Solar panels - how cost effective in South Australia?

I saw an advert from Origin Energy to install solar panels for $4990 (inc. GST and RECs rebate) for a 1.5kw system.

I have no idea if that's good or not, so started thinking about building a solar calculator. Turns out the Solar Shop is way ahead of me there.

Unfortunately their application is a little vague on the details, but suggests around 8-10 years is a typical time period to recoup your losses.

This letter appears to lay out details circa 2001 a bit better.

Adelaide E-Bus

Robby just let me know:

(2:00:45 PM) Robby: hey dan
(2:00:48 PM) Robby: http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/1245/
(2:02:37 PM) Robby: if you look out the window
(2:02:39 PM) Robby: you can see the solar panels
(2:02:49 PM) Robby: i noticed them last week and thought it was just to power the new bus terminal

Free Rice and Big Talk

Free rice - I'm stuck at level 38-39.

The more words you get right, the higher the level. Every thing you are correct about means 10 grains of rice donated to the 3rd world.

Where's my Airship!?

Where's my airship flights?

A few quotes to get you salivating:

EG: In as brief a list as possible, what kind of advantages does airship travel hold over traditional air travel?

RH: The best word picture I can give you is to refer back to where we left off, with the Hindenburg. It could carry a whopping 100 tons of payload and people at a top speed of 83 mph (cruise was closer to 65 mph). Yet it was powered by only four diesel engines each with a maximum of about 1,200 hp. so for less than the horsepower of one engine on a four engine C-130 turboprop cargo plane (that only carries 20 tons) the Hindenburg could fly from Southern Germany all the way to the US in about 72 hours.

and

The airship industry has no shortage of enthusiasts, visionaries, and passionate dreamers, but it’s almost barren of the steely eyed business people who have the professionalism and expertise to first build the solid enterprise that can build the airships. I guess it’s just easier for these people to get an MBA and go manage an IT start-up or a Fortune 500 company.

When you have industry folk saying where's my manager, then you know there's a market there ripe for the taking.

Can you imagine it? You book in a flight, which might take a day or so, but you get to spend many hours in an inflight casino... or a bar. Or even better, you are hooked up to the internet, so there's very little discernible difference in your day to day life (at least if you develop software for a living).

Tell me that's not better than flights for $1 to batshit nowhere.

Rental Bikes

What do Adelaide and the French cities of Lyon and Paris have in common?

Rental bikes!
Adelaide has a very small pilot program, but in Paris, they've unleashed 20,000 of the things.
You go to a bike depot, if your credit card is already on file, you just check one out. If you get it back in the first half hour, it's free.

Pompless China

China cracks down on pomp. Not bad for a country previously pretty big on giant constructions.

Under new rules, you can't have a giant government building - if you ignore them, your gold plated lobby can be appropriated and sold.

Hamachi is pretty nifty.

I actually tried out Hamachi; and I'll be the first to admit it does exactly what I need.

For those of you who don't know, Hamachi is a zero-conf VPN tool. If you've got a computer at home, a computer at work, and you need to make them talk... a few clicks and you have a VPN.

It does it well, too.

Install, easy; connection, easy. Add a few entries to my HOSTS file, and I'm hooked right back up to work. Too easy.

The only qualm I have now is how to reconcile this with consuming too much energy! Perhaps I can offset it by taking the bus more.

How does pollution affect cyclists?

Do you know? I don't know, but treehugger does.

I have to say it's a little unsettling after reading about Dabbawala, then reading about Pirates, one of which died of Dropsy; and knowing about the links between global warming and the marked decline in pirates.

Even worse, on in the background is The Planet. It's covering climate change and all of that jazz - but it's not just all of that jazz.

To give you the gist:

It's not that hard to understand. The economy is a system. The biosphere is a system. Economic growth is the main deal that society is focused on. Economic growth typically means more people. More people need more things. More things consume more materials. Where do the materials come from? The biosphere. The economy derives huge amounts of raw material - food, crops, wood - from the biosphere, turns it into junk for 20 years and then gets it thrown back into the biosphere.

It's really just a question of how much we can take and throw back before the biosphere becomes fed up; and we start to experience Uneconomic growth - where it costs far too much to get too little.

Windturbines

Take a look at this video of a windturbine. It's one of three in the world with a viewing area; and the view is astonishing.