Actually private research tends to be done faster and cheaper, look at the human genome project as a prime example.



Yeah, that's called Tyranny and it's a big No-No where I come from. You see, if a research team can have it's work taken from them by force then it discourages them from doing more research. Plus once they lose control of their work it can then be used in ways they may never had wanted it used. You cannot force someone to do research for "the greater good" because that then becomes a form of slavery.




You have answered your own question here. Oil is the most cost effective source of energy available today. Until that changes any plan to achieve energy independence must include domestic drilling. For a long time the main source of energy was wood, but this was replaced by coal. Not because wood became too scarce or too expensive but because coal was more efficient. Coal was quickly usurped by oil, which will remain king until something better comes along. However you cannot force people to accept something as better, it must be proven better. Right now Solar and Wind are very expensive and not everyone lives in an area that can make the most use of them. So yes, "drill baby drill" until these technologies become practical enough for all people, not just those with the extra money to try it out now. Personally I'm a big fan of Nuclear energy, now that they are no longer cover operations for creating weapons grade fissionable materials they are much safer and far more efficient.

As to Solyndra, I don't think people are complaining simply because it failed. The ire there is that the company failed after being given a large sum of tax payer money and now the government has nothing to show for it. Further the money was given based on an ideology, not on sound lending principals. If someone wants to give their own money to a company simply because they like the people running it, that's fine. It's when you start giving away other peoples money that it becomes a problem.

Not surprising. No one needs a bunch of close-minded zealots behind the microscope.

I have heard to a few Richard Stallman lectures in my time too, and even HE admits you cannot equate Software to anything else where patents are concerned........and isn't it the government that runs the patent racket and caused it to to become the corrupt system it is now?

I think the ideal patent system would be to have them as templates, and you could 'rent' the designs for a good fee, but otherwise the patents would be an open collection of all the organized designs.

This would of course end up eliminating many junk patents due to disuse.

Patents in the U.S were originally allowed as an incentive for inventors, artists and Entrepreneurs to create things that are useful, this was done by basically giving a temporary monopoly on an idea or process. The problem is now "Temporary" means indefinite in effect, since lobbyist can easily convince (bribe) corrupt lawmakers (and almost all lawmakers are corrupt), to extend the patent limit every few decades, so now the current system actually does the opposite, of the original intent.

What I would do is simply allow patents on software to last a year max, and almost anything else, could not conceivably need more than fifteen to twenty years, and I would place limits on how man times a patent can be renewed (if at all).

Energy is a strategic concern, and as such it makes sense for federal involvement. The fed gov has been funding energy (including profitable ventures that can surely fund themselves) for decades so I don't see why suddenly it's taboo for alternative energy projects. And don't forget, those nuke plants will need all sorts of public funding and gov't loan guarantees.

Old story: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=obama-energy-research-nuclear-power
]https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=obama-energy-research-nuclear-power
[/url]

Would I prefer it be solely a private investment? For the most part, yes, but this is one area where I can support some leeway, especially if it means we can get hardware production up-and-running domestically.



In general, when it comes to energy I'm going to lean toward conservatism / libertarianism:

Conserve the limited resources, and exercise my liberty - as practical as possible - over the power providers. ; )

It is not taboo to fund alternative energy, it never has been. In fact I have personally overseen such investment of government funds, it's part of my job. But there are certain protocols in how or why a company or enterprise gets these funds. Solyndra had asked the government for a loan, they submitted thier files and financial data, then after examination the government rejected their request. The President then decided to over ride that decision thus bypassing those tasked with responsibility of tax dollars. The President could have sponsored a fund raiser, or given his recommendation to outside investors or even reached into his own pocket for this company; but he didn't. Instead he reached into our pockets, over the objections of those who actually researched the company and gave away public funds. By doing this Solyndra was singled out and given preferentrial treatment over other companies, this is why it was wrong. Being an energy company had nothing to do with it, Solyndra could have been a mortgage lender, an auto manufacturer or a soap rental business and it would have still been wrong. By playing favorites in this way the government is making a decree as to which businesses are allowed to succede or fail. I know that people like to complain about oil companies "exploiting loopholes" in the tax code. But those aren't really loopholes, they are standard deductions that every single business in the counrty also uses. This is not favortisim, it is fairness, it is equality under the law.

