Odd solar power?

[Polish_Silver]

Re: Odd solar power?

I love the Bay Area.

Shiny, are you out of your mind? The congestion is horrible.
Weather is great, i'll grant you. But housing is astronomical.

[shiny!]

Re: Odd solar power?

Shiny, are you out of your mind? The congestion is horrible.
Weather is great, i'll grant you. But housing is astronomical.

Well, yeah, I'm out of my mind. Isn't everybody?

I love the Bay Area but have no illusions that I could ever live there. Prices are indeed astronomical. But I just love the place. Took a two-year course at Fort Mason from '93-'95. Travelled out there once a month for two years; stayed with friends six doors up from the corner of Haite and Ashbury. I left my heart in San Francisco isn't just a line from a song! But even then, housing was nuts. While I was there, some friends of mine bought a "tiny" one-bedroom condo for $100,000. I thought they were crazy.

Further south... Santa Barbara, Carpenteria... California is filled with (unaffordable) beauty.

Actually, Central Texas is looking pretty viable. The Fredericksburg, San Marcos, Austin area is lovely country. Texas cockroaches might be a dealbreaker, though. They really give me the heebie jeebies. I was so glad to get away from them thirty years ago.

[GRG55]

Re: Odd solar power?

I disagree with this. It doesn't take much thinking to see the largest sources of our energy usage: heating and cooling a home and driving vehicles that are not fuel efficient. Up to around 70% of an average home's energy usage goes towards heating and cooling it along with heating water for bathing. One of the biggest things I see going forward will be conservation or switching to more efficient methods of heating/cooling, such as point solutions. Why heat and cool the entire house when you spend most of your time in just a room or two?

Oh, oh. Time to trade the McMansion for a one room log cabin?

The NAR probably has you on their hit list :-)

[BadJuju]

Re: Odd solar power?

Oh, oh. Time to trade the McMansion for a one room log cabin?

The NAR probably has you on their hit list :-)

I would love to build a 200 sq ft stone cottage.

[GRG55]

Re: Odd solar power?

...Personally I've spent a lot of money to conserve, considering my income. Switched to LED lights. Replaced the insulation under my mobile home to insulate my water pipes and prevent A/C and heat loss. Installed a new A/C-heat pump system two years ago, set warmer in the summer and cooler in the winter- as much as my health will allow. Induction hot plate and countertop convection oven for cooking. Low-power computer and monitor. Plugged every device possible into power strips that are shut off when devices are not in use. Replaced the old CRT TV with the most energy-efficient LED/LCD TV I could find. Planted a grape vine at the west end of the house to give it afternoon shade. Energy-efficient windows and draperies. Insulative barrier paint on the exterier, elastomeric roof coating and insulative paint on the roof. Shade cloth outside wherever possible. Bought a 2012 Hyundai Accent and only commute two days a week. Try to do shopping on the way home from work...

What we are dealing with here are changes in behaviour. And everyone has different speeds at which they are comfortable with change. The best incentive to accelerate the process is the price mechanism. Forget about "energy policies", forget about "self sufficiency", forget about subsidies to the favored companies in "renewable" energy (which concept itself is false since energy cannot be created or destroyed). Just like cigarettes and alcohol, just tax the activities that society feels should be discouraged...and without question the change in behavior will follow.

The only thing I can do to conserve more (besides die) is move... to some magical place with a low cost of living, that doesn't require A/C or heat to survive, that has adequate water and energy resources, jobs and great mass transit.

Where is that place, BTW? This is a serious question, not a rhetorical one.

Well 25 years ago I had a desire to drop out and move to the former Portuguese colony of Goa, on the west coast of India. Beautiful beaches, fabulous fresh food, cheap rent, live like a King for a few dollars a day. No mass transit though. Hell, I could have avoided the whole cell phone, Crackberry, iPad, Amazon.com, Nintendo insanity that seems to grip our world. Instead I yearn for the day I can dump my mobile phone and portable computer off the side of a sailboat and free myself from them forever.

Alas, Goa (and India) were "discovered" by my fellow Baby Boomers, and like everything else they come across it was an "opportunity for improvement"...and the place barely survived the experience...

[rogermexico]

Re: Odd solar power?

I would love to build a 200 sq ft stone cottage.

Have you ever done any bricklaying or stone work? I once laid about 300 square feet of paver bricks over a weekend, trimming to fit with a wet saw. I literally had to soak my hands in a bowl of ice water. Stone is what you use when there is no wood left....

