Vermont Tiger

Cult Objects

By Daniel Foty

What's the difference between these...

... and these...

Derned if I know...

Happy Halloween

By Daniel Foty

Tiger vs. pumpkin:

 

 

Happy Halloween!

"Solar Engineering" - Some Experimental Results

By Daniel Foty

This past Saturday, the sky was crystal-clear and the sun was maximally-bright.  It seemed like the perfect day to conduct a little "solar energy" experiment just to see what would happen.

Contrary to what my detractors might think, your humble correspondent actually makes use of "solar energy."  When you have large-scale power equipment that might see infrequent use, small "trickle-charger" panels are very useful to keep the equipment's battery topped-up - which is particularly useful when, e.g., you want to fire up the tractor to plow snow off the driveway.  You can't charge a seriously-depleted battery with these panels, but they serve their intended purpose quite nicely.

So armed only with one of those panels and a multimeter, it's an easy thing to do a few measurements and a few calculations to put some bounds on the whole notion of "solar energy" for generating electricity.

WARNING!!!!  What follows contains mathematics, terms used in physics and electronics, calculations, and even discussions of basic physics and engineering.  Reader discretion is advised.

So, if you dare to follow, let's continue below the fold....

Eco-Schtick - "Unsustainable" Indeed

By Daniel Foty

Sometimes the Monday morning news brings in a perfect metaphor.  This is such a Monday morning, starting with the headline on this story:

Eco-friendly festival can't sustain itself

And fear not, it gets sillier from there....

It was the first New World Festival of Eco-Friendly Science and Technology [sic!! - see below (ed.)] and quite possibly the last.

The event near the beach in Santa Monica, which had been scheduled to run through Sunday, was shut down abruptly Saturday afternoon.

....

Howard Mauskopf, the festival's organizer, said he needed to shut down because so few people had shown up. "We're in a position where we don't have the financial ability to continue," he said, adding that he would have needed eight to 10 times the crowd that was present to make ends meet.

This is already silly enough, but if you read through that entire piece there's not a mention of anything that normal people would consider to be "science and technology."  You'd expect at least a few solar panels and kiddie pinwheels, but all we seem to have here is a bunch of hippies acting like hippies - even the lead photo, which looks at first like someone playing with some sort of lighting technology, actually shows some "artist" trying to create scuplture from burned-out electronics.

And speaking of hippies and hippie behavior, you can probably guess what's coming next....

".... You Worse Than Senseless Things...."

by Daniel Foty

What will be the terminal end point of the ridiculous efforts in "renewable" (sic) energy?  Probably the exact opposite of what the proponents envisioned; as the magnificent Victor Davis Hanson put it a few days ago:

The age of Obama has turned “green” into a refuge for scoundrels. The next era will be marked by unprecedented national wealth from vast new gas and oil exploration, not from thousands of acres of subsidized solar panels and windmills.

As your humble correspondent has repeatedly noted, "renewable" (sic) energy has only two constituencies - fantasists, and kleptocrats.  No amount of talking and PR can overcome basic facts; as the equally-wonderful Richard Feynman put it in his addendum to the 1987 report on the Challenger disaster,

In any technology, reality must take precedence over public relations - for nature cannot be fooled.

There seems to be a never-ending supply of fantasists who somehow have concluded that they can wish and believe their way around the laws of physics - but (funny this) physics always wins....

And as Mr. Hanson notes above, take such fantasies and their associated fantasists and add in large pots of (taxpayer) money, and you attract kleptocrats, scamsters, game-players, and system-workers.  Funny how that happens, isn't it?

There is no "renewable" (sic) energy boom (and there will not be one).  There are no "millions of green jobs" (and there will not be).  Primary energy sources need to be plentiful, inexpensive, reliable, and produced with minimal effort.  "Renewables" are the exact opposite - and the economic consequences of the religious cult associated with them simply cannot - and will not - be sustained.

On this count, last month a reader asked a relevant question about the world after the "renewable" (sic) energy fantasy passes....

Winterfest

By Daniel Foty

It's getting to be the time of year when the usual question "What kind of winter will it be?" is being asked; it's also the time of year where are a variety of prognostication techniques come into play - leading e.g. to the odd habit of an audience gathering around whenever a woolly bear caterpillar is sighted....

There are, of course, more scientific methods of trying to project the upcoming winter weather.  Over the years, one of the better outfits at generalized long-range predictions has been the commercial Accuweather service.  Accuweather released its winter forecast for the U.S. this morning - and if you want the executive summary, it would be "Batten down the hatches":

 

If you want the short summary beyond that graphic:

The AccuWeather.com Long-Range Forecasting Team is predicting another brutally cold and snowy winter for a large part of the country, thanks in large part to La Niña... yet again.

The interior Northeast is predicted to be colder and snowier than areas closer to the coast.

