Jason and I are again performing as the “opening act” for the Placer Nature Center’s 4th Friday lecture series this week.

This lecture is on ABC: Arthropods, Butterflies & Climate and will be presented by Dr. Arthur Shapiro Friday April 24th.  Music starts at 7PM, lecture at 7:30.  See you there! 

My favorite story of the week: Hayduke Lives: Tim DeChristopher’s Heroic Act of Creative Civil Disobedience.  In short – a University of Utah student posed as a bidder in one of the BLM’s parting-shots mineral-rights auctions, bid up the parcels by about $500K, and walked away winning $1.8M worth of leases around Arches National Park.  Of course, he had no intention to actually pay, was detained and now faces federal charges.  But until it’s resolved, those leases are protected from exploitation, and the process of the auctions is undergoing greater media scrutiny.

What else is inspiring though, is that he is trying to raise the $45K initial payment in order to keep his bid legitimate until the end of the Bush administration, and then there’s a good chance the new administration will keep them off the books.  In just a few days, he’s attracted $37K – plus a bit from me - and I’m hopeful that he can fill the rest in the remaining two days.

Bush, our turn to prescribe “two of these”!

Our Christmas tradition is to enjoy the (so far) inevitable few days of gorgeous California Christmas weather to scour the American River canyon for trash and bring back as much as we can carry.  We have no problem finding plenty of cans, bottles, towels, flip-flops and sunglasses.

The light in the canyon was amazing this year – here’s a quick panorama I took.  Dare you to find any trash in there ;-).

As I posted back in 2005:

The US automakers don’t seem tapped into [the fuel economy] trend at all.  They still seem to think circumventing mileage minimums by pumping out SUVs is the way to sustainable revenues.  Last week Ford and GM were put on notice that they were wrong.  At least the blue half of this country, and I suspect lots of export markets, are willing to invest their automobile acquisition budget in a choice that reduces pump costs, unsightly and unhealthy smog, and reduces our dependence on foreign oil, and maybe even get a bit of value appreciation while they’re at it.  They’re even more motivated to vote with their dollars since their election votes haven’t provided much of a visible return.  Yet despite plenty of urging by the environmental community, Ford and GM seem to have ignored the inevitabilities of the long-term.  More and more of those purchasing dollars will head straight to Japan.  I suspect the next 15 years could be pretty rough as our automobile designers adapt.

High fuel prices have accelerated the timeline beyond what I had imagined, and Prius sales have accordingly boomed. 

I’m proud to at last announce I’ve joined those voting with their wallets for fuel efficiency and low emissions (and unfortunately against our domestic automakers) with my new purchase!

Let’s hope American competitiveness is up to the challenge, and hope that they do a much better job of recognizing and capitalizing on long-term trends in the future.

Just got my first yearly bill from PG&E, reflecting the performance of our solar array.  Good news - right about where I expected it to be!  Here’s the stats for those that need encouragement to take the solar plunge:

• Power generated: 13,315 kWh
• Power bought from PG&E: 3,358 kWh
• Annual bill from the power company: $348.00
• Sum of monthly minimum payments for connected meters: ~$50
• Savings: $3,221.14 [1]
• Actual rate of return: 8.95% [2]
• Total payback length: 11.2 years [3]
• Extrapolated payback date: 11 Oct 2017

Notes:

1. This calculation takes into account the sliding price scale for energy over the baseline, and actual changes in the rates and baseline during the year.  Some straight-line averaging was necessary to correlate the readings taken from the meter with those from the power company.
2. Tax free!  And calculated only over the payback period - once the array pays for itself, I will continue to get free energy for many years.
3. Straight-line extrapolation based on assumed fixed consumption, and fixed energy prices.  It is virtually impossible that energy prices won’t rise substantially in the next 10 years, shortening the payback period and increasing the rate of return.

Laine was inspired by this story we came across in the Christian Science Monitor about hedgehog rescue in England:

This is St. Tiggywinkles - a wildlife hospital. It’s where 500 hedgehogs are served meals in bed every day in the hope they’ll put on enough weight to survive the winter.

…

The phone rang constantly with people who’d found ailing hedgehogs…  Stocker would give advice on hedgehog care, but sometimes he’d ask the caller to simply put the hedgehog on the train.

"I knew that the British Rail network used to carry racing pigeons," he says. "So I contacted British Rail and made the arrangement that if somebody had an injured hedgehog, they could put it on the train at their station [in a box] and they would go straight through to Aylesbury." Hedgehogs from as far away as Scotland made the free journey as a Red Star parcel.

Is that straight out of Beatrix Potter or what?  Gotta love the British, especially their flair at names.

Sadly, I can’t guarantee Laine’s hedgehog will be the one in this household putting on weight to make it through the wet season.  In fact it’s unlikely to make it through the night in one piece.  Life’s rough out here on the frontier!

As far as I can tell, the solstice happened about an hour ago - placing it on either Thursday the 21st or Friday the 22nd depending upon your time zone.  These short days are pretty unpleasant, and I always look forward to lengthening days this time of year.  So the solstice is both a symbol of gloom, and a symbol of hope that it will all look brighter from here on.

