All Forum Posts by: Steve K.

@Bill F.

First of all thanks for providing legitimate counter-points and advancing this conversation beyond,“Solar is bad! No it’s not!”

Mathematicians at the Max Planck Institute calculated that nuclear events as bad or worse than Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima will occur once every 10 to 20 years (based on the current number of reactors which was 440 at the time (2012), we have 447 now with 150 or so more currently being built)):

https://phys.org/news/2012-05-probability-contamin...

I’m sure these findings have been argued against by those that want us to believe nuclear is 100% safe. We don’t know when another nuclear disaster is coming, but we know one is coming. It's a mathematical certainty because we've already had over thirty accidents. What’s to stop it from happening again? The same people who told us it was safe back then? The AP1000? South Carolina spent $9B on those for nothing.

For the number of nuke plants it would take to power the earth (800-12,000 depending on who you ask), combined with the time the waste remains deadly (1,000 to 1,000,000 years depending on who you ask), it seems probable things could go wrong considering we've already had over 30 accidents with only about 400 plants. I don't consider myself a mathematician or an authority on splitting atoms, nor should anyone reading this, but I do know a little. I know insurance companies rate nuke plants uninsurable. I know I wouldn't buy a building I couldn’t insure. I know in real estate if there’s a possibility something can wrong it eventually will.

Nuclear was poised to meet the world’s energy needs… then Chernobyl and Three Mile Island happened. Hundreds of shovel-ready projects cancelled. France kept going, Japan and a few others but everybody took a step back. It took four decades before the “Nuclear Renaissance” kicked off around 2010, which of course brings us to Fukushima and that was the end of the Renaissance. Low priced Natural Gas also severely undercut nuclear at this time, with 12 nuke plants prematurely closed in the US. Fukushima has cost $160B and is still going, so that has got people seriously worried.

An eye opener is that leading up to Fukushima, Japan was completely sold on nuclear. As an island nation with few natural resources, they depended on it. Then Fukushima came and they closed down all forty-eight plants to take a closer look at safety. Eight years later only five plants have resumed. Hundreds of nuclear projects around the world were cancelled after Fukushima. Many existing plants were scheduled to be phased out. Even France moved away from nuclear. Nuclear was dead.

Or was it? China is building new plants as well as Saudi Arabia, Russia, some Eastern European countries, mostly totalitarian regimes with no regard for human life or the future of the planet and wait... what? Japan?! Japan is building more nuclear?

Enter Bill Gates. Maybe he’s on to something. It’s possible he’s avoiding the battery space because it’s rapidly becoming overcrowded, and he sees nuclear as being overlooked. I personally hope he’s right and we find a way to make nuclear work. I have a customer who works at a company in Denver that is working on a small, modular reactor that could be deployed quickly in remote sites. That sounds cool. The nuclear of today is much different than it was in the 60's, it's just the risk factor holding us back. 

Waste remains the world’s biggest game of hot potato. Shooting it into space is cost prohibitive (plus, what if the launch fails?). Dumping it in the ocean is tempting and from 1946 until 1993 a dozen or so countries did, especially France, until Jacques Cousteau realized what a terrible idea that was, and decided to dedicate his life to defending the oceans because nuclear waste being dumped in the oceans frightened him so much. We still have no idea what to do with it. The best idea seems to be simply burying it. 

Which brings us to Yucca mountain. Yucca started before I was born so I haven't been following it the whole time. I’ve been following since the late nineties when I lived in Northern AZ. $15 Billion taxpayer dollars have been spent on Yucca so far, and we’re still in the planning stages. Nevada is against it whole-heartedly. It became Harry Reed’s personal crusade. Yucca is an old volcano on Western Shoshone/Southern Paiute land with a fault line underneath. Proponents swear it's a great place to dump nuclear waste, but most Nevadans disagree. They still harbor a lot of mistrust for government, due to history. Our first nuclear waste dump was near Yucca in the 60’s (Beatty). The government assured Nevadans it was completely safe but then it leaked and had to be shut down and much later after changing hands a bunch of times caught fire and it remains a very expensive unsolvable problem that nobody wants to pay for like all nuclear waste. The feds also assured Nevadans they would be completely safe when their state became a nuclear bombing range (more nuclear bombs were dropped on Nevada than anywhere else in the world, about 100 above ground and 800 below ground tests were conducted there and the landscape is now riddled with craters you can see using google earth). The people living nearby these sites are now known as "downwinders". 85% of Nevada is federal but many Nevadans (understandably) resent and mistrust the government (Sagebrush Rebellion). So it’s an issue of states rights and Native American rights, which aren't small issues.

Currently Yucca is a zombie project with not much hope of moving forward. Nevada has filed many lawsuits over the years, using different ways to deter the project like preventing the government from using their roads to transport the waste (Flagstaff followed suit), and also suing for funding to conduct their own independent study to determine if the site is actually safe. Nevada even has a state agency tasked with warding off nuclear waste. One argument against it is that Nevada doesn't even have any nuclear power plants in the state, so why would they take the waste? It seems unlikely Yucca will be a solution any time soon, and my understanding is that the build-out phase is expected to take decades to complete, so even if it becomes an option it’s not an immediate solution. It's the most studied and expensive piece of real estate ever, and may end up being the most expensive liability on the planet. 

