Why doesn't every house have solar installed?

[lilhasselhoffer]

maybe someday we will paint houses side panels with this, and have solar roofs... interesting...

Mercedes is working on "solar paint" that could drastically reduce the need for charging

The company states that this groundbreaking solar paint is just five micrometers thick and weighs a mere 50 grams per square meter – practically weightless. Despite its...

www.techspot.com

isn't this just human stupidity though? we can predict hailstorms fairly easily 1-2 days in advance. therefore, when predicted, we should have "inflatable" protection domes erected in solar fields, like luxury cars have to protect from hailstorms.

work smarter not harder

You may not live in the United States. My experience with Germany was that after a year I had about a week of hot weather, and nothing required more than a fleece cold wise. On the other hand, in the states I've had days that start below freezing and get to balmy. For those in the Metric system, -10 to 19. Yes, that was actual temperature and not "feels like" temperature.

On a similar note, walk out onto a European street and you'll find everything occupied. Cars jammed in anywhere there's a few feet of space to park, and nowhere near enough covered parking. Imagine having to have a cover for all of those cars...and now imagine anything from a cubic centimeter to a baseball/softball. That's the kind of hail you can get in places like Texas. Now imagine not only having to carry thick enough protection that will prevent thousands of softballs being fast pitched at your cars, but also the hundreds of square feet covering your home...which might have 2-3 people in it. The logistics of this are basically akin to asking why we don't just build huge plastic domes around all of our cities, so that we can build one central efficient climate control and protection system to manage rainfall, temperature, and weather events. It's fundamentally saying it's trivial to design a rocket capable of bringing live passengers to Mars because humans have known about fire for thousands of years...


Regarding the predictions...maybe you don't get that either. Imagine a hailstorm that's capable of covering three nations in Europe, and you'll understand. This week a rush of arctic air, or polar vortex, is being sucked into the US. It's supposed to drop us well below seasonal temperatures in the Ohio river valley...400 miles south of any real Canadian town. In non-freedom units, that's a 650 km weather front that can easily spawn hail because cool dry air is meeting up with warm moist air, and the front itself will at one point stretch from Minnesota to Ohio. This is regularly what weather we get...whereas my year in Germany literally had three weather types. Cool and dry, cool and rainy, warm and sunny. The statement about requiring us to work smarter is...it's just stupid. Not malicious stupid, but stupid borne of an ignorance that doesn't understand the scale of thing.


Heck, let me have some fun with you. I live in the Eastern part of my county. City-county-state in ascending size, with state being about even with EU country. I drove from the east to almost the west, about 5 miles was at 30 mph, with the rest at about 55 mph. It took more than 2 hours. If you were to predict weather for the counties in my state you'd have 100, with 551 municipalities. I've traveled across my state on highways in about 13 total hours, northeast to western central. I've watched as some areas in the same city get hail, rain, and no precipitation at all... Your solution is then to basically bubble wrap everything nearly permanently...which will prevent generation of solar energy, in response to the mechanical issues with having large flat panels exposed to the sun...which I cannot wrap my head around. I'm simply brought back to my original response. Not every house is sensible to festoon in solar panels...and they have drawbacks. Just like electric cars, there absolutely are uses for them...but they are not a 100% solution for everyone everywhere. To pretend that is to fundamentally misunderstand that there are people in situations other than yours...and blanket statements are why people are angry with the green tech rhetoric. Green tech being sold as green guilt is pretty crappy.

 

[Space Lynx]

Cars jammed in anywhere there's a few feet of space to park, and nowhere near enough covered parking. Imagine having to have a cover for all of those cars...and now imagine anything from a cubic centimeter to a baseball/softball.

I specifically meant solar panel farms (my apologies for not making that clear with this particular comment) it would be very easy to logistically plan a covering for those in some way. Hell, you could technically even just take two giant tractors, drag a huge hard plastic "temporary garage" over the entire solar field.

How to protect the panels elsewhere, yeah I have no idea. I do know some Corvette cars have the bubble thingy though.

 

[Endymio]

no, the wheels would just be for the deployment process is what i meant.

they would be grounded / quick install procedure before inflation procedure

Do a quick cost analysis on the hundreds of people you would require to be continually on call to wheel-out and ground all these units at a moment's notice.

Hell, you could technically even just take two giant tractors, drag a huge hard plastic "temporary garage" over the entire solar field.