[rogermexico]

Re: Odd solar power?

The best incentive to accelerate the process is the price mechanism.

+100

The only government action that would be remotely useful to deal with either PCO or "climate change" would be a fuel tax that will never happen. But even that is not really necessary, as the market will give the right message in due time.

And now for a rant directed at no one in particular:

The best defense against the effects of PCO at the individual level is not solar panels, or biodiesel beggared from Micky D's and long john silvers, or carpooling plans or hydrogen cars, or buying a farm or preparing for mad max.

The best defense is to maximize your real net worth so that you can afford to buy liquid fuels and pay the higher prices from cost push inflation that are coming.

Because the way it will be decided who gets to use the petroleum that remains will also be mediated via the price mechanism. This is the cold hard truth, and something we don't talk about much here explicitly.

The link between PCO and the investments we all discuss here, including those that exploit PCO, is that for each one of us, these investments and financial self-defense in general are the very way we can best deal with PCO.

Forget "scaling down" or going off the grid, or even buying a fuel efficient car or even reducing your driving. These are all helpful but marginal activities at the individual level compared to ensuring that you have the resources to bid for fuel and more expensive things in the post PCO economy. Better to drive a Range Rover and have enough money to pay for $10 gas than ride a bike and have no money for a $10 gallon of milk. No grocer is going to spot you the milk just because you are "green"....

When you are "off the grid", hunkered down in the sticks growing your own veggies, heating with wood and pedaling a trike into town once a month to buy beans and rice and coffee, your self-sacrifice and green frugality will do NOTHING to help you buy an airline ticket that now costs $1500 for coach due to high fuel costs. You need MONEY to deal with PCO.

The same is true for countries. A country can best ensure access to energy by being able to buy it - by having a valuable enough real economy to earn the money to bid for petroleum.

This a politically incorrect and disturbing thing to realize and to articulate. But there are too many monkeys on the rock, and they all want to drive and consume and live as well as they can. The ugly truth is that they will not all be able to, any more than we all can own as much of montana as Ted Turner. There is simply not enough to go around of anything. The way things will be allocated, when they are not allocated by the will to power, will be by real purchasing power.

So let's talk about cabins in the woods and conservation and priuses and bicycles for fun, but keep in mind that nothing will trump having the resources to purchase what you really need in the future that is coming.

[GRG55]

Re: Odd solar power?

I would love to build a 200 sq ft stone cottage.

When I lived in the sandbox (Middle East) I used to regularly escape to London, and after arriving on the overnight flight no matter what the time of year or weather I would go for a long walk through Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, just to reacquaint myself with trees and grass. In the park, near Westbourne Gate, off Bayswater Road is a lovely little 2 bed, 1 bath, stone and brick cottage that dates back to 1852, called Buckhill Lodge. I always thought it would be a great project to recreate that building, using real stone and brick, someday...

[globaleconomicollaps]

Re: Odd solar power?

Well, yeah, I'm out of my mind. Isn't everybody?

If you are willing to live in the 'hood you can buy a house for $150,000. Walking distance to BART. Just keep the doors locked and get some big dogs.

http://www.realtor.com/realestateand...1_M14385-81599

[dcarrigg]

Re: Odd solar power?

A $10k suit is not a clothing solution for a national economy. Neither is a $100k electric powered sports car a transportation solution. There are high priced niche markets in every sector, but these are not long term solutions for mass economic needs, which is what we need for energy.

That's assuming that there's a single policy maker out there that cares what the masses think and do. Take clothing. Hermes and Louis Vuitton overwhelmingly destroy the competition in market value, even if they have just a 0.5% slice of the raw sales by market volume on the street.

A $10K suit might not be practical for everybody, but this isn't communism, and who says the market has to care about 99.9% of folks at all, anyhow? Let them go naked, the market seems to say. The value's in luxury.

Alternative energy is the same way. Yet this behavior is new in the energy market, so people aren't used to thinking of it like this. The oil giants are still giants. But I think there is plenty of room for a high-end, high-value, luxury market niche in energy. And maybe that replaces some of the big oil giants in the S&P 500 basket and becomes more important to market value over time than you might think.

Think of it this way: Nobody gets mad that Carhartt isn't a Global 500 company but Rolex, Channel and Gucci are. Yet for some reason people seem shocked, shocked, that the energy market would start to behave similarly.

