Age and Experience

It turns out when your levels of work-related stress go up, your bloggin' mojo goes way down.   And I'm still young enough and inexperienced enough that small changes induce heavy stress. I'm looking forward to being so weathered and calm in my professional self that most everything leaves me un-fazed.  But then, I might get bored.

When I look at my co-workers and see that they are mostly twice my age and hear their stories of living in tents or otherwise wiling their lives away in a direction-less stupor when they were my age, I start to wonder. If I didn't hit all that like I was supposed to at this point in my life, does that just mean that phase is coming?  Does having it mostly together when you're young, aside from continually feeling clueless but stumbling through anyway, mean you're going to burn out and hit a midlife crisis when you're thirty-five?

Social Skills Require Practice

EnergyVanguard's post about Nerd Verses Geek verses Dweeb got me thinking.

There is the stereotype of the brainiac with appalling social skills, often who suffers in lonely sadness because he just can't get the girls.

The sad truth is that for someone with poor social skills, it's not just lack of potential mates one has to worry about, it may also be lack of meaningful friendships and community, the absence of which can be very damaging to self-esteem. If only very or mundanely brainy but not MIT brilliant, in reality poor social skills often translates to a lack of meaningful job opportunities as well, because despite all our claims at being meritocracy, if you can't get yourself liked and noticed by the people who recognize merit, well, your merit probably won't get recognized.

Comments on US Solar Company Collapses

The bankruptcy of not one but several U.S. companies producing solar electric modules has generated speculation about whether the entire solar industry itself is on the brink of collapse.

Some details, then, are in order:

1. Both Solyndra, that company that went bankrupt despite all of that stimulus funding, and Evergreen Solar, our most recent bankruptcy addition, have a product that, depending on your point of view, could be seen as "highly innovative" or as "unproven technology."  The workhorse of the solar industry is monocrystaline silicon cells, arranged into rectangular panels. The process uses the highest quality silicon, and the efficiency of these panels can't be beat by anthing currently in large-scale production.  Both companies were producing something off of this beaten track.

Solar Panel Prices

This article echoes my own experience recently with photovoltaic cell prices:
 In April 2010, a PV system cost $8 a watt.
 Now for 2011: the latest prices we've been getting for PV are $4,500 per kW before tax credits. It's dropped 45% since last year.
I had an eerily similar experience. I made a preliminary budget for our zero energy home solar array and assumed $7 a watt. But then I spoke to a local solar contractor we work with about this pie-in-the-sky pet project of mine and he had to laugh when I told him how much I'd estimated. He explained to me that huge increases in production capacity solely in the last few months have dropped the price dramatically, down to $4.50 a watt.

If it stays this way, the implications of this are fairly important. The link author says it better than I could:
It means we're not far off from PV being the cheapest source of electricity you can buy everywhere in the whole country, even in the parts of the country with access to cheap and toxic coal electricity. Is that time five years away? Ten years away? It doesn't really matter; either one is a very short length of time, and we should get ready for that and pay attention.

Barrier to Green Building

The biggest barrier to growth in new green residential construction is not technological, and it's not even cost anymore, not directly anyway.  The existence of a green building and home energy rating industry to date have demonstrated that while there are plenty of customers who wistfully wish for a green home then complain about how much extra it will cost them, there are others who will pay for it, too, and those people can help bring the cost down enough to start encompassing more and more of the people in that first group.  It is very possible to build a moderately green home at a very modest 2% cost premium.  What's more, for all those builders who complain about the extra work or the hard sell of the extra cost, there are those whose livelihoods have been made on the differentiation of being green builders.

Greenwash of the Week

"Greenwashing" is the practice whereby a moderately green or even completely un-green product is given some variation of the name "eco" and marketed as the one and only choice you need to make to live lighter on the planet, you hippie.  Like whitewash on a fence, something greenwashed might look green from far away, but flakes of green veneer start to peel away upon closer analysis.

Building Green makes a good list of the many types of greenwashing:  which can take on the form or outright lying, specious arguments, claims that are simply poorly researched, making compliance with environmental law sound like something totally awesome and groundbreaking (no ozone-depleting chemicals!), highlighting one green aspect while ignoring a fatal flaw in the sustainability of the entire product, etc.

Are Solar Panels Just "Eco-Bling?"

This article and the subsequent comments (ignore the usual contingent of off-topic jerks and their environmental straw men) has generated some very excellent discussion about one of the fundamental questions in green building today: is renewable energy or energy efficiency more important?

The answer is "both!", of course,(but then you could get into an argument about whether any of it is worth it) but that would be an answer that denies the practicalities and subtleties we encounter in the field and in the preconceptions of our customers.