Again: calculate the strain of a gale-force wind on a structure this size. Plus, hail in the US can easily shatter a car windshield, so your "plastic garage" would need to be more than thin plastic. And in a crowded area -- where do you put it when it's not in use? A thin rolled-up tarp isn't going to be anywhere near enough protection.

People have thought about these issues for years. They're not being implemented because of practical reasons, not just sheer blind inattention.

 

[Space Lynx]

Do a quick cost analysis on the hundreds of people you would require to be continually on call to wheel-out and ground all these units at a moment's notice.

Again: calculate the strain of a gale-force wind on a structure this size. Plus, hail in the US can easily shatter a car windshield, so your "plastic garage" would need to be more than thin plastic. And in a crowded area -- where do you put it when it's not in use? A thin rolled-up tarp isn't going to be anywhere near enough protection.

People have thought about these issues for years. They're not being implemented because of practical reasons, not just sheer blind inattention.

I'm not saying my answer is the right one, but I bet money there are engineers and creative people out there that could figure out a cost effective way of protecting the solar panels, perhaps not even just in solar farms.

For example, another idea could be designing "snap on" thick hard plastic shields that will snap on to each panel, it would take lets say 15-45 seconds to snap on to each panel - depending how innovative the snap on design is, true you would need the labor, or just get a few friends together and buy them dinner eh

 

[lilhasselhoffer]

So...quick back of the hand math. Apple has 100 acre solar farms in North Carolina. An acre is 43560 square feet. If we assume that each of the rows is spaced regularly, and that the acreage is a big square, the footage would be 4356000 square feet. Let's say an individual solar panel is about 10 square feet of coverage. This is really rough math so it's easy, but you have 435600 panels. Calculate about 80% coverage...because I have to ballpark a figure for inefficient packing and infrastructure...so 348,480 panels to cover.

Holy crap...let's assume some magic and only need 30 seconds per panel to cover them. 348480*30 = 10454400 seconds = 2904 hours. The average work week is 40 hours...so with a 10 person team it'd only take 7.26 weeks of time to cover up every single panel. Assume leaving them on for a day, and then another 7.26 weeks to remove all of them. So...just shy of 2 months of warning would be needed to cover that one 10 acre farm. The math is...just mind boggling.


Now...the 7.26 weeks is unforgiveable, but what about the energy requirements. It's moving mass...so the amount of mass would be great to know. We start by approximating the square footage of panels, different from the area covered because the panels are not simply lain flat on the ground. 42 million kwh is what Apple claims, and google estimates that at 186,000,000 square feet of panel coverage. Let's assume that you use the equivalent of about 10 layers of corrugated plastic to minimize waste, but absorb enough kinetic energy from the hail. It's a gross estimate, but the goal is minimum weight and thick enough only to prevent catastrophic damage.
Plastic corrugated sheets are about 450 grams a square meter, or 0.092 pounds per square foot. 10 of those would be .92 pounds per square foot, or 171,120,000 total pounds of plastic. That's about 20,504,698 gallons of water equivalent....or about 19,450 elephants of plastic. Considering they have two fields in North Carolina, that's basically the mass of the remaining Asian elephants on the entire planet being wheeled out to cover a solar farm. Let's assume that it has a cost of about 100 cents per pound (which is insanely low), the cost of the protective covers is $171,120,000... If we estimate high and say that it's about $9 per square foot of panel, then to net save money the covering would have to prevent replacement of 19,013 square feet of solar panels. If you factor in the power losses from 7.4 weeks of down time average per panel, the astronomical cost of the protection, and what you have to save, this idea become unfathomably bad investments of resource.


FYI, this is the same argument I made earlier about personal protection. It's an extension of the apparent anti-green sentiment being more green overall, and why I recommend thought before adopting apparently good things. Green guilt is a real thing...but we have to be good enough to identify it and not fail our future generations by confusing the doing of what is right with actually doing what is best.

 

[Space Lynx]

So...quick back of the hand math. Apple has 100 acre solar farms in North Carolina. An acre is 43560 square feet. If we assume that each of the rows is spaced regularly, and that the acreage is a big square, the footage would be 4356000 square feet. Let's say an individual solar panel is about 10 square feet of coverage. This is really rough math so it's easy, but you have 435600 panels. Calculate about 80% coverage...because I have to ballpark a figure for inefficient packing and infrastructure...so 348,480 panels to cover.