I’ve heard a few Scandinavian countries are working on geologic storage by drilling deep down into granite bedrock, and that sounds promising. Nice little gift for some poor sucker in 5,000 years. 

Don't get me wrong, I hope nuclear works out. If it does I’ll start selling it. I'd love to close a deal worth $50Billion. I'm not under the impression renewables can go from 2% of the grid to 100% overnight, with no storage solution and no pain felt such as a couple Californians being required to install solar that they probably would have installed anyway. Solar and wind technology is pretty good and nobody is dying from it, so I see no reason not to push that 2% from renewables up as high as possible until we figure something better out. 

@Jay Hinrichs

@Andrew Smith

@Bill F.

@Bill F. Here are my thoughts on the Bill Gates letter (interesting read by the way):

 I'm all for R&D of any kind. We're going to have to figure something out, because demand for energy is expected to triple by 2050.  

Nuclear would be ideal if not for these glaring issues: waste, possibility of proliferation, and potential mathematical certainty of disaster. If Bill Gates can solve these problems, he'll be the richest man in the world (again). 

It's a tall order though. To begin with, nuclear is incredibly expensive, even for Gates. That aside, we still have no permanent waste facility anywhere on earth. A portion of the waste remains dangerously radioactive for many, many thousands of years (longer than human civilization has existed). Not all of it, to be fair, as most of it returns to the radiation level of the original ore in less than a century and can be safely released, but a portion of it has a negative impact for many, many future generations which is a pretty crappy legacy. The waste issue has always been extremely contentious. Gates will have to create a way to generate nuclear power with zero waste, or solve the waste problem too. 

As far as nuclear thus far, it's biting us in the ***. The 99 aging reactors left in the US (and an olympic-sized swimming pool of radioactive waste from each one of them sitting around in temporary storage with nowhere to go) may just be our country's biggest liability.  

As of right now, renewables are a completely viable option. NREL has determined that solar and wind generation (technology we have today at a much larger scale), plus some sort of storage, combined with a more flexible energy system including a mix of decentralized small-scale power-heat cogeneration units, biomass, greater savings in energy usage, increased electricity grid optimization and better trimming of loads on the grid is more than adequate to supply 80% of our power from renewables by 2050. But only if we start right now, and go pedal to the metal, which is a great segue into the larger issue: transportation. Electricity production is only responsible for 25-30% of greenhouse gas emissions, while the rest is mostly transportation and heating. Transitioning to electric transportation methods and using electricity (provided by renewables of course) or other carbon free sources for heat will also be necessary to have a carbon free energy system. 

Storage remains the holy grail of renewables, much like waste is for nuclear. As of now the best ideas for storage are massive battery banks (lithium ion, graphene, etc.), thermal batteries, molten salt batteries, pumping water up to a reservoir during the day and releasing it through hydro turbines at night, solar panels that are so sensitive they work at night... if anybody has a better idea DM me with it ;). 

Will it be nuclear, renewables, or all of the above? I can't say, but I'm glad Bill Gates is working on it.

@Andrew Smith

@Jay Hinrichs

Thanks @Bill F., I hate to be the guy correcting people on here, and I’ve tried to avoid getting into back and forths, and I would go insane without @Andrew Smith. But a lot of the things people have said in this thread about solar, presented as fact, are so far from the truth it would be the equivalent of writing “Interest rates are currently 35%, real estate investing doesn’t work”. Correct me if I’m wrong Andrew but I don’t think that’s even an exaggeration. If somebody wrote that on here, I would hope a qualified mortgage lender would pipe up and correct them, so that everybody doesn’t think interest rates are 35%. Cooking dinner now but I will read that article tonight, thanks for sharing. 

 Yes thanks for clarifying, in our office we calculated the tariff as a 5-10% increase on total system cost, while the tax credit reduces it 30%, just trying to avoid getting too granular with this crowd ;)

 Nobodies defensive, it’s sad your opinion is formed with false or outdated information, that’s all.

Of course the degradation factor is taken into account when we do energy forecasts. It's less than 1% on avg., high quality panels less than .5%. 

I have never cleaned my panels nor do many of my 1,000's of customers (only the really anal ones, or the large scale bank-owned ones required to do so by investors). All of these systems are producing better than forecasted, dirty or meticulously cared for, basically same end result. If there's a dust storm or something, they can easily be cleaned or you can just wait for it to rain like I do. If you clean them daily you might make a few extra pennies a day. Or if you think it's necessary, as some managers of large scale arrays lead us to believe (mostly to justify their position "managing" and array with no moving parts, or to appease investors who have little solar knowledge and just like to have something to point out and think it's important), then paying some guys to run around with spray bottles and squeegees for a few hours isn't going to be a deal breaker on a multimillion dollar system. Soiling is a non-issue in my experience. In areas with heavy dust like the Mojave or the Gobi where the largest solar arrays are, cleaning them is a teeny tiny expense compared to the many millions of dollars worth of electricity those large arrays produce. 

