You may be losing money in terms of ROI, where your electricity savings over the next 25 years don't cover the upfront costs. It's definitely the case without net metering or feed-in subsidies.
Good thing I had no up front costs and have a lease payment that is a fraction of my energy bill. I don't think you know SolarCity like you think you do, nor the deal they have with the utilities down here. I'm tied into a yearly 2% increase in utility cost over the duration of the contract, which is a helluva hedge against the the inflation of utility costs. And I have a no-cost service plan and warranty over the whole system. All that and a system that stands on its own when the grid is unavailable. So where is the down side here?
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Net metering is not sustainable over society scale because everyone can't sell their electricity at solar peak for the same price/kWh that they buy electricity at demand peak. Right now, it's basically a subsidy from non solar panel electricity consumers (usually poorer) to solar panel owners (usually richer).
That may or may not be true. As long as there is still a substantial industrial need during peak demand times the ability to sell electricity back to the utility at a profit exists. And exactly how long does it take to get to that point, especially taking hours of generation for regions into consideration? We must be talking decades away? The whole idea is also to bring solar online so other sources used for power generation, like coal and oil, can be eliminated. As the grid is modernized it will allow for the excess power to be diverted to where it is needed. For certain these "subsidies" won't exist forever, but as the cost of electricity continues to rise, the locked in contract cost and almost self-sufficient power generation of the solar system is a great long term benefit. Where's the downside again?
Our galaxy’s weirdest star, KIC 8462852, is even weirder than previously thought, showing changes never observed before in a star like this.
To quickly recap, last year it was announced that the object experienced dramatic and rapid changes in brightness, which led to the wild speculation that the object was surrounded by an alien megastructure. New observations have shown that there are no aliens around it but the mystery has deepened further still, as historical data suggests that the star has inexplicably dimmed by 14 percent in just over a century.
Researchers Josh Simon and Ben Montet, using observations by NASA’s Kepler space telescope, discovered that KIC 8462852 faded slowly and then suddenly during the four years it was studied.
“Our highly accurate measurements over four years demonstrate that the star really is getting fainter with time,” said Montet, from Caltech, in a statement. "It is unprecedented for this type of star to slowly fade for years, and we don’t see anything else like it in the Kepler data.”
A pre-print of the research was released in August, and is now published in the Astrophysical Journal. In it, the scientists compared KIC 8462852 to 500 similar stars also observed by Kepler. Although they saw a small fraction getting fainter with time, none had dimming episodes as intense.
KIC 8462852, which is also known as Tabby’s star, faded about 1 percent in the first three years of the study, before suddenly dropping another 2 percent more. It then remained stable for the final six months.
Just a reminder SpaceX isn't the only space company in business. Check out Blue Origin's flying dildo, launched at around the 51 minute mark:
The top is the crew pod which separates from the rocket booster. This is in case of an emergency and it was thought that the rocket booster might explode because because of this seperation, but it didn't!
This booster has been launched and landed back on earth 5 times. No other booster has done this.
Is "orbiting and progressively being engulfed in a black hole" the obvious answer?
I've read a few articles about this dimming episode and no one suggests this which is strange cause that seems like a good answer. I'm sure someone smarter than me can rule that out.
I've read a few articles about this dimming episode and no one suggests this which is strange cause that seems like a good answer. I'm sure someone smarter than me can rule that out.
X-Rays and gravity wobbles. I mean, Black holes are detectable. We know where some are. Just because they don't emit light from their event horizon doesn't mean they are somehow now invisible. There are plenty of high-energy X rays emitted from interactions on this side of a black hole's event horizon that we can see.
Besides, we can now even see the effects of a small planet on a star's wobble. I think if a black hole was eating away at a star - one that we have been looking at pretty seriously ever since we noticed the weirdness - we would be able to detect the wobble that a Black Hole eating a star would cause.
I've read a few articles about this dimming episode and no one suggests this which is strange cause that seems like a good answer. I'm sure someone smarter than me can rule that out.
Oh, and I just wanted to rule that out to prove I'm smarter than you
X-Rays and gravity wobbles. I mean, Black holes are detectable. We know where some are. Just because they don't emit light from their event horizon doesn't mean they are somehow now invisible. There are plenty of high-energy X rays emitted from interactions on this side of a black hole's event horizon that we can see.
Besides, we can now even see the effects of a small planet on a star's wobble. I think if a black hole was eating away at a star - one that we have been looking at pretty seriously ever since we noticed the weirdness - we would be able to detect the wobble that a Black Hole eating a star would cause.
Yeah Polak, you idiot.
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But during the critical final moments, when nine hydrazine-powered thrusters were supposed to fire to arrest Schiaparelli's descent, the signal disappeared.
That's the part that sounds not good. Might have gone boom.
