainly) coal produced power from the electric company. No "high feed in tariff" required at all. No feed in tariff at all, in fact.
It obviously makes an inroad on reducing carbon because, beyond the panel's production and shipping, there's ZERO carbon, unlike coal which produces more carbon per 10 KWH than it likely took to make each of my 20 panels, meaning they pay off their carbon debt in about 100 hours of sunlight, and are total carbon savers for the rest of their 20 year lifespan.
If we're going to fix climate change, we need to be HONEST about energy production, not compare 150%-350% of the cost of one production source with 5% of another production source to be able to say the 5% source is better.

HAHAHAHAHA!!!! Nuke requires a jump in your bill (even with the HUGE government subsidies the nuke industry gets at every step), but it's better than home mounted PV which SAVES you >50% off your 20 year power costs without a taxpayer cent?!?!? Please think about that.

I'm not basing my figures or thoughts on any study, but on my own personal, long term, economic experience with a system.
As someone who purchased a solar system for purely economic reasons, and has found it to be a HUGE cost saver over buying coal/nuke power from the electric company, all without counting subsidies at all, and even considering I paid top dollar for my system and have battery backup (that produces nothing but cost thousands), I'll simply say you're completely wrong in your assessments based on my own dispassionate, no child having, purely economical experience and leave it there.
I'm happy saving 50% of every power/dollar, you are accepting of giving away around 80% of your power/dollars to the power company. That doesn't make solar unworthy, non-"green", or economically unviable, it makes it a TERRIBLE choice for YOU because you're doing it wrong, and your electric company is punishing you rather than incentivizing you.

The inference being that I have a choice..? =) We don't in Aus.

But you're missing the point, X >= 1 feed in tariffs are being subsidised by other users on the grid. You upload your power regardless of demand peaks (so you could be sending power when it really isn't required). Electricity companies are not going to massively drop production of regular power as it takes a considerable amount of time to spool up/down baseload production, and they are still going to switch on high cost gas turbines during peak load just in case a big old cloud blocks out the sun for an hour or so and solar production falls in a heap...

And peak usage times are usually ~8-9am (schools and business start up, switch computers and air con on etc) before solar production really kicks in, and later in the afternoon when it get's hotter, people are getting ready for dinner. If you have significant daylight savings time shifts, then you can certainly get better production when peak demand in the early evening is occurring. If the panels are facing west rather than east or north (because that's where you maximise production and make the most money... =)

As for "the idea that it might take more energy to produce a panel than it will produce itself is ridiculous", I didn't say that it did, just that it's return on that energy invested is comparatively poor. You coal analogy is patently wrong though. Depending on which source you go to, coal is anywhere from 30:1 to 50:1 for EROEI (energy returned on energy invested). It's cheap to obtain, burn and dispose of the waste, despite being toxic/radioactive.

eg. http://bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-energy-storage/

When you talk about solar PV and the energy required to make it, you're not just talking about the production line, you're talking mining the silicon, purifying, the wasted wafers which aren't up to snuff, the cost of the workers and the power that goes in to building, transporting etc, lifetime maintenance, loss of production over time and disposal. The above link puts PV at the low 1.5-3:1 which is well beneath the roughly 7:1 required to sustain our modern society (and does not cover the massive increases in energy demand and consumption from developing countries). And as the author of the article notes, these are unbuffered values. If you add buffering to load shift, the sums get even worse.

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

I didn't say solar was a bad deal, I said it's a poor way to reduce carbon pollution. If the electricity company you are connected to is willing to pay high feed in tariffs to you and you save cash, that's great, but that doesn't automagically (intentional typo mean that solar PV is making any sort of serious inroads in to reducing carbon pollution.

If we're going to fix man made climate change, we need to be prepared to pay a far higher cost and worry less about our hip pockets. Nuke might not be economically viable without causing jumps in bills, but in terms of the energy output it provides over it's life time, it is one of the highest returns in energy for the energy invested in building it, paired with very low carbon emissions.

Obviously, the figures on EROEI depend on which article you read, as it's a very complex number to work out (and will always be an approximation), but it's fairly commonly acknowledged by people who do not have a vested interest in solar PV (vs low carbon power sources in general) that PV is a feel good technology that doesn't actually do a hell of a lot in terms of carbon reduction.

And your first paragraph pretty much spells out why solar PV is a dud investment for small plant/home plant if it were completely unsupported by a plethora of mechanisms designed to make it viable financially (and that's before even considering whether the energy cost is significantly offset by the energy produced), not to mention trying to make time to do things when your PV production is high so that you're not wasting it.

I try to load shift as much as possible, even went so far as to have most of the array facing the west where we'll scrape out some extra power when we're actually going to use it (eg. in the afternoon, particularly for running air conditioners in summer), but without feed in tariffs that are 1:1 with energy purchase prices and government subsidies on the installation of the system, the sums (at least in Australia) just do not ever come close to making sense.

