Getting People Behind A Plan And Getting The Government Out Of Our Shoestrings

So many people keep asking for the government to step in and do this or that to further some cause. All I can say is haven't they been watching the government's track record? They can't do anything right. I will keep my comments relative to the energy industry for now, but keep in mind that many of the ideas I'll pass along for thought could apply to any number of areas of government intrusion.

What most people are asking for when they ask for help is a subsidy. There are many types, including research money, grants, tax deductions or credits and free or reduced cost of government services. The best examples of that last one are the billions of dollars in land-use royalties that the oil companies should be paying to drill for oil but aren't and the government backed insurance used by the nuclear industry. Examples of research money are the endless R&D projects in the overpriced National Labs and the country's universities. These organizations have no gain from moving their research from the lab to the market place. In fact, they would lose that funding. For the labs, that means layoffs and for the schools it means a reduction in overall funding which must be made up by tuition. Grants are a very selective process. What most people don't know is that most technological grants are 'solicited'. That means the grantmakers decide what they want created and then someone applies to do the work. An innovator in a technology not on their list must get an 'unsolicited' grant and they barely even exist. The lion's share of all grants get funneled to some contractor with an association to some decision-maker on the grant. Even non-profit organizations that give grants require the recipient to be non-profit, direct the research in specific areas and satisfy financial matches. Basically, if you are one of them and you already have money, you can get a grant for anything you want. The tax subsidies are nothing more than flat out manipulation of market forces and most often are for political gain. There's nothing technical involved in the decision. If you've ever watched a political debate on tax credits or exemptions, you'll quickly see that they stem from the financial pros and cons affecting opposing political groups.

Regardless of the type of subsidy, the effect is the same. They promote one thing over another in opposition to the natural market forces. This frequently causes a monopoly in some fashion. Unfortunately, no actual monopolies can even exist without government interference. If the TVA region (Tennessee Valley Authority) would not have gotten the Rural Electrification Act pushed through, there would have been no money in running power lines to every home in America but look at it this way, many of those people had self sustainable onsite electricity clear back in the fifties, and that was growing. What if that had become the standard we use today and centralized power was a thing of the past? Interesting thought, even if not completely practical back then. Another example is the $0.56 cent/gal incentive to make ethanol. Those guys built up so many plants that they ran the price of corn up by both direct and indirect causes. Now, less than 2 years later, those same Ethanol plants are closing or sitting half finished. The industry is dying off because they couldn't keep up with their own growth. ...because they grew faster than the market could support. Take Compact Fluorescent Light bulbs (CFLs) for another example. Many communities and even countries mandated quite a bit of them. Now we have LEDs which are so much better and cheaper (to build, not to purchase yet) and those places can't use them because they have to do CFL. Then along comes the studies that are showing real world lifetimes aren't even as long a the incandescents even though they still cost 10-40 times as much. We're banning paper in one region and plastic in another but no one thought to ban all the plastic coverings over each product in the bag. We're banning everything from 4-wheelers and scooters and Segways while other towns are promoting them because they can move a person-mile with less energy than a full car! We have mandated stop signs that mandate we kill every bit of momentum in our vehicles at each one just to expend more energy to get it back. Our traffic light situation and on/off ramps to our interstates is a complete shambles, yet we argue over 24 or 27 mpg as a fleetwide average. I just love to see people in micro-sized cars parked in traffic. (I shifted my hours to drive non-stop the whole way). Did you know that an experimental hybrid car with 4 wheels is banned if it hasn't passed every safety and emission certification, but you could put an 'experimental' 3 wheeler on the street in any configuration without either cert? How many innovative, edge-cutting companies went out of business trying for those certifications? No, I believe it's much better to let the people pay for what they want. The public can change their mind much faster than the regulaiton can. Just think of how fast some our products died after bad publicity came out on them.

