Hawaii gives us a glimpse of the future of what solar will look like in the US. They are the hottest solar market in the US due to having the highest electricity rates combined with excellent conditions for solar. The primary utility in Hawaii (HECO), has started denying many permits to homeowners due to grid saturation on many circuits.
Infrastructure investments must now be done by HECO to allow for increased solar adoption - something that may not be in the best interest for the utility.
I'm not positive, but I might imagine that it's that the solar power generated by that particular grid either equals or exceeds the amount used by it. If there's multiple grids it could be that the residential area is nearly self sustaining during the day, and they don't have the capability to move that generation successfully to the other places that need it because the grid interchanges weren't built with that in mind.
The other option is to grid-tie, but agree not to sell any power back to them (which can be configured in the inverter). You would then use utility power when you don't have enough solar output to meet your needs.
Disclaimer: I have read WAY too much Home Power magazine over the last decade. I could design said system in about 20 minutes, part numbers and all. [http://www.homepower.com/]
Based on their cost of $0.02 cents per listener hour, I wanted to calculate how many hours per day my $36 yearly payment equates to (ignoring their operational costs):
Sounds like the pricing structure all works together very well, then. 5 hours per day sounds like a good point which plenty of people can easily eclipse, but the majority will not, keeping the service profitable.
Yes, but they said it was 50% of revenues. I believe Pandora is profitable, so the sum of all other costs must be less. This means that the breakeven point is actually somewhere between 2.5-5 hours. 5 hours per day is not a magic number- I think 4 or 3 also sound perfectly fine, based on the usage patterns I see.
Well, the democratic options are limited. Aside from calling your representatives in congress and encouraging everyone you know to do the same.
The electorate is uninformed and easily manipulated. Bias in the news media is generally to support the status quo and not rock the boat. Lively debate occurs mostly for easily understood and emotional issues. Covering complex issues with complex answers is not a winning strategy for aggressive ad revenue goals.
With an uninformed and easily manipulated electorate, elections are largely influenced by money. Corporations and wealthy people contribute the most money to election campaigns, and therefore have a significant amount of influence over policy decisions and positions. Gerrymandering is also a huge problem and further reduces the amount of debate and competition during elections.
Lawrence Lessig (through rootstrikers.org) is a pioneer in raising awareness on how damaging the above situation is to a healthy functioning democracy. Awareness is the best thing we can do to improve the situation. If you're interested, check out this TED Talk that Lessig did: http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_t...
I haven't been exposed to Huffington Post much, aside from seeing some hyperbolic sensational posts back during the Bush Administration days which just made me doubt their commitment to any type of journalistic integrity. I've kind of avoided them since.
Seven studies were found which did report an association, while 24 could not find any association with electromagnetic fields. However, of the seven positive studies, two could not be replicated even by the original authors, three had serious methodological shortcomings, and the final two presented contradictory results. Since then, several more double-blind experiments have been published, each of which has suggested that people who report electromagnetic hypersensitivity are unable to detect the presence of electromagnetic fields and are as likely to report ill health following a sham exposure, as they are following exposure to genuine electromagnetic fields. [1]
This is the sort of thing that should have been mentioned in the article. Either through shoddy research or intentional omission the author included none of this and left it with two short paragraphs of dissent. The article gives the impression little work has been done on this issue.
Another example of shoddy science reporting in the media. sigh
Infrastructure investments must now be done by HECO to allow for increased solar adoption - something that may not be in the best interest for the utility.