Solar power: My views are in line with Sobek, the crocodile God

Sobek while praising the capabilities of solar, has been scathing in the use of feed-in tariffs. Solar feed in tariffs reek of the sulphurous stench of Hades.

I'm Changing my Qld Government vote to LNP because the Industrial Relations minister is a Dick

By name and nature: See:article on clothing manufacturing There really is not a lot of jobs nor candidates for union membership anyway, within this industry, so beating up the issue of sweatshops *again* is really flogging a dead horse no matter which way you look at it.

Getting a return on NBN battery backup = Marconomic solar PV plan

This article has a bit on the bottom regarding the battery backup unit, which many commenters have also mentioned. The problem is that although it is great to have broadband as well as voice calls available during blackouts, because blackouts are rare, and many homes were already in a situation where their phone was dependent on grid power, return on the investment in money and space to have the battery there can be dubious.

Once you have a battery permanently in your house, a return can be garnered by making the battery useful regardless of blackouts. A very small cheap solar panel can keep the battery charged up independently of the grid. Enough power is generated and stored to use the battery as a device charger (ipods, nintendos, mobiles etc.) that will cut your power bill considerably with no inconvenience to the utility. In my house charging devices uses a lot of electricity - not because of the amount of power required to charge the device, but because the chargers leak power all day, and the power points are hard to reach to turn them off and on each time they are needed, and the power conversion ac to dc is very inefficient. The battery/solar PV will double as an emergency charging point for devices during blackouts as well.

Still water flowing down the Murray Darling and out the mouth

The perceived wisdom that drought and a closed Murray Darling system is the new normal continues to be challenged by reality. From my reckoning and the following graph of the Murray river flow rate at lock one, the closest proxy of what is flowing to the sea from the system, 15,000 GigaLitres (or 30 Sydney Harbours) of fresh water has flowed to the sea since September 2010.



This link to see more live river data flows if you are interested.

I had predicted at around January that more water would flow out of the mouth than the total official storage of the whole of the Murray Darling before it stopped again. The total official storage is around 22,000 GL so I could yet be right. I figure that one more year of this kind of thing and we will be wanting to redact our thinking and declare that (the 10 years from 2000 to 2010) was just a freak drought the likes of which we would never see again in our lifetime. It is plausible that we may want to keep strategic dams along the Murray at half capacity to hedge our bets with catastrophic lower Murray floods now possible if we get a repeat of the inflows of last year. Namely the Menindee lakes, Hume and Lake Victoria could moderate catastrophic inflows to just the major flood mark at Renmark and below if they are pre-emptively emptied.