Voting once every four years isn’t enough. Voting twice per year every other year (primaries/caucuses and general elections, midterms and Presidential) should be the bare minimum. In addition, if you have the time, get involved locally. Email your state and federal repa, let them know what you care about. Talk to your city councils and county boards.
Yeah, a bit long-winded of me, but California’s electric utility arrangement can be confusing for non-residents. I found the wholesale/retail analogy helpful to describe the relationship between electricity generators and the utilities. In that analogy, CCAs are like a separate buyer using the retail store space to put their own products on the shelf for us to buy.
Yeah, I was afraid that they were meeting their 100% renewable claim through credits, I’m going to have to look into that. I do have solar, but not enough for 100% self-generation, even if I had a battery system.
I just got my first bill since going to a community choice power provider. Here in California, the investor owned utilities (commercial companies, not the publicly-owned utilities) act as retailers of energy. They buy power on the open market from generators, then sell it to their customers. They bill both for the cost to generate the power, and also for power delivery (which includes maintaining the grid). An option that recently became available is for a city government to join a community choice power provider, which then buys power from generators on our behalf. The utility still delivers it, so it’s not real competition, but partway there. The community choice provider then bills the utility, who passes that bill along to individual customers.
So, the generation cost went down by about 30% for power used during the day, and a few percent for power delivered at night (three different time-of-use categories). Our community choice provider has an option for 100% renewable power, which I chose, so this is a pretty tangible demonstration that renewable power really is cheaper than fossil fuels.
What, no Hillary Clinton? Is he trying to lose again?
I checked Home Depot today and, oddly, all the Rheem 240V models are selling for less than the 120V models of the same capacity, even before rebates.
If I do get a 240V model, I certainly would just disable the resistance heating mode, which all the Rheem models (and probably all models, period) have the option to do.
Well, this story is about disconnecting Starlink ground terminals that are being used by the Russian military inside of Ukraine.
Yeah, but they tend to be lower efficiency (UEF 3.0) and CA rebate program requires UEF 3.3 or higher, which apparently you can only get by switching to the higher voltage.
Edit: to clarify, I was referring to the California state rebate of $700 or $900 (depending on capacity) taken off the purchase price at checkout. The federal tax credit of 30% applies to the 120V drop-in replacement as well as the 240V models.
I’m in California, on NEM 2.0 for 8 more years unless NEM 3 gets rescinded. I also want to switch out my water heater to eliminate most of my fossil fuel burning, but instead of solar thermal I’ve been looking at heat pump water heaters. Much easier and cheaper to install, even with having to run a 240V line across the garage. If you currently have an electric resistance water heater, going with heat pump is a drop-in replacement and uses much, much less energy.
Like everything else, advertising pressure has ruined it. You can still search, but just zoom in and look over an area to see what is there? So many businesses missing, because they don’t pay Google to advertise. Apple Maps shows them all, because they don’t make money from advertising.
Open Street Maps are ok, but my area has a lot of businesses missing. If you know the address you need to go to, then it’s great for routing.
My personal hobby horse with Google killing things is Reader.
Same here! Excuse me, I think I hear some bots…now where did I leave my autocannon…?
Super Earths, because we know so little about them. They are the most common planet type (based on census from Kepler and TESS), but our solar system doesn’t have one, so we have no idea what they are like. Models and simulations give a few possible compositions, resembling mini-Neptunes, or water worlds with thick oceans, or more like Earth. Maybe all are possible. Earth-like rocky super-earths may be more geologically active than Earth, due to stronger convection and thinner crust. If they orbit a K-type dwarf, they could be candidates for super-habitable planets, with conditions even better for life than Earth.
You guys are getting to the post-mission screen? I’m 0/2 today, disconnect and crash. Both times near the end of Suicide missions. Over an hour, down the toilet.
Seriously, maybe start a movement that teaches the Force belongs to all, whether as powerful as a Jedi or as simple and every-day as just using it to grab stuff.
Oh nooooo…anyway.
I’ve had the same T-Mobile family plan since…I actually don’t recall. 2011? $25 per line for 4 phones. It was 2GB of 3G data per month, with a promotional bump to 4GB that they kept extending until it was permanent, then LTE data, then 50GB of LTE before it throttles down. It’s plenty fast, so no real need for 5G speeds, especially since most activity is on our home WiFi.
I noticed that my projected bill will be much cheaper than my last, even though I haven’t changed my habits, so I did some math. At this same point in last month’s billing cycle (71.4% through the cycle), I used a net of 550kWh. As of the end of the day yesterday, I have used 122.5kWh. As I said, I haven’t changed my habits and have even used my electric oven more since I have family visiting that likes to bake. SDG&E has long said that they don’t make money on the generation charge, just the delivery charge, but none of that would change how much power they say I am using. Even though they have a natural monopoly on power delivery with regulatory capture of CPUC guaranteeing them whatever increases they ask for, I wouldn’t put it past them and Sempra to fuck around with how much power they say we are using. I don’t think any of us would be surprised to wake up some day to headlines about SDG&E and Sempra under investigation for fraud.