Friday Open Thread

8 thoughts on “Friday Open Thread”

1. I was not placed on Earth to glorify Curtis Yarvin, but this Washington Post story about him was kind of fun to read, with fair warning that it's of course disturbing in places:

   In fact, in several recent interviews with The Washington Post, he offered a surprisingly harsh assessment of DOGE, comparing it to an orchestra of chimpanzees trying to perform Wagner.

   “In the worst aspects of DOGE, there’s this aspect of the incel who gets mad at the girl who won’t sleep with him,” Yarvin said, using the term for so-called involuntary celibates. “That’s not a powerful attitude.”

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2. Rep. Yadira Caraveo Interview

   An in depth interview with Rep Caraveo who's running for CO-8

   Two comments about Caraveo. First, she comes across really well in the interview. That's not a sufficient reason to vote for her, but it is a positive data point.

   Second, there's a number of active Democrats trying to get her to drop out of the primary. That's wrong. We primary voters should be the ones making the decision on who we want as our candidate. We should not have a small group limiting our choices.

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3. The average electric bill for a poor haousehold is $145.00/mo. Lets say all the renewables, batteries, all electric efforts double that. It's now $290.00/mo. Or an additional $1,740.00/yr.

   Even for a lower middle class family, that hurts. For a poor family that's major.

   And for farms it's $900.00/mo. So doubling is an additional $10,800.00/yr. A lot of farms are barely hanging on.

   So for those of you wondering why I'm so focused on power. The above is why. And it's not a question of climate vs. doubling electric bills. It's a question of doing this sensibly with minimal impact on people's bills vs. doing this stupidly.

   I can afford doubling of the bills. Most service oriented companies, like Windward, can easily afford it. But a lot of others can not.

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   1. Huh … Forbes (updated in July, 2024) says the average Colorado energy bill is $91.96.  Energy Information Agency data puts the 2023 Colorado average at $94.65.  And both of those are based on ALL consumers, not low-income ones.

      Doubling the bill clearly would be problematic.  But doubling it over the next twenty years makes it less of an emergency, more of yet another chronic problem of poverty. 

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      1. The word "average" can make things look better, or worse. I tried to find the source again for this, it's from someone who tiik the raw eia (I think) numbers and tried to figure out what was being spent by family income level. And I think it took into account less insulation and older appliances/AC into account. Should have saved the url – sorry.

         I went and looked at my bill – September (fall is low usage time). New home but it's a townhouse, not that large, and it's $187.70. So efficient appliances, not that large, just 2 residents. We have one EV and that adds – but not that much. (And we're strongly pushing everyone in the state to go to EVs). We use gas for heat, hot water, & dryer.

         But even at $95/mo (2023) so $100/mo now, doubling that hurts.

         As to the growth rate, the PUC is estimating utility rates growing at twice inflation and doubling in 10 – 15 years (graph in this post – with link to source document). And that's if their optimistic scenarios pan out, which it won't. Even Chairman Blank is calling the proposed costs mind-boggling. 

         We could end up with a lot more than doubling. If demand starts exceeding supply then the wholesale price of electricity shoots up. There's so many ways the electricity price can get out of control and when it does, it's usually billions of dollars.

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   2. David, it's clear you have a real love for nuclear power. Good for you. I have a real love for the writings of JRR Tolkien. But both are fantasies with limited applicability to the real world. How much would your hypothetical electric rates have to go up to cover billions of dollars of debt service? And how resistant will the utilities be for weaning themselves off nuclear power because of that? It was hard enough getting them to move from coal.

      This is without even getting into who should pay for the externalities of cleaning up the uranium mining operations.

      IMO, nuclear will at best be an expensive niche energy producer. We can and should spend our capital on renewables. And remember, nuclear is fossil fuel too – radioisotopes are all fossils of dim past supernovae and merging neutron stars. None of them are being renewed.

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4. Sorry David, I'm with Gorky. Your daily rhapsodizing about nuclear power has grown tedious, as has your hijacking every Open Thread to do it. Give it, and us a rest already.

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5. I dunno’ where you’re using your electricity David,  I looked at my billing hisory for the last 24 months, and my highest two months combined are less than $160.  (My average bill over the past 12 months was ~$65 / month. — SFR; 3BDm, 3Ba; 1,900 s.f.; circa 1988 — so certainly not spectacularly efficient; gas heat & water, no EVs)

   

   As to the charge of obsessiveness — I’m imagining this updated scene from the 2025 released Close Encounters of a [Nuclear] Kind: where the Richard Dreyfuss character is inexplicably but frantically toiling away to complete a compulsive project in his basement (along with his self-built frazzled AI assisted 3-D printer robot setup) to construct what eventually turns out to be a 1/20th-scale model nuclear power plant cooling tower:

   
    

   But, I guess almost everyone eventually needs their some kind of retirement hobby???

   (I can’t believe I’d ever have said this in my lifetime, but I may actually wind up being kinda’ glad for the beginning of Eurovision next week?)
    

    

    

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