We live in a plutonomy now. Affordability, sanity and practicality no longer matter for the majority of GDP.

There may be no "single solution" to oil depletion. We will have smaller cars, live closer to work, carpool, etc.
Nuclear power may produce most of our electricity. Plane travel will become gradually more expensive.

Solar power at best solves a grid power problem, which could also be solved by nuclear power. It does not solve the "liquid fueled transportation" problem.

Again, you're looking at this from a middle class point of view. If my fancy 200 ft yacht (that looks like the death star and the iphone had a kid) gets 20 gallons of diesel to the mile before oil triples in price, I'm not going to care about the price tripling. As for the plebs, let them eat cake.

And stop worrying about those slobs anyways. Who are you, Karl Marx? It's much easier to let the middle class fall into abject poverty and live as wretches than it is to rebuild cities and transit infrastructure. Plus it is much better for the earth if they all stop using their cruddy cars to get to their meaningless cruddy jobs anyhow.

Meanwhile, who cares if the grid collapses? Let their highways collapse too. My house powers itself and is great for the environment. Plus I have my own transportation, and we have our own privately built roads with public money and public policing and tolls high enough to keep the plebs off. We can let government money go into those projects, because they're for us, not them.

(I'm writing this in a joking voice, but I'm serious about the economic decoupling of the vast majority of citizens and the very wealthy. Some folks at Citigroup thought this was true as well).

[Verrocchio]

Re: Odd solar power?

+100

The only government action that would be remotely useful to deal with either PCO or "climate change" would be a fuel tax that will never happen. But even that is not really necessary, as the market will give the right message in due time.

And now for a rant directed at no one in particular:

The best defense against the effects of PCO at the individual level is not solar panels, or biodiesel beggared from Micky D's and long john silvers, or carpooling plans or hydrogen cars, or buying a farm or preparing for mad max.

The best defense is to maximize your real net worth so that you can afford to buy liquid fuels and pay the higher prices from cost push inflation that are coming.

Because the way it will be decided who gets to use the petroleum that remains will also be mediated via the price mechanism. This is the cold hard truth, and something we don't talk about much here explicitly.

The link between PCO and the investments we all discuss here, including those that exploit PCO, is that for each one of us, these investments and financial self-defense in general are the very way we can best deal with PCO.

Forget "scaling down" or going off the grid, or even buying a fuel efficient car or even reducing your driving. These are all helpful but marginal activities at the individual level compared to ensuring that you have the resources to bid for fuel and more expensive things in the post PCO economy. Better to drive a Range Rover and have enough money to pay for $10 gas than ride a bike and have no money for a $10 gallon of milk. No grocer is going to spot you the milk just because you are "green"....

When you are "off the grid", hunkered down in the sticks growing your own veggies, heating with wood and pedaling a trike into town once a month to buy beans and rice and coffee, your self-sacrifice and green frugality will do NOTHING to help you buy an airline ticket that now costs $1500 for coach due to high fuel costs. You need MONEY to deal with PCO.

The same is true for countries. A country can best ensure access to energy by being able to buy it - by having a valuable enough real economy to earn the money to bid for petroleum.

This a politically incorrect and disturbing thing to realize and to articulate. But there are too many monkeys on the rock, and they all want to drive and consume and live as well as they can. The ugly truth is that they will not all be able to, any more than we all can own as much of montana as Ted Turner. There is simply not enough to go around of anything. The way things will be allocated, when they are not allocated by the will to power, will be by real purchasing power.

So let's talk about cabins in the woods and conservation and priuses and bicycles for fun, but keep in mind that nothing will trump having the resources to purchase what you really need in the future that is coming.

Nice, rogermexico, but your post doesn't really qualify as a rant. Instead, you have put forward a viewpoint that may be unpopular but is well-supported.

The gist is that if you have enough cash (purchasing power), then you can obtain the energy and energy-related resources that you will need in a post-PCO world. Your message brings this future world into sharper focus for me, and others who have read it. I must add, though, that conservation also serves a broader purpose than one's individual prospects for adaptation and well-being and also that individual efforts, while at the margin, still matter a great deal.

Conservation of energy resources today is a public good. As shiny! recounted her conservation efforts, she despaired over a barrel of oil wasted. I imagine that this feeling rose in her because of concern about those who will live in a future world where a barrel of oil would have become precious.