Snowfall is forecast to average near or even slightly above normal in areas south and east of the mountains from Virginia to Maine.

For areas north and west of the Appalachians, however, snowfall for the season is expected to be much higher.

So make sure that your winter-coping equipment is all tuned up and ready to go.  And then get your winter sports equipment into top condition to take advantage of it.

And, yes, we're going to continue to hold someone to his confident 2007 prediction that within ten years things-winter would largely disappear from Vermont - as the winter climate shifted to that of typical-New-Jersey.  That's not looking terribly likely now, is it?  If you don't want to be held accountable for "predictions" like that (particularly when they're being used as the basis for important decisions), then don't make them....

The Turbines of Wrath....

by Daniel Foty

It's been obvious for some time that wind turbines are little more than useless eyesores that exist only for their religious significance.

Now, they can be further downgraded - to worse than useless:

Ontario's rapid expansion in wind power projects has provoked a backlash from rural residents living near industrial wind turbines who say their property values are plummeting and they are unable to sell their homes, a CBC News investigation has found.

The government and the wind energy industry have long maintained turbines have no adverse effects on property values, health or the environment.

The CBC has documented scores of families who've discovered their property values are not only going downward, but also some who are unable to sell and have even abandoned their homes because of concerns nearby turbines are affecting their health.

Read the whole thing.

This is, of course, practically interesting - since such findings provide support for any tort claims (hinthint) that those who suffer devaluation of their property due to windmills may choose to file.  (And if you follow the link, you can read the interesting story of how an Ontario wind developer so threatened bought up the four properties of the complaintants.... and then re-sold them at a significant loss....)

"Green" Is.... Filthy....

By Daniel Foty

Some two-and-a-half years back, your humble correspondent contributed a lengthy piece on the foibles of "renewable energy" (sic) and "green jobs" (sic).  That piece took note of the realities associated with the manufacture of solar panels in China:

The first time Li Gengxuan saw the dump trucks from the nearby factory pull into his village, he couldn't believe what happened. Stopping between the cornfields and the primary school playground, the workers dumped buckets of bubbling white liquid onto the ground. Then they turned around and drove right back through the gates of their compound without a word.

This ritual has been going on almost every day for nine months, Li and other villagers said.

In China, a country buckling with the breakneck pace of its industrial growth, such stories of environmental pollution are not uncommon. But the Luoyang Zhonggui High-Technology Co., here in the central plains of Henan Province near the Yellow River, stands out for one reason: It's a green energy company, producing polysilicon destined for solar energy panels sold around the world. But the byproduct of polysilicon production -- silicon tetrachloride -- is a highly toxic substance that poses environmental hazards.

"The land where you dump or bury it will be infertile. No grass or trees will grow in the place. . . . It is like dynamite -- it is poisonous, it is polluting. Human beings can never touch it," said Ren Bingyan, a professor at the School of Material Sciences at Hebei Industrial University.

Has the story in China changed at all?  Apparently not....

A solar panel factory in eastern China has been shut down after protests by local residents over pollution fears.

Some 500 villagers staged a three-day protest following the death of large numbers of fish in a local river.

Tests on water samples showed high levels of fluoride, which can be toxic in high doses, officials said.

[The villagers] accuse Jinko Solar, a Chinese company making solar panels for sale overseas, of dumping hazardous chemicals into the water supply....

"Electric Cars" - Still Shorted to Ground (cont.)

By Daniel Foty

There's a quote from the wonderful Thomas Sowell that I often use in my lectures:

Nothing is easier… than setting some arbitrary goal – preferably based on numbers – and [then going] after it, in utter disregard of the costs or the repercussions.

That observation has wide applicability - and it's certainly dead-on with regard to the continuing disembodied fantasies involving "electric cars"....

[L]ast year, Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero launched a 600-million euro subsidy plan to promote the sector, and the Industry Ministry predicted that by the end of this year, more than 20,000 electric and plug-in hybrid cars would be registered in Spain. By end-2012, this number was supposed to reach 50,000.

However, between January and August of this year, only 213 electric cars were registered.

When there is that much of gap between a "plan" and reality (in this case, actual deployments being about 1% of "the plan" - and with the further caveat that similar "sales figures" elsewhere in the world have always involved sales that were either mandated or created via self-dealing), you know that something is seriously (and fundamentally) amiss.  What might that be?

While it is too early to pronounce the electric car as a failure, it is becoming clear that initial expectations were unrealistic.

No kidding.

Another One Bites the Dust (cont.) (cont.)

By Daniel Foty

Solyndra - the agony continues.

The FBI has raided Solyndra this morning.

And the abruptly-dismissed employees have filed suit against Solyndra over the abruptness of their terminations.

Follow both of those links, and you'll see what the "green jobs" really are....