But as I said in the first paragraph, that is all financial dickering, it has nothing to do with actual energy used vs energy generated. There is no free energy, you have to spend energy to make energy. You have to buil a PV array, pay for the wages of the people who install it, transport costs etc etc. They all drain energy out of the system. And most people in places where feed in tariffs are either on parity with the cost of purchasing energy when your PV isn't producing align their solar arrays with the ideal direction for greatest generation of energy that they can get the best profit for, not for generation of energy when energy demands spike.

The consequences of this are that at midday, energy is coursing in to the grid and unless your electricity provider has some capacity for extended storage and load shifting (eg. pumped hydro, large scale battery arrays), it's underutilised. Come peak time in the afternoon when people get home, switch on cooling/heating, start cooking etc when PV's production is very low, the electricity company still has to cycle up gas turbines to provide the extra power to get over that peak demand, and solar does little to offset that.

So carbon still get's pissed away every day, but as long as PV owners get a cheaper bill, it's all seen to be working like a charm... ; )

The energy current efficiency panels return is only on an order of 2-3x the energy input, which is barely enough energy returned to support a subsistence agrarian lifestyle (forget education, art, industrialisation). There's a reason that far better utilisation of coal and oil via steam heralded the massive breakthrough of industrialisation, it's because coal has close to a 30 to 1 return on energy invested. Same with petrochemicals, incredibly high return on energy.

The biggest advances in human civilisation came with the ability to harness energy more effectively, or finding new energy sources which gave high amounts of energy in return for the effort of obtaining them and utilising them. Fire, water (eg. mills etc), carbon sources, nuclear and so on. Even if you manage to get 95% efficiency on the panels for 100% of their lifetime (currently incredibly unlikely), you're only turning that number in to 8-12x the energy invested compared to 25-30x for coal/petro, 50x+ for hydro and 75-100+x for gen IV nuke reactors.

It's all up to Francois Hollande now. Matteo Renzi is reasonably angry at how Germany is handling this shit, and France + Italy might just be enough to rein in the hardliners in Germany/Finland. If Hollande doesn't go into open opposition against Schäuble et al tonight, Grexit becomes inevitable.

Luckily though, my neighbours found some fitting stone plates at an abandoned(?) house to finally finish a spot in their backyard. I'll be over there the rest of the afternoon, pounding those plates into place with a rubber mallet.

Edit: Also, fuck the social democrats for turning on the people again.

My truck rolled 200,000 in the middle of the afternoon on a Friday, half way through one of the city's busiest intersections. I stopped and me and my friend got out and did a victory lap around the truck yelling at the top of our lungs, 200,000!!! 200,000!!!

The other drivers weren't as impressed as we were.

First off, the city is already a powder-keg over segregationist tactics that were employed by the predominantly white city government to prevent affordable housing for lower income residents in the affluent parts of town.

http://www.ibtimes.com/mckinney-north-texas-city-center-pool-party-video-controversy-was-sued-over-housing-1955995

Now, the pool was in a upper crust luxury community and to celebrate the end of the school year, quite a few non-whites obtained passes to the pool. It was not until a bunch of the adult white residents of the community started calling in reports of fights and trespassing (people without passes).

These same nice white folk made the visitors feel wanted by throwing out racist comments "Several adults told the black teens to go back to their “Section 8 [public] housing” developments."

Now, the white kid who took the video, and who was not thrown to the ground by the police (he said they basically ignored him), said that most of the kids had passes and that the problems began before the few people who did not have passes showed up.

“I think a bunch of white parents were angry that a bunch of black kids who don’t live in the neighborhood were in the pool,” said Brooks, who is white.

Grace Stone, a white 14-year-old, told BuzzFeed News that when she and her friends objected to the racist comments about public housing an adult woman then became violent.

So the story is pretty much that a bunch of upper class white folks didn't like the 'darkies' getting uppity and brought the cops in. Everyone except the guy in the blue hat was released after being 'put in their place' by the cops for a while. Blue hat guy went to jail on charges of interference and evading arrest.

On Sunday afternoon, a sign left at the pool thanked McKinney police “for keeping us safe.” Because, as we all know, ethnic teens are the root of all evil and could hurt us white folks!

I doubt the cop loses his job, but he fucking should. Pulling a gun on unarmed teens is ludicrous. Putting your full weight on the back of a teen girl half your size and resting there for minutes is uncalled for. The jackass was PISSED that he tripped while chasing kids and felt he needed to get his own back.

As far as the community, they don't mind taking money from rich black folks to build a sports center, but don't let those uppity blacks think they can hang out there.

*promote

Thank you, my friend.

I was at the Farmers Market this afternoon and ended up telling some folks about this video. I ended up crying while standing next to the organic golden turnips.

Quite the PT moment!

You see how your arguments don't hold water.

Yet you still refuse to concede that Anita is full of shit and a con-artist.

"But if?!"

What if Jesus came back. What if a meteor hit.

..What if that "good guy with gun vs. black bad guy with a gun" bullshit actually worked out.

