The people who brought you all the post-2020 election chaos are at it again. This time they are looking to take over local precinct election offices nationwide. The stated goal is to stop elections from being “stolen”, but the actual goal seems to be to interfere with otherwise fair democratic elections. The quote below gives away their goals and strategy: If you cant win fair and square, cheat. If you can’t win by cheating, break stuff. From Pro Publica:

The meetings’ host, far-right blogger Jim Condit Jr. of Cincinnati, kicked off a July call by describing the precinct strategy as the last alternative to violence. “It’s the only idea,” Condit said, “unless you want to pick up guns like the Founding Fathers did in 1776 and start to try to take back our country by the Second Amendment, which none of us want to do.”

Heeding Steve Bannon’s Call, Election Deniers Organize to Seize Control of the GOP — and Reshape America’s Elections

I was surprised to read that Australia just had it’s 1,000th COVID-19 death. This is for the entire pandemic. The US is currently clocking in at about 1,500 deaths per day. Of course Australia is about 25 million people but this is still a huge difference. How? Why? I can’t say I perceive Australia as much different from the US. Australia always struck me as politically and socially even a bit more conservative than this US. So I don’t think this is a politics story. I think it is a competence story.

Covid: Australia records 1,000th death from the pandemic

I tend not to know any anti-vaxxers. I read things in the news, but generally have little direct contact with people who are refusing the COVID-19 vaccine. This week I was forwarded a mailing from our local neighborhood mailing list where one such refusenik, was trying to convince others to follow their lead. The link was to a far-right media article. Another neighbor felt obliged to send a link with information refuting the anti-vaxx claims, and predictably, ugly words were quickly exchanged.

I’m going to be honest. I’m a science guy. Got numerous childhood vaccines that I am certain kept me and my community healthy. All the data in have seen tells me everyone needs to get this vaccine, for their own health and the health of their community. Since something like 70% of Americans have been vaccinated at least once for COVID-19, this is a stong majority opinion. Unfortunately many leaders are going in the other direction. An article from VOX with some good numbers on the latest man-made disaster in (of course) Florida. I was surprised that 90% of older Floridians are vaccinated. I would have assumed the political conservative bent of the anti-vaxx media campaigns would make older Americans skew much lower.

How Florida’s massive Covid-19 spike got so bad

Looking at some rough numbers to size out a solar system for my house. We are probably on the high end of power usage since we have a relative large house and a pool pump. I also did not build this house myself, and there are lots of choices, like many American houses, that I would not have made. That said we have done a bit of work to save energy with efficient appliances, including air conditioners and some solar shading, which really made a big difference.

Of course, we won’t be putting solar on this house, since we intend to leave Texas in a few months. This is just to get a feel for the sort of numbers I would be looking at for a complete, 100%, more or less off grid solar installation.

From August 2019 tbrough July 2020, a year of relatively normal use (no ice storms / blackouts) we used a somewhat surprising 35,390 kWh for the year. This comes to just under 100 kWh per day and about 4 kW constantly over the year. Back of the envelope I would figure 3x to 4x this value for the panels, since the sun doesn’t shine all day. Let’s be really generous and call if 15 kW of solar panels.

Even at 400W a panel that is about 40 panels. And I have been working from a yearly average. Probably best to look at summer peak. It is interesting that summer peak in Texas is about twice what we use in the winter. We have propane heat so this says that half of our bill in the summer is air conditioner.

Lets say summer is 4,000 kWh over 30 days or about 133 kWh per day or 5.56 kW continuous. About 40% more than the average. Now we are looking at over 55 x 400W panels. That is quite a bit. But we could trim that down a bit.

Battery storage would be minimally enough to get through the night. Here is where it gets tricky. You probably aren’t going to run the air conditioner as much at night. And the pool pump will also be off. In fact that 5.5 kW might be too rough here. I need to see if I can get daily data from my power company. But let’s soldier on. Batteries need to supply 5.5 kW for 16 hours, or 88 kWh of storage. A Tesla Powerwall is under 14 kWh, so that is over six Tesla power walls. I’m thinking that isn’t going to happen. Probably need to look at day vs night consumption. Somebody check my math 😀.

Thinking about a new project. Just a small solar and battery installation. Will probably just get a few hundred watts of polysilicon panels and use my existing deep cycle SLAB electric riding mower batteries. There are also lots of nice looking, and inexpensive controllers on Amazon. Most of this stuff is available for campers, boaters and RVers. A surprisingly large range of inexpensive gear.

What I really want to do is to be able to monitor and graph a few data items, mostly panel voltage and battery voltage. This is just to get a feel for how these things work in the real world. I did some similar work for large enterprise systems a bunch of years ago and wondered if maybe I could use of of that open source software and a Raspberry Pi. I had a look at Graphite and Grafana and read about a bunch more. All pretty complicated and more than I really need. I guess I’ll just write some python.

China seems to be pulling back from it’s (what is the word?) modernization. Perhaps it is just following the rightward drift of other countries, but it seems to be a new authoritarian direction for China.

China’s media cracks down on ‘effeminate’ styles

Ah, so it has a name. I’m always figured opposition to solar and renewables was about propping up the fossil fuel industry. I can already see the end of coal, oil and gas. I hope a fully distributed approach takes hold and we don’t keep the same centralized fossil fuel economic structure.

Solarpunk Is Not About Pretty Aesthetics. It’s About the End of Capitalism

From The Baffler.

America, Ex Post Facto