Holy crap...let's assume some magic and only need 30 seconds per panel to cover them. 348480*30 = 10454400 seconds = 2904 hours. The average work week is 40 hours...so with a 10 person team it'd only take 7.26 weeks of time to cover up every single panel. Assume leaving them on for a day, and then another 7.26 weeks to remove all of them. So...just shy of 2 months of warning would be needed to cover that one 10 acre farm. The math is...just mind boggling.


Now...the 7.26 weeks is unforgiveable, but what about the energy requirements. It's moving mass...so the amount of mass would be great to know. We start by approximating the square footage of panels, different from the area covered because the panels are not simply lain flat on the ground. 42 million kwh is what Apple claims, and google estimates that at 186,000,000 square feet of panel coverage. Let's assume that you use the equivalent of about 10 layers of corrugated plastic to minimize waste, but absorb enough kinetic energy from the hail. It's a gross estimate, but the goal is minimum weight and thick enough only to prevent catastrophic damage.
Plastic corrugated sheets are about 450 grams a square meter, or 0.092 pounds per square foot. 10 of those would be .92 pounds per square foot, or 171,120,000 total pounds of plastic. That's about 20,504,698 gallons of water equivalent....or about 19,450 elephants of plastic. Considering they have two fields in North Carolina, that's basically the mass of the remaining Asian elephants on the entire planet being wheeled out to cover a solar farm. Let's assume that it has a cost of about 100 cents per pound (which is insanely low), the cost of the protective covers is $171,120,000... If we estimate high and say that it's about $9 per square foot of panel, then to net save money the covering would have to prevent replacement of 19,013 square feet of solar panels. If you factor in the power losses from 7.4 weeks of down time average per panel, the astronomical cost of the protection, and what you have to save, this idea become unfathomably bad investments of resource.


FYI, this is the same argument I made earlier about personal protection. It's an extension of the apparent anti-green sentiment being more green overall, and why I recommend thought before adopting apparently good things. Green guilt is a real thing...but we have to be good enough to identify it and not fail our future generations by confusing the doing of what is right with actually doing what is best.

I actually do appreciate you doing the math, but you are still taking my points out of context. A) it was just an idea B) more creative engineers could figure out something I am sure of it C) if you spent more time being positive instead of negative you might actually change the world because you do come across as very smart to me D) the snap on with hard plastic shields idea is still not a bad idea for smaller solar farms or individuals. Also, bigger solar farms are probably all laid out symmetrically, so you might be able to make bigger "snap on" shields that cover lets say 24 solar panels per snap, and Apple does have a crap ton of employees, perhaps they could make it mandatory training in rare storms that they are all trained to do the snap on - it would literally take 1 hour with the kind of manpower they have access to and can afford, or 0 dollars if they just add it to job descriptions of new hires, its literally not that hard of work to walk around and play lego snap on game.

 

[Shrek]

there are engineers and creative people out there that could figure out a cost effective way of protecting the solar panels

Would it not be enough to turn the arrays vertical (they are already steerable) so the hail glances?

 

[Dr. Dro]

Meanwhile in Brazil, one of the sunniest places in the world where solar could really take off:

Lei 14.300/2022

English translated by Google

The tl;dr is that this law, which I learned of very recently, is being called the "solar tax" because apparently people who supply their excess generated energy to the grid are to be considered freeloaders using the public distribution grid without paying their share. Yeah, that's what it's all about.

I'll just leave this here to avoid running afoul of the forum's rules regarding... idk, terrorism or something.

 

[Space Lynx]

Would it not be enough to turn the arrays vertical (they are already steerable) so the hail glances?

Probably still too much damage, especially since the hail will probably be blowing sideways and with gusts of wind change angle a lot, hence it is a storm. I like the idea though.

 

[R-T-B]

People have thought about these issues for years. They're not being implemented because of practical reasons, not just sheer blind inattention.

Yes, and its still estimated to be cheaper than the alternatives by a wide margin:

Solar is now ‘cheapest electricity in history’, confirms IEA

The world’s best solar power schemes now offer the “cheapest…electricity in history” with the technology cheaper than coal and gas in most major countries.

www.carbonbrief.org

biased publication yes but they are using the IEA as a source so...

The reason they "aren't being implemented" (they are globally but not as much in one particular country) is largely political.

it was just an idea

Honestly most cost analysis plans just assume replacement. The panels really aren't are a large or even high portion of the setup cost. They are small fish now.