Breaking News: 45 concealed carried Utah State students stopped an alleged gunmen who made childish threats during Sarkeesian lecture this afternoon.

Again, 4chan trolls are trolling you with a mind virus.

http://videosift.com/video/This-Video-Will-Make-You-Angry-CGP-Grey

The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
of the big lake they called "Gitche Gumee."
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
when the skies of November turn gloomy.
With a load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more
than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty,
that good ship and true was a bone to be chewed
when the "Gales of November" came early.

The ship was the pride of the American side
coming back from some mill in Wisconsin.
As the big freighters go, it was bigger than most
with a crew and good captain well seasoned,
concluding some terms with a couple of steel firms
when they left fully loaded for Cleveland.
And later that night when the ship's bell rang,
could it be the north wind they'd been feelin'?

The wind in the wires made a tattle-tale sound
and a wave broke over the railing.
And ev'ry man knew, as the captain did too
'twas the witch of November come stealin'.
The dawn came late and the breakfast had to wait
when the Gales of November came slashin'.
When afternoon came it was freezin' rain
in the face of a hurricane west wind.

When suppertime came the old cook came on deck sayin'.
"Fellas, it's too rough t'feed ya."
At seven P.M. a main hatchway caved in; he said,
"Fellas, it's bin good t'know ya!"
The captain wired in he had water comin' in
and the good ship and crew was in peril.
And later that night when 'is lights went outta sight
came the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Does any one know where the love of God goes
when the waves turn the minutes to hours?
The searchers all say they'd have made Whitefish Bay
if they'd put fifteen more miles behind 'er.
They might have split up or they might have capsized;
they may have broke deep and took water.
And all that remains is the faces and the names
of the wives and the sons and the daughters.

Lake Huron rolls, Superior sings
in the rooms of her ice-water mansion.
Old Michigan steams like a young man's dreams;
the islands and bays are for sportsmen.
And farther below Lake Ontario
takes in what Lake Erie can send her,
And the iron boats go as the mariners all know
with the Gales of November remembered.

In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed,
in the "Maritime Sailors' Cathedral."
The church bell chimed 'til it rang twenty-nine times
for each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald.
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
of the big lake they call "Gitche Gumee."
"Superior," they said, "never gives up her dead
when the gales of November come early!"

Replacing with proper embed. Matched from previous thumbnail *backup=[...snipped...]

*comics *parody *commercial

"From the moronic mind of BATFAN comes the motion picture event of the afternoon: IRON CAN, the incredible true story of the founding member of the legendary Appliance Alliance™.

Ultra Downy Jr. (now with floral scent!) stars as Tony Starch: Genius. Billionaire. Philanthropist. Can of fabric softener.

After being pressured into revealing his secret identity, Starch attracts the attention of the nefarious Fabrice Crimp, leader of a cult of creased cottons who believes that since the world isn’t flat, nothing should be.

Only Iron Can has the power-setting to flatten Fabrice and put an end to his ruffled reign of terror.

No one straight is safe. Everyone bent is probably ok for a change. The fate of looking presentable in a button-up rests on the nozzle of one can.

But even the greatest of heroes eventually run out of steam..."

I grew up in a nonreligious household. My mom died a week after I graduated HS. ( It was 1980- before cell phones.) I had left the house that day and was out all day. Late in the afternoon I heard my mom say "goodby" . It was her voice and she was not there but still I heard it clear as day.

I got home late that evening and my dad was waiting in the living room to tell me that mom died.

Bill Nye and others like him have a point but still can not answer experiences like I and others have had. There is no evolution theory that explains supernatural events.

Yes I believe in GOD. There is something out there that science can't explain. Yes there are a lot of nut job preachers and followers. It does not change the fact there is something beyond us.


We will all find out on our deathbed.

so i woke up this morning,grabbed my coffee and started my routine of seeing whats happening on the sift to be greeted by your comment.

thank you my friend.
it brought a smile to my face.
and brought me back to earth with a giant dose of getoveryourself.
my comment had a certain..shrillness... that,while unintended,was very evident with a reread.

i would love the assistance to get to the truth of the matter.i would not even know where to start.the articles i found for/against seemed to be a tug of war between vegans and big monied interests.

i think everyone here would benefit from your talents.

i guess i just find it ironic that one video has 24 votes,while mine is left floundering,yet both are basically saying the same thing.

grant you,the related video if far more entertaining.

anyways,thank you for bringing me down to earth my friend.
/tips coffee
and have a great morning! (or afternoon/evening)

@eric3579 @PlayhousePals @chicchorea @Januari
thanks for the bday wishes. Good day was had. Party on saturday night and cruisy sunday afternoon beers with mates

Are you that stupid or just trying to impress you leftest sift friends?

The kid knew he just robbed the store. That why its relevant. His reaction to the cop would had been different if he did not just rob the store..

Late this afternoon the Cop that shot the kid indicated that he just herd on the radio that there was an robbery but he did not have a clue that it was this 300lb thug that has been martyred by the press as the gentle giant.