Please understand that I am not trying to argue with you, quite to the contrary I am largely in agreement with what you have stated. I just want to answer your question in as clear a way as possible.

Heh - we usually seem to agree but the details get in the way. : )

And maybe I'm confusing "government" with "representatives" and "pundits".

The problem that makes me disagree with some of the people that have posted in this thread seems to be what Hayek wrote about in The Use of Knowledge in Society. If one brain had all of the knowledge and information, the economic calculation problem only becomes one of logic. Knowledge is dispersed though. Society was not planned, it came as a spontaneous, extended order. Some people that think scientific knowledge is the only knowledge don't like that they don't have all the knowledge to put into their formula (admittedly sometimes brilliant formulas). Tacit knowledge can never be given in that way either. So, they become anti-business because they think the businesses are cheating somehow. Instead they would use the state to hammer everything into a nice shape that will fit into their formula. That top-down approach is The Fatal Conceit though. The world is complex, not a circular flow.

I also wonder what exactly people mean when they say the market doesn't work. Many times it turns out to be that the market is working like it should. A high price will signal that a resource should be conserved or that more people should try to supply the demand. A low price will signal that there is a surplus and if some businesses can't compete, they should do something else more productive where there is more need. A market is a messenger for price discovery. It seems that many people just want to shoot the messenger.

I do find it kind of humorous that people want to blame the shortcomings of their preferred system (like protectionism or import substitution industrialization) on free trade, private property and free markets. Complaining about private companies using patents and charging high prices? A patent is a protectionist policy. Just get rid of it then. Inefficient resource usage? ISI.

You and I are like-minded on this. I don't care about the ecological "save the world!" BS either. It's more a conservationist thing.

As for the rest, it is frustrating. I've found that power companies unwillingness to change is a big part of it. It can depend on your utility, but it's a safe bet to expect them to be, maybe not hostile, but not friendly at least. Many of them wish that PURPA had never been passed. They don't even want to pay an avoided cost for excess generation, so many of them are not real fond of net-metering.

I know a guy that did what you want to do in the power district where I used to work. They must have had big disagreements about purchase-agreements (or lack thereof) before I worked there so there was a little bad blood already. He did go totally off grid when I worked there though and when we went out to retire the line and hardware that was feeding his place, there was tension. Later I found out that many of the line workers thought of it as a slap in the face to them, that someone wouldn't want to depend on them (a lot of these guys had narcissistic entitlement problems though too). I didn't know all this at that time though and someone commented about how this guy's son was a useless nerd because he had written papers to the legislature about alternative energy production. I commented that i wished my son would be that smart if I ever wanted to have one. I got a few dirty looks.

I went to a couple renewable energy workshops at the same college where I got my degree after I resigned from the power company because I was interested in getting into the installation business. They had these workshops after net-metering took effect in my state to educate people about it. It stated on the front page of the packet I received that it is never the intention of these policies to have many mini-utilities competing against the power companies. That right there says a lot to me about power companies. They didn't like many of the questions that I asked, to say the least. One of my former teachers told me that they were having the workshop at the college to represent their constituents, meaning the power companies, not regular joe.

One of the lecturers there was the man who went off grid where I worked. He recognized me. He was the main person that wrote the bill for net-metering in my state. He was glad to get what he could out of the bill (even though it is the bare minimum that is required for net metering), but wished it would have been a lot more. He did tell me that he quickly found out that the power companies had more lobbyists than anyone else in the state legislature. Makes you wonder about all those claims of a natural monopoly.