 

[Space Lynx]

Yes, and its still estimated to be cheaper than the alternatives by a wide margin:

Solar is now ‘cheapest electricity in history’, confirms IEA

The world’s best solar power schemes now offer the “cheapest…electricity in history” with the technology cheaper than coal and gas in most major countries.

www.carbonbrief.org

biased publication yes but they are using the IEA as a source so...

The reason they "aren't being implemented" (they are globally but not as much in one particular country) is largely political.


Honestly most cost analysis plans just assume replacement. The panels really aren't are a large or even high portion of the setup cost. They are small fish now.

would clear hardened glass ruin the sun's conversion rate of energy on solar panels? like some advanced form of corning gorilla glass, could that be placed on solar panels i wonder to mitigate low/medium level hail storms? hmm

i feel like people should be more creative. but i don't know

 

[Icon Charlie]

One big hurdle is regulations.

If you want solar, you need to draw up plans, get a building permit, get an electrical permit, and get approval from your power company. You need UL certified devices with certified protections, and then the electrical company replaces your meter, does tests, and approves it. It takes months and it isn't a sure thing.

Don't want to do that? Tough! They can turn off your power.

You can do it yourself. I did. But often people end up giving up and just paying someone else. Then only big installations are cost-effective and the cost balloons like crazy.

If USA is going to have more homeowners install solar, they are going to have to relax regulations for small solar generators like Germany's balcony solar rules.

I installed just a small 1kW because it was cheap and effective for $2000ish. I only wanted to put a dent in my usage, not go all crazy and expensive.
I got a couple other estimates. Contractors would not install less than 4kW, and the price was around $16000, if I remember correctly.

This is pretty much spot on. But it also depends on what region you live in on the rules and regulations in getting solar.

Up Front costs can be a pain as well.

I'm thinking something similar as the poster mentioned. Something small for starters and not on the roof.

 

[Endymio]

Yes, and its still estimated to be cheaper than the alternatives by a wide margin:

Except here in the real world, that isn't even close to being true. It's a figure arrived at by some extraordinarily dishonest accounting. The IAE report is honest enough to state that a "high quality" site is required (low latitude location with below-average rainfall/cloud cover). But it fails to note such calculations also require:

a) another source providing baseline power
b) a solar array sized so that it provides some, but not all, the difference between baseline and actual demand.

In other words, solar is cheap if you have an excellent site, and are using it provide a nominal amount of demand peak-shaving and gap-filling. And even in this scenario, it's not always true. If your supply is primarily nuclear, for instance, where plant costs dominate fuel costs, then even peak shaving doesn't net you much, since you still have to pay for the capacity anyway. Facts do matter.

If solar were "the cheapest in history", it wouldn't need massive subsidies and mandates for adoption.

The [solar] panels really aren't are a large or even high portion of the setup cost. They are small fish now.

LOL, what? They are the primary cost. According to the NREL, solar panel costs are nearly 80% of the total cost of a PV farm. And if we're discussing replacement due to damage, you also need to count deinstallation and reinstallation labor, which pushes the total over 90%.

U.S. Solar Photovoltaic System and Energy Storage Cost Benchmarks, With Minimum Sustainable Price Analysis: Q1 2022

 

[Count von Schwalbe]

LOL, what? They are the primary cost. According to the NREL, solar panel costs are nearly 80% of the total cost of a PV farm. And if we're discussing replacement due to damage, you also need to count deinstallation and reinstallation labor, which pushes the total over 90%.

Well, labor vs purchase cost could be the difference here.

 

[de.das.dude]

Seems like a good place to ask this.....
So, planning on doing some renovation, the balcony at my parent's place is on the South West, and gets decent sun. Its roof is a metal sheet, i can fit maybe a 400W panel on there. Is it going to be worth it?

The city has 2 way metering system, so no need of batteries and such, its also in the highest tier in property location, so no power cuts, no batteries required there either.

400W will be worth it? 22.5744° N

 

[Count von Schwalbe]

I think ASHRAE has worldwide data, so you should be able to figure out the actual amount of sun.

 

[Endymio]

i can fit maybe a 400W panel on there. Is it going to be worth it? ... The city has 2 way metering system,

Most sites that have utility-mandated purchasing of excess (which your two-way metering is a variant of) are going to be economic.

Not that this affects your personal decision, but the general point is that these mandates are a cost-shifting mechanism ... and one that works only while a tiny fraction of the population actually has solar.

 

[cal5582]

it costs money.

