A great look at the geography behind the Republican demonization of mass transit. To a large degree in the US cities are democratic and the exurbs and hinterlands are republican. Since so much of our transportation funding gets funneled through the federal government, this means cites spend a lot of time getting screwed. Policy decentralization would help a lot.
Energy Efficiency and Economics at Walnut Mews
Our condo HOA had a meeting last fall, and somebody brought up selling the flat plate collectors on the roof that are part of our defunct solar thermal hot water system. The 750 gallon cylindrical storage tank rusted out in 2003 after 20 years of service. The outbuilding that houses it was basically built over the tank, so swapping it out for a new one would have meant either chopping the thing up in place with a cutting torch and building a new one on site, or removing the roof, which nobody was keen on. Some plumbing got re-routed and the tank sits there still, derelict. It was also mentioned that the main boiler for our hydronic district heating might be nearing the end of its days. I volunteered to look into whether it would make economic sense to repair the solar thermal system, and what the options were for the boiler.
Given that flat plate solar thermal collectors generate an average of about 1kBTU worth of heat per day per square foot (according to the US EIA), and given that we have about 250 square feet of collecting area (nine 28 square foot panels), the current system ought to collect something like 250kBTU/day. Our current boiler consumes 520kBTU/hr worth of gas, meaning that the solar thermal system could at best displace a half hour’s worth of operation each day. Gas costs about $8/million BTUs, so the boiler costs about $4/hr to run. If we assume optimistically that system losses are negligible, and that the boiler runs at least half an hour a day 250 days a year (it was only hooked up to the baseboard heating, not the domestic hot water) then the solar thermal system is capable of displacing something like $500 worth of gas each year. This is a best case scenario though, since the hydronic system needs water that’s hotter than the flat plate collectors can make it (so the boiler will have to do some work to boost the temperature) and because the system losses are almost certainly non-negligible.
Still, $500/year might be a significant savings. To know whether it’s really worthwhile, we need to know how much it will cost up front to get this savings, and how long we ought to expect to be able to collect it (i.e. what’s the system’s expected lifetime). I got wildly varying estimates of the cost to get the system up and running again. At the low end it was $5000, to leave the rusty tank where it is and put a collapsible storage bladder in the crawlspace. At the high end it was $20,000 to remove the old tank and build a new spray-foam insulated stainless steel one in its place. I used this calculator to sanity check my energy numbers above (which don’t seem crazy), as well as the estimates. It suggests that all in, the total system cost including installation would be something like $28,000. I suspect that a plastic bladder in the crawlspace wouldn’t be as efficient or as durable as the new stainless tank. For the sake of argument, let’s say the cheap option will only last 5 years, and the expensive one will last 30 years. The original tank lasted about 20 years. Here’s what it looks like today:
Continue reading Energy Efficiency and Economics at Walnut Mews
Do Roads Pay for Themselves?
A study from the US Public Research Interest Group (PDF) on transportation funding the US. The short answer is that only about half of highway funds come from “user fees” like the gas tax and vehicle registration fees. The rest is payed out of bonds, property taxes and other government revenues.
Womb for Rent
Surrogate pregnancies are becoming common in India. For roughly the cost of having your own baby in the US healthcare system, you can outsource the task of giving birth to a Gujarati woman. It sounds like there’s a wide range of conditions, some less ethical than others. Is it okay to pay someone the equivalent of 10 years worth of wages to bear your child, so that they can give their daughters good dowries? The mind boggles. How long until you just upload the two genomes you’d like intertwined, and pick up the baby at the airport 9 months later? Or even better, maybe someone could take care of them in a well organized creche until about age 5, when they’re all potty trained and interactive. Choose from our vast selection of native languages and cultural indoctrination schemes! All the benefits of having kids when you’re 25, without the negative career impacts. Operators are standing by.
Markets and Morals
A good talk from Chautauqua on the interaction between markets and morals. Some interesting examples of morally ambiguous markets: countries paying one another to take on refugee acceptance obligations and the outsourcing pregnancy to impoverished surrogate mothers in Gujarat, India. Sandel argues that in the last few decades we have gone from having a market economy to being a market society. Markets are now a large portion of our governance, and it’s unclear whether this is really a good thing.
Sprawl at the Gates
Boulder County is slowly being invaded from the southeast and it’s not clear what we can do about it. Sprawling development is (still) the order of the day in Broomfield, Weld, and Jefferson Counties, and it looks set to generate a lot more trips through Boulder County in the coming decades. Personally, I’m praying for $8 gasoline.
Hackable Cars
A study of the security (or lack thereof) inherent in today’s highly computerized vehicles. Not much better than voting machines overall. We’re connecting dangerous things to our networks much faster than we’re learning how to keep them from blowing up. Just ask Iran! Thankfully my bicycle is still unhackable.
Whose Roads?
A summary of research looking at how road infrastructure is funded (PDF) from VTPI. Only about half of road funding comes from “use” fees like the gas tax and vehicle registration fees. The other half comes from general tax revenues. Ultimately this means that non-motorized road users, whose impacts on road infrastructure are very low, overpay significantly and end up subsidizing motorists.
The (HVAC) Elephant in the Room
A look at the difficulties of getting good HVAC design in high performance homes. Most HVAC professionals are not familiar with the design requirements of very energy efficient homes with tight envelopes. Most rules of thumb and the very basic modeling that is done in support of sizing the systems implicitly assume a “code” home… which is the least efficient house you can build without getting sued. Oversized systems cause different problems than undersized ones, but they’re still significant problems. As high performance homes become more common, more people are running into these issues. Better contractor, builder, and homeowner education is needed.
Fluid norms or Meta-ideology
Steve Randy Waldman takes Krugman and the US left-of-center more generally to task for their implicit assumption that our national ideological stage is somehow not subject to being shaped over time. Casino games and sport have fixed rules. Politics does not. Somehow, many positions that even Nixon was supportive of in 1970 would now be laughed out of congress as socialist. Trying to get things done within the apparent current constraints is not necessarily as pragmatic as trying to change the rules over time.