Yes, the recent tariffs increased the cost of imported panels by 30%, and the same president signed off on extending the 30% tax credit. So now we mark them up 30% and then down 30%. Makes sense to me... free market! Interesting fact: both policies were signed into law by the party of "less government"; the 30% tax credit in 2005, extended in 2017, and the 30% tariff in 2017. Less government achieved by more government? Energy subsidies are extremely complex, and solar isn't unique in that regard. If you look into subsidies for any form of energy it's migraine-inducing. Despite the tariffs panel prices have dropped by 75% since 2009 and will continue to drop as they are increasingly mass produced. 

Current prices have been more than economical for renewables in CA for quite some time that's why almost all new generation is coming from solar and wind. 

@Andrew Smith you beat me AGAIN! And you even had more updated info than me... I stand corrected, nuclear is down to 9% of the CA energy mix, I'll have to update my number of 14% from a few years ago. It's quickly on its way to zero. 

Whatever question is being asked about energy, nuclear is never the answer. How did we forget to account for the cost of managing the nuclear waste for literally 100,000 years? Taxes pay for that, and if we don't protect it, it can be made into dirty bombs. Great idea indeed but solar "doesn't make sense".... ok. 

California's population is growing consistently by 300-400,000 people each year over the last 10 years. Some residents are leaving, but more are moving in. They definitely don't have a problem with a "mass exodus", if anything the opposite is true, they're struggling with ways to accommodate their growing population. That's why it makes sense to include a power plant with every new home. Build a new roof, power the home with that roof. 

Financially solar panels make a ton of sense. There's an upfront cost but over time the power they produce is far less expensive than traditional energy sources. 

Solar panels don't last very long? That's utter hogwash. Down the street from me is NREL, where they test new technology. They have an array consisting of solar panels from the 70's and guess what? Still producing power. Why would we recycle them when they still generate valuable electricity? Modern solar panels are even better, they come with 20-25 year warranties, degrade less than 1% per year, and will still be producing valuable electricity in 30-40 years at least. If you want to "recycle" some panels, just bring them over my house, I'll plug them in and sell the electricity.

Also not sure what "toxic metals" you think solar panels are made of. They're made mostly of silicon which is the eighth most common element in the universe that is non toxic and easily recycled. The embodied energy in a solar panel, the amount of energy it took to produce it including mining the aluminum for the frame, all the materials in it, assembly, shipping and everything, is offset by the production from the panel in 1-4 years, so they pay for themselves in terms of energy return on energy invested many times over during their useful life, that's why they make so much sense environmentally. 

"Actually, isnt CA almost exclusively nuclear power anyway right now?"

 Nope. Currently about 14% of CA energy comes from Nuclear, compared to 19% from solar. California is not big on nuclear. They’re shutting down the last remaining nuclear plant and not building new ones. Fukushima was the last nail in the coffin for nuclear. We realized having these facilities was too much liability, especially next to the ocean and on top of major fault lines. Side note: Did you know there’s a nuclear plant in NJ that's the same dangerous design (Mark 1 by GE, 1960's technology that we've known was faulty since 1972) as Fukushima? The biggest job maker in nuclear currently is the decommissioning industry. It takes over ten years and costs billions of dollars to take these things apart. Guess who pays for that? Taxes. Meanwhile people think recycling solar panels is a problem SMH.

@Cody Furman Just serve notices, every time. That should be enough of a reminder, and starts the clock ticking. I’ve spoken to tenants about it like you mentioned; explained calmly and as kindly as possible that a judge will evict them and a sheriff will come remove them if they don’t pay, that it’s hard living with an eviction on your record, that I have my own payments I have to make to the bank and the bank doesn’t have a heart either, that they’ll lose their security deposit because I’ll keep that for unpaid rent and go after them for additional monies if they cause damage, etc. Didn’t help at all in my experience. The moment it becomes real is when the judge asks them, “Will you be out by tonight, or do I have to send a sheriff to forcibly evict you.” That’s when they get it. To answer your question though I don’t know if it’s illegal, but you definitely want to avoid doing anything that could be viewed as threatening and anything in writing can be used against you. I don’t think it hurts to have a calm polite conversation if you have a good working relationship with a good tenant, one last attempt to find out what’s really going on. But be careful and I wouldn’t send a formal letter or an email, that’s what the notice is for. Anything additional after the notice is kind of like a triple dare. Nobody that double double dares is serious. As others have said your landlord tenant handbook is your manual. Definitely don’t text a message that Bruno is on his way to their house and he’s coming for their kneecaps. Good luck!

@Christopher Lombardi Says the guy from New Jersey. Haven’t you guys been in danger of defaulting on your massive debt for years? What is it up to now, $150B? I just read today everybody is dumping NJ bonds, again. It seems like every week the S&P is downgrading New Jersey. But yeah CA sure has it rough.