 

[Space Lynx]

it costs money.

I guess you have never heard of Keynesian Economics. Well, maybe you will learn about it on a visit to the Hoover Dam someday.

 

[cal5582]

I guess you have never heard of Keynesian Economics. Well, maybe you will learn about it on a visit to the Hoover Dam someday.

that keeps devaluing my money. i dont get the hoover dam reference though.

 

[de.das.dude]

I guess you have never heard of Keynesian Economics. Well, maybe you will learn about it on a visit to the Hoover Dam someday.

visit to the Hoover Dam costs money

 

[Space Lynx]

visit to the Hoover Dam costs money

perhaps a bad example then but the idea is a great public works project that benefits the economy for many years to come so to speak, lot of middle east oil rich countries do this very smartly, China does a decent job of it, their high speed train system for example will benefit society immensely in the next 50-100 years, not so much in the short term, but in the long term.

 

[cal5582]

perhaps a bad example then but the idea is a great public works project that benefits the economy for many years to come so to speak, lot of middle east oil rich countries do this very smartly, China does a decent job of it, their high speed train system for example will benefit society immensely in the next 50-100 years, not so much in the short term, but in the long term.

oh yeah, we dont do that here. we say we are going to do that, then they build a bridge to the middle of nowhere and the politicians wives and friends pocket millions off it.

 

[TechBuyingHavoc]

The county you live in does have someone that drives around and takes pictures of houses every year at least once for each house. They use this to estimate your property value for property taxes, I assume if they wanted to be real dicks they would see you have solar panels, and could just charge a household extra property tax based on how many solar panels they count. I wouldn't put this past them honestly, my Dad built a little tarp storage thing to park his van under to protect it from rain, it was literally 6 skinny metal parts and a weather tarp over that, they added 20k usd to the property value because of it. Absolute joke. Our ancestors rebelled against King George's excessive taxation many moons ago, and it was all for nought.

You forgot the two extra words that completely change the reason for American colonial rebellion (on paper at least, the actual reasons are more complicated as expected): Taxation without representation.

The whole objection was against being taxed by a legislature where the person subject to tax has zero representation in that legislature that could fight for that person's interests. Now, I think that is actually a fig leaf because everyone in the colonies and Britain knew that the British Parliament would never allow colonial representatives to be seated but the principle matters. Those same ancestors who rebelled against King George's taxes were fine with their own taxes BTW.

Regarding property taxes, if the new amount is grossly unfair, you absolutely should fight that with your own property appraisal or appeal process. My local government regularly overvalues properties (twice in a decade so far) and paying for a third-party appraisal had them quickly accepting the lower and more fair property valuation.

 

[lilhasselhoffer]

I actually do appreciate you doing the math, but you are still taking my points out of context. A) it was just an idea B) more creative engineers could figure out something I am sure of it C) if you spent more time being positive instead of negative you might actually change the world because you do come across as very smart to me D) the snap on with hard plastic shields idea is still not a bad idea for smaller solar farms or individuals. Also, bigger solar farms are probably all laid out symmetrically, so you might be able to make bigger "snap on" shields that cover lets say 24 solar panels per snap, and Apple does have a crap ton of employees, perhaps they could make it mandatory training in rare storms that they are all trained to do the snap on - it would literally take 1 hour with the kind of manpower they have access to and can afford, or 0 dollars if they just add it to job descriptions of new hires, its literally not that hard of work to walk around and play lego snap on game.

Would it not be enough to turn the arrays vertical (they are already steerable) so the hail glances?

would clear hardened glass ruin the sun's conversion rate of energy on solar panels? like some advanced form of corning gorilla glass, could that be placed on solar panels i wonder to mitigate low/medium level hail storms? hmm

i feel like people should be more creative. but i don't know

This is pretty much spot on. But it also depends on what region you live in on the rules and regulations in getting solar.

Up Front costs can be a pain as well.

I'm thinking something similar as the poster mentioned. Something small for starters and not on the roof.

Let's tackle all of this in one go...because the point is to discuss why certain things aren't done and why (as the thread states) not all houses should have solar panels strapped to them.

1) The problems with shielding are not just about the magical free labor and downtime. 10 acres of solar panels, and you want some number of people to drop the job they are doing to go snap on covers. For reference, the server farms these power generators serve have only the people required to maintain the hardware and trouble shoot locally...so some magic workforce of thousands will not show up.
2) Speaking of not showing up...I did the math to explain why the covers are a stupid answer to a very real question. Again, a retort to why you would choose not to strap solar power to everything...because it's actually not cost effective to prevent damage from events regular enough to be functionally guaranteed.

