At least they are out on the streets doing something, however ineffectual that something might be. What would have MLK rolling in his grave is the lack of widespread protests of the current proto right wing dictatorship in the US.
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https://mobile.twitter.com/KlasfeldReports/status/1186723184785182722
Thread…
https://mobile.twitter.com/KlasfeldReports/status/1186762376961548288
They don’t actually offset the carbon emissions, they just make up some accounting and you pay them for it.
I always liked Australia somehow but I just read an article how backwards their government really is:
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has accused environmental activists of “economic sabotage” and “indulgent and selfish practices” and says the government will look at legislation limiting potential damage to businesses.
Mr Morrison declared he was working on legal measures to outlaw the “indulgent and selfish practices” of protest groups who tried to stop major resources projects.
Or Peter Dutton:
*“For many of them they don’t even believe in democracy,” he said.
"This is not about free speech, it’s not about the ability to protest. These people are completely against our way of life.*
It is pretty bad here atm and with climate denial in particular. The government is allin on selling coal to China. In the last election we basically got done over by Queensland aka the Florida of Australia. Dutton is a massive creep as well. Google what he looks like if you want, trigger warning though.
It’s sort of a mixed bag still, like we have the highest minimum wage in the world, so it’s not all a hellscape, but on climate change we are as far right as it gets. Australia ranks third in the world in carbon dioxide production in terms of fossil fuels produced (without regard to where they are consumed). Not third in the world per capita. Just straight up third in the world.
Depends where you go.
My friend was on a tram last week that was delayed by Extinction Rebellion protests. He said 2/3rds of the tram were supportive of the protest, even though they were the ones being inconvenienced.
That’s Melbourne tho. A bit different in other places.
If it’s not obvious those comments from members of the government refer to Extinction Rebellion protests basically. They’ve done a lot of shutting roads down recently, particularly in Melbourne. I don’t think it’s going to achieve much and spend my politics time working for the Greens instead, but I understand where they’re coming from. The last election led a lot of environmental activists to conclude that electoral politics is hopeless.
Yeah if you want to pick your cities it’s fine but it’s the same story in the US. WA and QLD exist though. Unfortunately.
Technology might save us after all: An Energy Breakthrough Could Store Solar Power for Decades.
Best part, it’s made of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen. First practical applications estimated available in 3 years, full blown storage tech in 6 years. Microbet may have been early (very early) but he might just get rich yet lol.
The hard part about making money in solar is not finding work.
Meaning it’s hard when you can’t find work, or you can find work but it’s hard to make money even when you do?
Margins are thin on large amounts of money. One might think that the selling point for solar is environmental benefit, but it’s not it’s sold on price. After doing this for 10 years I have found the spots where margins are good but you definitely can’t get high volume of that. What I can tell you is that I’ve seen a lot of people who are very good at it and busy go out of business. I don’t know of a single installer, from giants like SolarCity to individual operators, that has not had trouble.
Why do the margins suck so bad? Serious question. Lots of stuff is sold on price and the margins don’t automatically get worse than a certain point.
My thinking anyway is that it is about it being sold on price. some things are not sold on price at all, in fact in some cases a higher price sells better. Some things are so partly on price. Some things are sold as investment vehicles or cost savings, and they are sold mostly on price. It’s like a CD, certificate of deposit. It’s all about payback and it’s very competitive on price.
That kind of thing may work okay in some kind of retail or wholesale sales of products, but construction is much more unpredictable. You have to have a healthy margin because of the variance.
Your linked article is pretty bad, somewhat worse than the average popular news article. This seems to be the paper it’s summarizing. Skimming the paper (reading the abstract, figures, and conclusion), it’s an interesting result and published in a very good journal, but it’s hardly revolutionary imo. You really have to take what professors publicizing their research say about practical applications and particularly timelines with a grain of salt. I would be shocked if this technology was heating triple digit homes/buildings in six years. But it’s an interesting result to be sure.
Also the application is solely for storing energy for heating. This doesn’t do anything to help store energy as electricity (we can already do that in batteries).
I work in trucking (as I’m sure you all know by now) which is at least as variable as construction and has absolutely shit margins. Honestly I feel like the problem with solar is that it has to pencil out vs grid power as an alternative, and costs are still too high for that to make sense in most situations.
Weirdly it’s not the solar panels that are the problem here I think… the problem is that batteries are still pretty expensive, and grids pretty much have to be forced to buy solar power that they don’t need from homeowners during daylight hours to make them pencil out.
Bottom line we need better/cheaper ways to store the solar power when it’s generated. Once that gets solved a lot of value will be unlocked and it’ll be a lot easier to get people to pay for it. Basically the problem is the duck curve full stop.
Just my 2c. I’m interested in your response.
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Penciling out is a problem where it doesn’t pencil out. Where I am it pencils out well enough that finding workis not a problem. I’ve had salespeople and multiple crews and have done maybe twenty jobs in a month before and I could go right back to doing that and losing money any time I wanted. I’d rather do one or two jobs a month and make some money.
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So where are you losing the money? COGS? Labor? Marketing?
I’m just not understanding I guess why the numbers don’t add up. Obviously if you’re selling below cost there’s plenty of demand (this is generally true, if I was willing to lose money I could do infinite revenue in freight brokerage)… but it sounds like demand is pretty thin when you sell for cost + acceptable profit.
A better question would be how or why you have competitors willing to underbid your costs, and if they are doing anything that gets the cost down for them that you can’t do for some reason… although it sounds like everyone in solar is willing to damn near lose money which is where it disconnects for me I guess.
The big players were willing to lose money. SolarCity was losing $75M a quarter. Other people just don’t make enough during good times to cover bad times. That was me. You chase bad work just to keep people working. This is incredibly common in a construction. Construction scales badly, especially residential. I can make decent money and large margins and do a better job operating the way I do with little overhead, risk, and liability and no big company can beat that.
If anyone is making more than a very solid working wage (maybe up to $150k or so), it’s distributors or utility scale contractors. I don’t know enough about them to know though. The one relatively large distributor where I know the owner very well seems to be doing well, but I’ve been surprised before and I know he came into the business with money…I think millions.
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