Solar Power and subsidies

An article in today's New York times reports on thermal solar power plants being built in the SW states. Costs are high, compared to coal fired plants, and a subsidy is provided:

"The solar plants receive a federal tax subsidy, like other types of renewable energy, which makes the economics work for builders but also feeds skepticism about the technology’s long-term potential. “Unless there’s a subsidy involved, it doesn’t seem like a very attractive technology,” said Revis James, a renewables expert at the Electric Power Research Institute, a utility industry consortium."

I don't know what else Mr James said, but his comment is disingenuous. Coal and other fossil fuels receive subsidies of all kinds. The oil and coal companies receive tax rebates to compensate them for the diminishing supplies of coal and oil. The power companies receive rebates for building the plants in the first place, and more rebates for installing pollution control equipment. And everyone involved externalises the costs of whatever pollution remains after scrubbing, and of course the cost of CO2. Externalised costs are indirect subsidies. We all pay for them one way or another.

No one knows exactly what these subsidies amount to in cents/kWh, but there's no question that it's high. One thing is for sure, though: power generated from fossil fuel is not priced to reflect its actual costs. If it did, solar power would look a lot more attractive, and there would be a lot more effort to conserve power. There's not much point in increasing electricity supply if there isn't also an effort to cut electricity use.

The illustration used to help the reader understand the potential of solar thermal power is also interesting: "A megawatt is enough electricity to run 1,000 room air-conditioners at once." One of the things that struck me when I visited south Texas some years ago was the lack of insulation in most of the homes. Proper insulation would cut power consumption for air-conditioning by a third or more. The use of ground effect heat pumps would cut the remaining power demand by 75%. These two modes of conservation should be heavily subsidised. The payback in dollars for each installation would be ten years or less. The payback in energy savings would be substantially less.

Update 2020-03-03: The efficiency  of solar power cells has increased  substantially, They now convert a higher percentage of solar energy into human-usable energy than plants do. Dow has developed a method of painting solar cells onto any surface, which could make just about any surface available for generating power. The other problem of solar (and wind) is storage of surplus power. Betteries, heat sinks, and pumping water back into reservoirs are all feasible, Denmark has become the first country in the world to eliminate all fossil fuel power plants. Oil prices remain low, while extraction costs continue to trend up. Without subsidies the oil business would have folded long ago.

9/11 Conspiracies

     Try the following link: Prison Trains

     Funny, eh?
     Then look at the comments. While most people see the humour (such as it is), a few earnestly propose or point to what they believe is the truth: that 9/11 was "an inside job", conceived to provide excuses for the reduction of civil liberties and engagement in foreign wars.
     Well, the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade centre did provide those excuses, on which the Bush administration has acted with too many signs of glee. Not that they wouldn't have used some other excuse if 9/11 hadn't happened. They have been trying to find an excuse for a pre-emptive attack on Iran (also a former ally in the Middle east, by the way), citing Iran's nuclear weapons program as reason enough. A number of factors, which I needn't enumerate, have prevented them from acting on this excuse.
     I don't think there will be a strike on Iran in the foreseeable future. The next President, Republican or not, will have enough problems to deal with, without adding a gratuitous one.
     The ancient Chinese are said to have cursed their enemies with "May you live in the most interesting of times." We do live in the most interesting of times. But then, we always have.

Theatre Review: The Drawer Boy

The Drawer Boy, by Michael Healey. Gore Bay Players, Gore Bay ON, June 27 2007.

Two bachelor farmers, Morgan and Angus, friends since childhood, live together. Angus has been damaged by war. Morgan tells him the story of how they met two English girls, Sally and Frances, brought them back to Canada, and lost them in a car accident. This story fills in the gaps in Angus's memory, for five minutes or so. Myles, a young actor, asks to stay with them in order to learn about farming, as his collective' is 'writing' a play about farmers. This affords an excuse for a number of more or less corny jokes about how the uncouth farmer takes in the sophisticated city slicker.

But Myles overhears the story, and uses it as his scene in the play. Morgan and Angus see the rehearsal, and when they return from the theatre, Angus remembers not only Myles but the story as well. His memory seems to be restored, until Morgan has to admit that he made up the story. The injury that robbed Angus of his memory also made him moody and depressed, until Sally and Frances left them. Not much of a story, really, but Healey presents and reveals it layer by layer until we are left with what seems to be the truth.

The three actors did a creditable job, making us believe their characters and the gradual unfolding of Angus' and Morgan's history. Myles was played a little too much on one-note, but then he's not a complex character. Naive and trusting, he accepts Morgans deceptions and tricks at face value, and thinks he can somehow cure Angus. He almost succeeds, too. Morgan was more subtly portrayed, and he is a more complex person. Who would have thought that the boy who loved action and adventure, who went to war because he wanted an adventure, would be so sensitive to his friend's needs, and invent such a tale to comfort him? Angus was the most difficult character to play, as his memory loss and repetitive compulsions tempt the actor to caricature, but this did not happen here. The transition into apparently full recovery of memory, his realisation that his memories are false, and that the truth would hurt, and his relapse into the forgetfulness that keeps him happy, were very well done. The set was a simple, semi-abstract portrayal of the kitchen and porch. Lighting shifted attention to the two acting areas, and colours, though simple, effectively signalled shifts in time. The music (what play these days doesn't use a soundtrack as a movie does?) was blessedly unobtrusive, and served more to reinforce the mood than guide it.