3) Gorilla glass is a technology from the Soviet Union. It's actually quite an amazing little bit, and at one point they used the technology to make beer glasses that were functionally unbreakable. We stopped using it because it was cheaper to break a glass and have it melted down and reused multiple times, as opposed to one session of having differently sized atoms infiltrate the silicon lattice and create a crystal structure which was less crystalline due to its internal forces...which is to say that the gorilla glass is literally soviet tech that was repurposed...and is that cool.
4) Glass over the top of solar panels isn't a bad idea...as it's functionally what we already do. The problem is simply than glass thick enough to take a hailstone flying at terminal velocity is surprisingly thick. If you've never been in one, it's amazing what a hail storm can damage.

5) Back to the glass for one last time. The good news is that visible light is the spectrum which most panels work at. This means if the stuff is transparent to the eye, it won't significantly impact energy. You can argue otherwise until blue in the face...but the simple and short answer is that coating them in glass wouldn't be a terrible answer.
6) Of course I cannot just leave it there. 2.4 gigajoules per ton. That's huge...and it's why unbreakable glass 50-70 years ago seemed silly, because energy was dang near a costless resource. Our modern focus on energy changes that math significantly.

7) It's always funny to hear people moan about regulations. Let me offer an opinion which should not be controversial. Some regulations are great, and others suck. It's great to have GFCI protection in bedrooms, because despite the additional cost it's worth the piece of mind. It sucks when you have a functionally single source of design and goods that has no value-add. Regulations requiring an engineering sign-off, without requiring that engineer to verify the math for the design, is one thing off the top of my head. For example, if I want to build a porch I need about 3 permits to do so...but 2 of the 3 are basically rubber stamped. Only the design review with the city engineer is value added, but I have to pay for the other two to file the document and get some nebulous approval that it won't impact the quality of properties in my county. More GFCI, less porch permits, is what I want. That said, working with mains voltage is not something you screw up a little....so maybe it's worth it to require anyone doing the work is minimally competent.
8) The primary cost of solar is always going to be the panels or the storage. The only other thing is the land. You therefore have a huge investment which can be destroyed if the panels are destroyed. I'm not sure why you'd conjecture it's the least expensive bit of the power generation...

9) The cost of solar that is usually calculated is simply purchasing the panels. This sounds stupid to say...but Chinese dumping. There's a reason it got cheap...producing panels in silly huge volume became easy, with no consideration of what it would cost to produce them sustainably. It's great to be able to buy a Chinese panel, refined with coal fired electric ovens, using ores strip mined from South America. Wow...it's almost like the idea behind solar is more about guilt and apparent cost being low...while a complex look at the overall costs and impact yields the complicated answer of "it depends" with regards to the question of why solar makes sense.




Let me wrap with an anecdote. It's what taught me about the bad side of going green, and why I'm skeptical enough to ask questions. It's also the reason I state things like "if you live in the US southwest and don't have solar panels you might be doing life wrong."
I went to a plant that produces glass and copper components. They proudly advertised that 98% of their product was recycled, which was true. Of course, 30% of it was stuff they damaged themselves and immediately went back into the mix. Likewise, the vast majority of their production was in the middle of switching from ancient coal fired ovens to LPG, because the tax credits for energy saving just recently had made it such that the conversion was less costly than continuing to use coal. Being fair, they made the effort to use the anthrocite coal (may be butchering that spelling), because it was a lot less sooty than the cheaper alternatives. This taught me that recycling was something easy to claim as a win, but rarely told the tale. It also taught me that being green was about what financially made sense, not about what people told me was good for the planet. To that end, I will absolutely get angry at people throwing an aluminum can anywhere but into recycling but don't give a crap about sorting wax paper and regular paper out of a bin. It's why I love the idea of more nuclear reactors, and don't have a problem spending huge chunks of my life within spitting distance of Three Mile Island. I view everything as having a cost, and doing something to feel good as stupid unless it actually is good. That, for all of you people out there, includes assuaging green guilt with installing solar panels...something which should be required in certain areas unless it causes some problem but should absolutely not be a requirement for everyone. This is why I don't bemoan paying road taxes, despite never using 99% of the roads which they pay for. Everything is a compromise.