Have y'all be watching the series Landman? Billy Bob Thornton plays a landman in the Permian Basin. A lot of it is drama and bullshit, but some of it is pretty good. Hard truths.
There is a great clip here about alternative energy. It's something to think about.
11 comments:
How often do you get to see Sheridan on his tricky horses?
Drew458
A Landman is really the guy who researches the mineral rights and negotiates the leases....
Not quite what is portrayed in the series.
Having said that, it is an interesting and riveting story.
I don't watch much episodic TV.
In the late 90s there was an animated show called 'Home Movies', and one of the projects was about the Landstander.
Off topic, yes, but hilarious. It pre-ruined this show for me.
I don't have Paramount + account, but they gave a free 1st seaon three episode showing and I saw that clip. Very good content as written.
Solar Photovoltaic (aka, solar panels) work quite well, and unlike windmills, are very low maintenance. The least expensive and most efficient setup is battery-less grid-intertie.
Generally pays for itself in 10-12 yrs; less than that if there are direct tax credits.
If the Fed.gov was really serious about residential solar, they would give a 100% tax credit over a 10 yr period.
Meaning, if you spent $20,000 on a grid-tie PV system, you could write off $2000 per yr for 10 yrs, off your total federal taxes.
Works, provided that: 1. The panels don't get damaged. Chances are in that 10 year period they will here in DFW, 2. Your inverter doesn't break., 3. Unless you get batteries and use it so that you can enjoy electricity when the grid is down, they are useless. And if you get the batteries, you also have to assume you'll be replacing some or all of them in 10 years. I had friends that dove into that business. With the gubermint subsidies, and my family price, for my house I could pay my power bill for 15 years. 10 years is a miserable ROI on gear that will absolutely degrade over that timespan.
It's a compelling series. I can't stand the lawyer woman. I won't give away the plot, but at one point towards the end Tommy tells her to do her job. If she didn't want to do it, she shouldn't have gone to work for an oil company. And the X-wife and daughter are over the top. One of the best lines is to the son, who goes down a really stupid path - "I've seen some dumb ideas in my time". Love that line. I'm old enough to use it.
Windmills kill birds, mess up the microclimate with the blades, and the blades are made of fiberglass with petrochemical-derived resins.
Solar panels are barely acceptable on buildings. For a single point, with battery storage, that's still tied to the grid. But plow down prairie or farmland or any other wildland, and they kill the ground. They kill habitat. And they have to be kept clean because the efficiency drops radically. Best way to clean them is using pressure sprayers and some sort of cleaning and covering chemicals, again derived from petrochemicals.
We have safe and efficient power available to us if we'd use it. Nuclear. 5th and 6th generation plants, which have been designed, are far more safe than the 1st and 2nd generation systems we have running in our country right now. Nukes are the way. The newer generations have even less loss rate and less radioactive waste than previous generations.
Agree. Solar also uses things liker germanium that cause enviornmental problems.
Agree again. Nukes can load follow (If we get the NRC to quit being stupid) and we can reprocess fuel. Gov't tried and both sites were a disaster. Seriously, they did not follow the rules they mandated for the plants. We should look at thorium as well; the fission curve will yield less plutonium, and we need reactors with a geometry that burns transuranics. All doable.
Quite turning corn into gasoline at a net energy loss. Batteries to make green energy available at night are their own environmental nightmare. There is limited pumped storage, although possibly more.
Our current system is cheapest because it uses the least energy and manpower. We need to maintain it. The craze to deregulate to make things cheap also temps companies to do a lot less maintenance. Want cheaper power, find out how much tax the gov't is putting on your electricity and raise hell.
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