Fitting with the gloom theme, the shortest day of the year was a cloudy, then drizzly, then outright gray and rainy day here in Auburn.  That adds up to the perfect opportunity to see what the bottom end of my solar panels performance is!  So as it grew dark I checked and found that in the worst imaginable conditions, I only generated 1.546 kWh - a far cry from our 40kWh average daily consumption, and probably just enough to power my laptop and monitor during the workday.  Depressing!

But true to the theme of hope, I updated my solar cost savings spreadsheet found that despite the lack of substantial solar output in these horrible conditions, during the first four months of operation I have still saved just shy of $1000.  Right on plan!  Even if electricity prices stay constant, inflation drops miraculously to zero, and for some reason the expected tax breaks don’t materialize, I’ll still break even in about 14 years; averaging about a 7% annual return on my investment.  I’m willing to accept that as the worst possible case!

By the spring solstice, I’m expecting much better news - the calculation (not just the forecast) of the value of this year’s tax breaks, longer and sunnier days, and probably some unavoidable electricity rate increases.  All adding up to a payback of under 10 years.  At least, that’s my solstice hope!

This summer marked a permanent reduction in our power bills, with the joyful completion of a 7.6 kW solar array!  I’ve wanted to invest in solar for years, but shopping for a reasonably priced yet competent installer always ended up on the back burner.  Despite the desire to do good by the environment and participate in an emerging distributed grid of clean energy, the costs are quite substantial, and is has proven quite difficult to determine what the payback on such an investment would be.  Between state rebates, federal and state tax credits, depreciation, choices of flat or time-of-use metering, a stack of rates based on consumption, which change seasonally and will probably increase in the future, figuring out the payback required too many assumptions to give me confidence in the resulting numbers.

My enthusiasm to figure this all out was renewed on a visit to the Horton Iris Farm, where they have a new 3+kW roof-top system.  The installer, Coy Ware of Coy Solar, has been a friend of the Hortons for a long time, and has a long history of general contracting, electronics, and eco-friendly technologies, so it didn’t take long for us to analyze our usage, figure out the parameters of the system, and get underway.  We calculated the payback at somewhere between 4.5 and 9 years - a pretty wide range but that was the best we could do.  At either end, I was willing to invest though.  Coy devised clever ways to move materials and equipment around the site since it isn’t very accessible by machinery.  It took about 6 weeks of steady and at times heavy manual labor to construct and install the system on the hillside below our pool, especially to Coy’s standards of excellence!

We switched it on about 6 weeks ago.  The system is a grid-tie, meaning that there are no batteries or other storage mechanism.  Excess power is pumped back into the grid, making the meter spin backwards - what a sight!

A new digital meter courtesy of the power company, and the System Lifetime readout on the solar has helped me keep track of how much I’ve saved - not a trivial proposition given the rate schedule involving baseline rates and increasingly expensive rates the higher over the baseline you go (the exact opposite of volume discounts).  I put together a rather complex spreadsheet simulating a virtual power bill and the resulting savings of $519.75 for the first 47 days.  Not factoring in the tax savings, a straight-line estimate at that rate puts the payback at around 8 years.  I hope to see that period shorten as rates rise (as they no doubt will within the timeframe), and the actual tax savings can be measured more accurately.  Over the life of the system, it should pay for itself many times over.

And the air is just a little clearer than it otherwise would have been. Those benefits will accrue for years as well.

Some people just aren’t satisfied with going weeks between fill-ups in their Priuses. Some want to go months!  In the Christian Science Montior article Plug-in hybrids: a here-and-now alternative, Mark Clayton reports on homebrew efforts, to add batteries and a charger to your Prius and get a 50-60 mile charge each night:

One auto critic who tested a plug-in Prius recently reported that in normal driving, not trying to go easy on the throttle, he would still have to fill up the tank just once in 5-1/2 months.

This doesn’t seem like low-hanging environmental fruit to me, but clearly it appeals to some!  Where there’s a market, a vendor will emerge:

Edrive Systems, a private Los Angeles company, plans to offer by early next year an aftermarket kit that converts a Toyota Prius into a PHEV. Target price for the under-the-hood makeover: About $12,000.

But this seems to represent the extreme of a more broadly-based level of interest that is leading other manufacturers (such as Volkswagen), to follow suit.  ‘Bout time!

This from a story Toyota hopes to cut hybrid premium in half as reported in USA Today:

"The mind-set has changed. Used to be somebody would pay $2,000, $3,000 more for a big V-8 and the macho and muscle and squealing tires that went with it," said Jim Press, president of Toyota Motor Sales USA. "Now, at least in some places, people pay the premium for the (hybrid’s) image of being concerned about a clean environment, contributing to their children’s future health and depending less on foreign oil."

It continues to baffle me why our domestic auto manufacturers continue to extrapolate the demand by some for big mondo cars to everyone in the market.  I still think our industry is on it’s way toward another clock-cleaning ala Japanese imports in the 1970s.  Toyota considering how to double their Prius sales points this way.

My previous hybrid posts: Prius-buzz; 1397 miles, one tank - must be a hybrid.