You might also hear complaints from the power companies that maybe you alone are not a problem, but if many more people follow suit, you will shift the price of their transmission lines, transformers, generators, etc. onto fewer customers and thus cause their prices to increase. You are being, you guessed it, selfish and greedy! I know you've heard that one before. Damn it, I don't care. Let the price go up for everyone else. Make the power companies compete to find ways to reduce price or else go out of business. The customers can determine for themselves if they would rather follow suit by also coming to the conclusion that they should install some renewables or if they would rather not have the hassle.

As for fossil fuels, I can't argue that they aren't more efficient. We should be using them When looking at the amount of energy it takes to extract them compared to how much energy they put out, they are more efficient. The problem is though, the process takes millions of years. When looking at it like that, they are not efficient and the resources should be conserved. If I had plans to use biomass as an energy source, how much energy would I get out of it now gasifying it compared to if it was left to rot and turned to coal millions of years later? Also, there is quite a bit of heat loss that's not always accounted for when comparing capacity factors. A coal plant will have long transmission lines with line loss too. A distributed system will have very little line loss, if any at all, plus there won't need to be near as many power line eyesores. There are many factors to consider. I wouldn't worry about grid parity. Just do what works best with the given resources.

TL;DR It's frustrating in many ways. Good luck with your new house! It would be nice to tour it. Maybe you will have a virtual tour. Solyndra failed, many others are doing well, like First Solar, so I don't really care. I do care that some of my money was given to them though, and it looks like it was given irresponsibly. From what little I've read, it looks like a classic case of poor management plus trying to force something that just wasn't there at the time instead of making some profit and reinvesting to grow.

Thanks for the kind words.

I really hope we can put this idea into practice. The goal isn't to raise a middle finger to the energy suppliers (it may have sounded that way) but I'm just particularly enamored with the idea of turning sunlight into PC gaming. Or driving, or whatever other cool or mundane things we can do with electricity. I mean, really, it's a pretty neat technological feat: that ball of fire 93 million miles away is providing the energy to run an air compressor or watch a movie. That buying solar generation comes with a payoff leading to nearly-free power at some point, and also has conservation benefits... those are great bonuses.

So the place will have a combo of geothermal for heating and cooling, passive solar design for more heating in order to reduce the electricity requirements on those days of short sunlight in winter, and of course electricity generation and storage. And we'll be on a private well that's shared with the neighbor. We're considering some newer processes for the building shell, too, also oriented toward reduced HVAC needs (I've read heating and cooling is the biggest single use of power resources in the US). The initial cost is going to require some compromises in the rest of the house, especially since we need a big garage and shop for my work needs, and because we aren't swimming in money. If we can accomplish all this with domestic hardware, I'll be ecstatic. 3-5 years is the plan.

A bit of news around here is that CAPX2020 is coming through this area. Lots of folks are displeased, given that it plows right through the natural beauty along the Mississippi river valley. The goal is to get juice from the Dakotas down to Chicago and other areas east, adding flexibility to the grid, and spreading around the wind-generated power from the Dakotas; I assume they are also making electricity from natural gas as oil development is doing well in that part of the country. The land we just bought is actually about 3/4 of a mile away from the proposed route of this main line, but the line will also skirt just outside the village we live in now, about 25 miles away from the land we bought. Stay here or go there, we're going to be living with the new line. A bit of irony is that the environmentalists are having a problem with the power lines that bring electricity generated in part from renewable resources. But no matter upon which side one falls, NIMBY is certainly in play.

But yeah, it'll be a constant reminder, should we meet our goal, that we won't need anything from the big honkin' line looming large on the horizon.

As to the local electric supplier, I don't know what their un-official stance is. They do give out incentives for energy efficiency projects (high SEER HVAC, for instance), so on the surface they're showing that they support reduced consumption. And maybe they really do: big projects cost big money, plus they need to jump through all sorts of hoops to build new generation facilities. I'm also not yet sure if state law allows a payback beyond break-even NetZero metering; it would be a real kick in the pants to get a check from the power co for $25 or $50 each month for helping supply power to the neighbors. That'd be taxable income, of course... haha - they get you coming and going, and I'd be happy to pay it.