Despite our best efforts to earn, save, and invest, our individual positions on the gradient of purchasing power may or may not provide us with the wherewithal to consume energy at our desired level in that future world. At that point, we will, as the old cowboy song had it, root hog or die.

A Philosophical Cowboy

Sometimes it's dreadful stormy and sometimes it's pretty clear
You may work a month and you might work a year
But you can make a winning if you'll come alive and try
For the whole world over, boys, it's root hog or die.

[Verrocchio]

Re: Odd solar power?

lovely little 2 bed, 1 bath, stone and brick cottage that dates back to 1852, called Buckhill Lodge. I always thought it would be a great project to recreate that building, using real stone and brick, someday...

Thank you sharing your experience; I did something similar in my expat years. Buckhill Lodge would be a beautiful home.

[bpwoods]

Re: Odd solar power?

How did we migrate from Solar to Stone? No worries!

Building in stone is - well, a trifle difficult. Dressed stone is similar to brick and blockwork, but you do have to have a virtual image in your head of what the final product will look like (like building with Lego). Random rubble is another matter entirely. Great skill is needed, but the final effect is magical. You have to build in layers (2.5 ft) and keeping the walls vertical is a real challenge. Someone might put up a pic of an old random rubble wall to illustrate the matter. Stone built is better built!

[Verrocchio]

Re: Odd solar power?

That's assuming that there's a single policy maker out there that cares what the masses think and do. Take clothing. Hermes and Louis Vuitton overwhelmingly destroy the competition in market value, even if they have just a 0.5% slice of the raw sales by market volume on the street.

A $10K suit might not be practical for everybody, but this isn't communism, and who says the market has to care about 99.9% of folks at all, anyhow? Let them go naked, the market seems to say. The value's in luxury.

Alternative energy is the same way. Yet this behavior is new in the energy market, so people aren't used to thinking of it like this. The oil giants are still giants. But I think there is plenty of room for a high-end, high-value, luxury market niche in energy. And maybe that replaces some of the big oil giants in the S&P 500 basket and becomes more important to market value over time than you might think.

Think of it this way: Nobody gets mad that Carhartt isn't a Global 500 company but Rolex, Channel and Gucci are. Yet for some reason people seem shocked, shocked, that the energy market would start to behave similarly.

We live in a plutonomy now. Affordability, sanity and practicality no longer matter for the majority of GDP.



Again, you're looking at this from a middle class point of view. If my fancy 200 ft yacht (that looks like the death star and the iphone had a kid) gets 20 gallons of diesel to the mile before oil triples in price, I'm not going to care about the price tripling. As for the plebs, let them eat cake.

And stop worrying about those slobs anyways. Who are you, Karl Marx? It's much easier to let the middle class fall into abject poverty and live as wretches than it is to rebuild cities and transit infrastructure. Plus it is much better for the earth if they all stop using their cruddy cars to get to their meaningless cruddy jobs anyhow.

Meanwhile, who cares if the grid collapses? Let their highways collapse too. My house powers itself and is great for the environment. Plus I have my own transportation, and we have our own privately built roads with public money and public policing and tolls high enough to keep the plebs off. We can let government money go into those projects, because they're for us, not them.

(I'm writing this in a joking voice, but I'm serious about the economic decoupling of the vast majority of citizens and the very wealthy. Some folks at Citigroup thought this was true as well).

Seven years ago (2005) Citigroup coined plutonomy as an umbrella concept for the general idea that a basket of equities that profited from spending patterns of the very wealthy would yield outsized returns. Someone with nothing else to do today could track their recommendations to see how well plutonomy held up as an investment thesis. <Link to 2007 WSJ article on plutonomy>

[dcarrigg]

Re: Odd solar power?

Seven years ago (2005) Citigroup coined plutonomy as an umbrella concept for the general idea that a basket of equities that profited from spending patterns of the very wealthy would yield outsized returns. Someone with nothing else to do today could track their recommendations to see how well plutonomy held up as an investment thesis. <Link to 2007 WSJ article on plutonomy>

I'm pretty sure the logic holds. Wealth is getting more concentrated. The laws are set up to exacerbate it. Nothing on the horizon looks like it will change this. Everything's conspiring to squeeze out the middle class in the first world.

Here's a short basket of fashion (I'll try to update other sectors in a couple of hours - if someone else gets to it, all the better, I have to run errands ):

Hermes 2005 - Present

Louis Vutton 2005-Present

Coach 2005-Present

Burberry 2005-Present

Tiffany 2005 - Present