All in all, a very good production. Walter Maskel can be proud of his cast and crew. Marie and I thoroughly enjoyed it. If you get a chance to see it, do so.

Book Review: WLT, A Radio Romance

WLT: A Radio Romance by Garrison Keillor (1991)

I vaguely recall negative reviews of this book when it first appeared. It didn't conform to the cosy, down-home image that Keillor's fans had formed of him, based on his Prairie Home Companion tales. It's raunchy, rude, and cynical, yet underlying it is the streak of melancholy that also supports PHC.

Keillor is a master of the deadpan style that make horrors and ecstasies equally mundane - in this, he belongs with Raymond Carver and like-minded writers. The plot line that holds these rambling chapters together is Francis With's rise in radio and his eventual jump to TV. He renames himself Frank White, cultivates a resonant voice, makes himself an indispensable factotum to the station's owners, and after a bizarre road trip (designed to jettison an out-of-date Gospel music group from WLT) walks into a TV studio and starts talking. In the last chapter, told from the point of view of a muck-raking biographer, we learn that White married his sweetheart, had three children, and became the grand old man of television news. Hence the romance of the sub-title: Keillor's novel is a melodramatic fantasy. But despite the weirdness, the story has the ring of truth. That's the secret of Keillor's success as a raconteur. His husky, slightly bemused voice makes us believe even the most bizarre incidents and improbable coincidences. But unlike well-crafted novels, life does consist of bizarre events and improbable coincidences.

If you want to pick a nit, this book at times seemed to go on too long. ***

Book Review: The First Chimpanzee

The First Chimpanzee, by John Gribbin, & Jeremy Cherfas (2001)

An extended (and IMO unnecessarily long) argument that humans, chimps, and gorillas shared a common hominid ancestor some 3 to 4 million years ago. In other words, the chimp-gorilla line split from the human line after the evolution of hominids, not before. That would make chimps and gorillas hominids.

This hypothesis was developed by Sarich and Wilson in the late 1960s, when the molecular clock was first calibrated. The argument rests on molecular biology, and the development of the molecular clock in particular. It's been shown that DNA/RNA and hence proteins evolve at surprisingly steady rates. This enables the calculation not of dates but of ratios of time spans, and hence of the relative positions of divergence points in the evolutionary trees of related species. Add a few dates, and the ratios can be used to locate points in time. Fossil evidence has calibrated the molecular clock pretty accurately for non-human genera, and for vertebrates and chordates generally, so that its application to the primate group should be a no-brainer.

However, paleontologists don't like to have their speculations checked by external objective evidence. Even amongst themselves, they get rather testy when a colleague finds a fossil that requires "re-evaluation" of existing guesses.

Along the way, Gribbin and Cherfas provide reams of interesting data, the most important of which is that the sum total of all humanoid fossils could be laid out on a dining room table. Most of them are teeth. Insofar as I can judge the evidence, I go with Gribbin and Cherfas. Well written, but somewhat whingey in the final chapters, where they discuss the reception of the Sarich-Wilson hypothesis, which they support. So the rejection of that hypothesis becomes quite personal for them. **-½

Book Review: The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks

Davies, Robertson The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947)

Here, Marchbanks (or Davies) restrains himself a little compared to the second book, The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks. But in both he expresses himself forcefully on the absence of a Canadian sense of pleasure. According to him, Canadians cannot abide mere fun, let alone culture (a much more strenuous pursuit.) Although there have been changes for the better, we still have a lingering sense that something advertised as good for you cannot be and must not be pleasurable. It was Presbyterians that set the ground-rules for social and cultural life in this country, and many of us suffer from a lingering hangover of puritan megrims. Only the terms of opprobrium have changed: these days, the blue meanies oppose the arts not because of their putative immorality but because of their supposed impracticality. Significantly enough, the Harperites are willing to fund children's sports via a tax break for family expenditures on hockey and other forms of mayhem, but not for music lessons. Like many money-mad people, they confuse price and value, and worse, have a very limited knowledge of the market that they profess to admire and understand.

Marchbanks' struggles with his furnace form the leitmotif of his life as described in these diaries, and his repeated bouts of one or another kind of mild illness form the accompaniment. His casual mentions of daily triumphs and defeats remind us that in many ways our life has become more comfortable in the last 60 years. But it hasn't, therefore, become better. There's more to the good life than creature comforts.

The quotable bits in this book tend to be small paragraphs. Robertson has mastered the art of the long slow curve and the sudden break (he does not, however, use any baseball metaphors or allusions.) He tends to use the semi-colon where most writers would use a period, so that his sentences seem to be lengthy. But here and there one finds a sentence that can be quoted without context. "If man has conquered the air merely to fill it with bombs and illiteracy, we might as well discount this civilisation, and try another." "New York, I perceive, contains almost as many rogues as Toronto." "If we were all robbed of our wrong convictions, how empty our lives would be."