I was surprised that good-old-oil-boy George W. was promoting hybrid technology in the energy bill.  Has he greened up a bit?  Or is this simply a token gesture, meant to obscure the immense subsidies to oil business?

But perhaps W is even more devious than I had imagined.  Perhaps he knew that many new "hybrids" are not providing better gas mileage at all - just increased power.  GM’s hybrids are a sham.  Even Honda is a culprit.  The Union of Concerned Scientists has a whole Hybrid Center which details these problems.  The government incentives for buying hybrids still apply, whether you are trying to save the planet, or simply want to get from 0 to 60 quicker.

This is reminiscent of Bush’s 2003 push for a hydrogen economy, which sounds like a good way to go green until you realize hydrogen is currently manufactured mainly from - yep - natural gas.

Nobody should be fooled into thinking that George W. isn’t the least envrionmentally responsible President we’ve seen.

I wonder if these guys would have gotten even better than 110 miles a gallon without (I assume) ethanol in their mix.  After all, ethanol lowers the amount of heat stored in the fuel:

[Ethanol] contains only about two-thirds as much energy as gasoline. Thus, when it gets blended with regular gasoline, it lowers the heat content of the fuel. So, while a gallon of ethanol-blended gas may cost the same as regular gasoline, it won’t take you as far.  [Robert Bryce, Slate]

As I’ve blogged before, I’m glad to see more evidence of Prius fanaticism, even when it’s taken to rather ludicrous extremes (driving 1400 miles in circles is hard to justify as "efficient" ;-).

I think it’s been common scientific knowledge for a while now that one way to conserve oil would be to stop ethanol production.  A recent study puts some numbers on it - that ethanol made from corn requires about 29% more fossil-fuel energy to make than it contains.  Clearly a bad investment.  Would you invest in something that had a huge investment and a guaranteed 29% loss?

Apparently that’s a good enough return for the Senate though, which proposes increasing ethanol subsidy in the new energy bill, to double the ethanol output by 2012.  Gee, I trust them to determine whether medical savings accounts are cost effective, don’t you?

I took Chris Pratley’s suggestion and played with OneNote’s Publish features, using as a sample last Thursday evening’s fern discovery expedition.  Publish worked great, saving the page in MHTML (a multi-part HTML package with embedded images).  OneNote preserved the layout nicely, which is pretty impressive given HTML’s limitations as a document layout format.

However, MSN Groups serves up the resulting .mht poorly - IE doesn’t seem to recognize the format and display the results correctly.  (I have no idea if other browsers even support this format.)  You can right-click and download the file to your local machine and browse it just fine, but that’s rather inconvenient and raises security suspicions.

The MTHML can be converted to plain old HTML fairly easily in IE by selecting File/Save As…/Web Page Complete.  The resulting multiple files require a bit more work to upload to MSN Groups, but the results actually work (always a good thing.)  Would be nice to have a direct Save As…/Web Page Complete or equivalent in the next version of OneNote.

[Update 14 June: Well, that didn't work as well as I thought.  The simplest "My Documents" option on MSN Groups isn't publicly viewable.  Creating a new group with public permissions still required an MSN account to view - unacceptable for my purposes.  When I moved the files back to my own ISP account, and updated the links in my blogs, I found the Save as/Web Page Complete didn't preserve relative locations, and mangled the names to make direct access through a browser impossible.  Had to do some hand-editing.  Looks like I have to up the priority of my request that OneNote export clean HTML directly.]

My daughter Laine and I went out on the lake tonight for a gentle paddle.  Partway through, as we were investigating what I think is a hawk’s nest, we found a type of fern I hadn’t seen in this area before.  I brought home a sample to determine it’s type, and was reminded of some nature walks we’d taken together earlier this year.

On those walks we looked for interesting flora, and collected data on our expedition.  We took a GPS, a couple of digital cameras, and mapped our journey and the results.  But how to organize and display this data once we’d collected it?  I’ve been using Microsoft’s OneNote extensively to manage my time and track the various projects I’m involved in - would it prove a convenient digital repository?

It did marvelously.  I based each page off of a map or photo of the samples, and surrounded it with small pictures and text augmenting and explaining the data there.  Add some hand-drawn lines over the top (wish I had a tablet for that) and I have a very nice record of our discoveries, in a fashion that highlights the most important data but also allows for supporting details.  Here are a couple of samples - a walk down our Secret Trail to where fungus abounded, and a hike with pony down to the local Waterfall, where we collected and identified several types of ferns.  (MSN spaces doesn’t seem to allow me to upload such wide and tall screenshots without shrinking them - bummer.  I’ve just included a teaser to encourage you to click the links for the full-size JPGs stored elsewhere.)

OneNote packages all the data (maps, images, text, spreadsheets and GPS files) in a single file, without losing resolution (I can size up the photos later to see more detail).  This makes it handy to archive, move to other computers, and so forth.  All in all, it’s hard to imagine a substantially better digital notebook.

[Updated 6/10: moved screenshots to MSN Groups.]

[Updated 6/14: moved screenshots away from MSN Groups due to access restrictions.]