litany

Unfortunately insulating a building after the fact is extremely difficult, expensive, and depending on climate can approach the level of near tear down. I think it many cases it may ultimately be more environmentally friendly and cost effective to add things like solar and just brute force the heating/cooling.

The reason for this is that buildings not designed for insulation and air sealing can suffer from dramatically worse durability (mold etc) when just adding insulation. It is not necessarily wise to just add fiberglass batts to wall cavities.

The addition of insulation to our homes is a modern thing, and there have been significant issues even currently (the mold crisis).

The issue is that to build a building properly, it is necessary to address heat flow, vapor flow, air flow, condensation, drying, and water barriers. This means you often have to address the entire envelope of the building, which is very expensive, difficult, and means replacing a lot of material. Basically remove all cladding and sheathing and upgrade it.

Realistically most of these concepts are not well understood in the construction industry, and the expense is high so most corners would be cut leading to huge issues with mold and wood destroying pests down the road.

They are talking about their ability to run on biofuel (e85). They achieve the greatest performance on e85. The most recent research I’ve seen is that production of fuel ethanol is now carbon 0 or slightly carbon negative, for the whole chain (including production of raw materials, transportation etc). This won’t be the case for all plants, and it’s not clear to what extent production has reached this level, but it shows what is possible.

So yeah, burning things may not be necessarily bad. Unfortunately no one seems to be investing in similar technologies to apply to other sectors of transportation such as aviation and shipping. It would seem to me to be much more realistic to design an engine for a airliner that burns a biofuel than to design a battery electric version.

The people who have embraced biofuel (e85) the most are car guys looking for more power. E85 has good knock resistance (high octane rating) like race fuel, but is far cheaper. It also has a greater cooling effect upon injection (because you need to inject more, as it is lower energy density).

So the thing is the economics of rooftop solar are a lot different than power station solar. The DOE has public data on how much utilities pay for electricity. In a market like mine, Southern California Edison isn’t an electricity generator, they buy power at about $0.02/kWh but then they sell it to the residential consumer for up to $0.32.

So clearly it’s a very different calculation. Regardless of that generators are building large scale solar arrays to sell power to the utilities at very much lower rates than what a rooftop owner pays to generate their own power. It’s just the rooftop owner can bypass a lot, and potentially all, of the utility and grid fees which are >90% of the cost. The other thing is that many utilities are hugely subsidizing this with net metering policies, which basically means the utility is acting as a huge battery for only the grid connection fee which, depending on the market, can be as low as $15 a month. Which basically seems to make products like the Tesla Powerwalls a really tough sell. Why pay $5000 for a tiny powerwall when, assuming you want grid connect anyway, the utility will be a way bigger powerwall for free?

Unless you just make it bigger. They talked about being able to have 6 of the things and were showing dual monitors much of the time. Ultrawides have been demonstrating that there is demand for larger monitors. Most people who want a two or three monitor setup would probably be even happier with a single, larger monitor.

One thing to keep in mind is that California is possibly uniquely effected by smog. It doesn’t rain for months at a time, it’s hot, it’s heavily populated, and LA is surrounded by mountains so the LA area is especially impacted. As a result I think Californians are more effected by the smog than people in most of the rest of the country.

That is how title 24 has operated for years. They have two methods for compliance, prescriptive and engineered. The prescriptive method is they specify minimum Efficiency values for things like insulation, doors, windows, HVAC, water heater, etc and takes climate zone into consideration. The engineered gives you an annual energy budget and you just have to meet that in the model. So for instance you can have a house that doesn’t have insulation but with enough solar on the roof you can make up for it. The idea is prescriptive is to make it easier on owner builders and engineered is so that professional builders can optimize with market forces in consideration and designers can make trade offs like spending more money on efficiency in order to allow larger openings (doors and windows) as a percentage of total area.

This solar requirement has been a long time coming. I haven’t looked at the new standard, it’s called Title 24 2019 because it’s still under development but they might just pushing the energy budget low enough that solar is effectively required. Otherwise it may be required for prescriptive title 24 compliance. The article talks about square footage and 2kW minimum systems which to me sounds like the prescriptive requirement.

Personally I’ve never been able to use prescriptive for design reasons but some contractors for sure do, and they don’t understand the concept of modeling.

So yeah, you can innovate all you want and CA set it up that way for years now.

As an outdoorsman this is exactly what I am excited about with self driving cars. It has the possibility of making going even deeper into the wilderness more practical. A self driving car can take you to the trail head, go charge, and then go wait for you. With 300 miles of range you can go most anywhere.

You're right, the article didn't mention difficulties shipping glass. It did mention that they wanted to be close to their customers though. I'm not really sure that your detail would have added anything as the article wasn't really about glass manufacturing. It could have been added with one or two sentences though.

Due to regulation housing prices have jumped 80% is a big claim. Where is the mention what that regulation is? It just says "regulation". He says it's all due to Browns climate jihad, does he mean title 24? I have a hard time believing title 24 can cause such a housing price increase because it mostly applies to new construction and the extra initial costs of title 24 aren't that expensive. If not title 24 then what? He doesn't say.

They are claiming San Francisco is driving up oil prices significantly statewide and causing an unnecessary burden to the middle class. That's something that can be investigated and discussed, but on first blush it seems hard to believe.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-bakersfield-oil-201602...

This article claims that the worldwide slump in oil prices has led to a loss of 50k jobs in kern alone. I'm not sure how San Francisco plays into this.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kern_River_Oil_Field Implies that field depletion is reducing output.

http://www.sfexaminer.com/sf-say-farewell-kern-county-oil-fi...

Additionally I'm having a hard time understanding how San Francisco banning something, by not renewing a lease to Chevron of 800 acres that does not expire until 2020 is having such an impact. What is the status of that field anyway? Is it depleted or will it near depletion by 2020? All they say is that oil revenues from the field have been declining sharply.

They also say they are looking to lease it to a solar generation company. It sounds like they might be trying to replace the revenue now that the oil revenue is in decline. That doesn't sound that unreasonable. What was Chevrons offer for the lease renewal anyway? Perhaps it wasn't very good and they spun it to score green brownie points with their voters.

You don't have to cite chapter and verse, but if you just name the regulation we can look further into it to educate ourselves and then inform our representatives of our position and vote accordingly. Simply trying to continue making regulation into a boogeyman helps no one. Blowing things out of proportion also doesn't help.

Nice of them to not mention any of the regulations that they claim are causing harm. This is The Register.