Diary 1, 2

Diary
Wednesday, 25 April 2007
Davies' Diary of Samuel Marchbanks and Table talk of Samuel Marchbanks have inspired me to try my hand at daily writing. I don't know how well this experiment will go. Imitating a writer is hard enough; emulating him is much more difficult.... J. returned to Toronto today; I took him to the bus stop this morning. He seemed cheerful enough, which is just as well, his having enjoyed free board and lodging, reimbursement for the bus ticket, and $100 reward for helping me with the Trade Show booth. It comforts me to think that such minimal sacrifices on my part can generate such contentment.

Thursday, 26 April 2007
Went to lunch at St Andrews today, as we usually do on the 3rd Thursday of the month. I chose leek and potato soup, a creamy broth of delicate flavour, that perhaps appeals to the 1/8th of me that's Welsh. A tolerable lemon cake with a good lemony icing, and a cup of coffee rounded out the meal. We sat with three friends that we have known since we came to Blind River 35 years ago, and had a pleasant conversation about inconsequential matters. This is the best kind, for it engages the mind agreeably without straining the prejudices. Since one of the people present was a geologist, we discussed rocks. He had a piece of Ayers Rock at home, picked up before it became necessary to forbid visitors there to pick up souvenirs. I wonder why people like to have stones as reminders of the places they have visited. One doesn't pay for stones, but that can't be a sufficient explanation, as most people are quite willing to put out cash for trays, spoons, tea towels, and other assorted items of dubious practicality. I suspect an unconscious return to the early childhood fascination with pebbles.

Book Review: Time Lord, by Clark Blaise

Clark Blaise Time Lord (2001) Blaise won the Charles Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction for this book. It is a good read, but finally a not very satisfying one. The bio of Fleming is competent enough, especially considering that Fleming himself left little evidence of his thoughts and feelings. Though he kept journals, their contents are almost entirely the objective facts of his life: Arrival and departure times, what he spent his money on, whom he met, and so on.
     It was a misread timetable that prompted Fleming to think hard and deep about the problems of time keeping. Railways connected so many places that the inconvenience of calculating timings in terms of dozens of local times prompted the railways to adopt standard times of their own. Eventually, the railroads of N. America agreed to a common standard of time zones. This was the precursor of worldwide standard time. Great Britain had already adopted a single standard time. Blaise is good at tracing Fleming's involvement and influence in the move to standard time, a move that started as a technical problem and of course ended as a political one.
     But Blaise also meditates on the effects of standardising time, of removing time keeping from the natural rhythms of sunrise and sunset, of midnight and noon. Here, his essay is less successful. Not because he doesn't make excellent points and observations, but because his reinterpretation of Victorian life in many ways breaks new ground, or looks at well known facts and ideas from a new angle. Inevitably, much of what he says is not fully worked out or clarified. He sees the changes in Victorian arts and social fabric as a response to the shift from the natural world of the senses to the abstract world of reason. In this he follows the Romantic criticism of the industrialisation of Europe. But unlike the Romantics, he sees those changes as forerunners of our own problems, not as redefinitions and abrogations of old ones. His argument amounts to a paradox: by freeing ourselves from natural time, we have become enslaved to abstract time. He hints and alludes to this paradox, but does not explicate it. But this very lack of full explication prompts the reader to think about the implications of what Blaise says.
     Blaise either forgets or chooses not to explore how early in European culture time became an abstraction. In the Middle Ages, clock time became a guide. The monks were the first to take clocks and calendars seriously, and they used them to order their spiritual life. It was a pope who authorised the recalculation of the calendar, a calendar inherited from the Romans. These clerics were the first to abstract time. The Romans took the first steps towards decoupling holy days from the moon and the sun, defining many of them in terms of their dates in the calendar rather than by the phase of the moon. Christians needed to calculate Easter, a holy day that links the phase of the moon to the position of the sun. The calculation required the abstraction of moon time and sun time so they could be brought into accurate relationship with each other. That, I think, was the beginning of the process that led to Standard Time, and in our own day has led to Universal Co-ordinated Time.
     The book is valuable as much for what it suggests as for what it says. What Blaise does say is often spot on, for example his analysis of the effects of a new awareness of time on painting: impressionism and cubism, he says, are attempts to make pictures timeless, to disconnect them from time. When time no longer inheres in the natural objects that surround us, we experience them as moments, as mere surfaces, not as carriers of narrative. Narrative, too, breaks up. Blaise says that Hemingway's style converts time into a series of events. Time is no longer the architecture of a life. To quote a saying he doesn't cite: Life is just one damned thing after another. Plot implies a structure in time, it is a structure in time. Modern literature abandons plot, replacing it with abstract patterns of image and event, of character and response, of perception and memory.
     A good book, because it makes one think. ***