So, we now know we have to do this ourselves and without government help. What will that be like? Remember back in the 80's when people were putting in those 6 foot to 12 foot satellite dishes so they could get a hundred channels? As one of those guys, I helped put in my share of the 5 million dishes installed in 5 years. People shelled out up to $5,000 for one, but the average was about $2,300. This all for television. No crisis, and not even high quality gain (have you watched TV lately?) These systems took a professional a day or two and looked awkward as anything in the back yard. ...for TV. Well, in around 1986, they came out with the little ones we have now. They offered more better-quality channels for less money and with less aesthetic inconvenience. The big dishes died in months. The problem was that the little ones traded capital based purchases for lifetime membership rental costs that can only go up. Gone are the days of 100 free channels with no bill. This is thanks to your government allowing these new companies a monopoly on the transmitted info to their dish.

Energy isn't the same issue. No one can own proprietary rights to the sine wave of alternative current electricity. Anyone can duplicate it and they are. These people are seeing tremendous benefits in cost savings on their energy needs and other people are watching and waiting to pounce. A few years back, there were 140,000 homes living off grid in the US. I'd bet my lunch it was double that now. (really good leftovers!) Those people went off-grid for other reasons prior to the recent energy crisis and now they have probably the best new set of reasons. What the rest of the people miss is the hidden costs of being on-grid.

Let's compare those missed costs. Prior to installing PV, some ficticious household spends an average of $150 on electric and $300 on heating. After they install PV, they drop $100 for electricity on average (still getting charged the fees and taxes and minimal use). Keep in mind that they still spend $300 for heat. Their total bill is now $350, instead of $450. There's no justification for any PV system on $100 monthly savings.

If this home also went completely off-grid, they would lose that last $50 charge for electric plus the $300 for heat. Now they need to justify a larger system that includes many more features, but they now have $450/month to do it. The economics are vastly different as he can now buy 4 1/2 times the system of the other guy. This is but one of the considerations that need to be addressed before promoting a system. PV will still have a hard time competing due to the battery cost and no waste heat available. Using solar thermal would supply the required heat that PV missed. Sure they could install both, but we are talking about money first, right?

Ok, hopefully I've given you a little background on why subsidies and government inteference are bad in almost every form. So how do we get everyone to buy those expensive renewable energy systems? Simple, we help their competition. We either help them compete (our personal favorite) or we help the guys that are close to making a better system that's also cheaper. No personal favorites yet? Well, you're just not paying attention. If you're looking for a site to go to, find others to tell you how to invest or what system to buy, then you're in it for the wrong reasons. If, on the other hand, you're in this to save our country a lot of grief, to save our kids and ancestors a lot of heartache and to just save our environment, then we have to do everything we can. Try looking for complete solutions to all your needs rather than hype and for goodness sake, don't listen to an energy company's greenwash commercial or a politician. If you're still stuck, stick around and I'll see if I can help you find a favorite.

We need to help Boone Pickens get the word out and start on his plan. (We learned that after Boone's speech) We also need to change the regulations on who can net meter and how they get paid to increase the reliability and supply of the grid. (We learned that yesterday) Now we need to invest some time or money in a renewable energy company that's on the brink of breakthrough and do whatever we can to make them the cheapest out there. Many people ask how to get gas prices down, or how to get the whole world on board or how to get those global warming skeptics to eliminate their fossil fuel use or how we can do all this quickly or how to circumvent the government regulations or how we can fight that crooked political lobby or how we can (pause to deep inhale... Sorry, I ran out of breath on this sentence) ... entice the poor in those developing countries or how we can get the energy companies to lower their prices or how we can stop mining mountain tops or how to stop China from building 4 coal plants each week. Well, if you offer them all a cheaper and more reliable energy supply that has less problems than what they have now, they'll all come to you to purchase it. I could be talking about you, as in your country or you, as in your state or even you, as in the major stockholder of the next Microsoft of renewable energy. Think of it this way, what some investors consider a donation, some companies would consider angel funding. These companies have learned how to run their business in startup mode on merely shoestrings. Don't change their mom&pop business model. Just give them a few more shoestrings.