Energy Choices (rev g)

Revised Draft from a Pamphlet (11k words) to a possible QIF Book (40k words)(14k so far)

Added material in red, plagiarized from QIF in Green, QIF suggestions in Violet my edits in blue.

Throughout the Bible, there is only a single use of the word energy; and no reference could be more fitting for Friends and for this writing than Colossians 1:29 :

“For this I toil, striving with all the energy which he mightily inspires within me.”

INTRODUCTION

Our current lifestyle is simply not sustainable, not in energy, in population growth, in the air we breathe, the water we use nor the food we produce. Although each of these concerns is

paramount to our long term survival on this planet Earth, they can be managed if we have the will to seek truth and balance in our stewardship. This writing focuses only on the energy part of this life equation and how we can live in a sustainable energy environment now without sacrificing the quality of our air, or our water or our drastically changing our lifestyle. The cover image above collects all the air and water on Earth into single actual size spheres to show how miniscule are these resources that sustain life. The upper sphere is all the air (and smog pollution) the middle one is all the water on Earth and the smaller blue sphere is that proportion of water that is fresh on which all seven billion of us depend (much of it not fit to drink). This book focuses on the damage we are doing to the air through the unrelenting burning of fossil fuels for energy and how as individuals we can make a difference starting now.

Going through elementary school in the 1950’s and the heady days of science, electronics and space, now, at the age of 68 in 2016, I cannot believe that I have lived long enough to see the solutions to clean renewable energy here before us. Not only do we see the demise of coal at hand, and the amortized cost of clean solar energy now costing less than half the price of electricity from the utility, but also we have Electric Vehicles (EVs) that are better, faster, cheaper to buy, cheaper to operate and cheaper to maintain than comparable fossil fueled vehicles when used in their best application which is local travel and commuting.

If one can ignore the legacy of indifference, the lethargy of public policy and the ignorance that seems to drive much of popular sentiments, instead of handwringing over these frustrations, I can now see a sustainable path to a bright future if we will only consider our choices and make the right decisions with a prepared mind. We only have one planet spaceship Earth to carry us through the cosmos, and we are now realizing we can no longer consume everything on it for immediate profit and ignore the long term consequences. We are already beginning to see the consequences through climate change.

In this writing, I hope to show how change to a new clean energy economy might seem daunting at the large scale needed to save our species, but in fact, it is easy to do as individuals, since in our daily lives we routinely face major milestones where we have to make significant energy decisions anyway. As seekers of truth, the prepared mind will know the route to take. This introduction to those choices will be followed by a discussion of the details of both solar power and electric vehicles to counter much of the widespread misinformation, both intentional and unintentional, that impede our progress forward.

Finally, I will conclude with some examples such as my own family’s 95% reduction in fossil fuel consumption through solar energy and EVs while at the same time reducing our energy costs by more than half and with no substantive degradation in lifestyle. Another example is how our Annapolis Monthly Meeting virtually eliminated energy costs and emissions by switching from propane and grid utility mix to clean renewable solar and wind energy while giving us satisfaction in hosting meetings in a carbon free and sustainable facility.

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LIFE’S ENERGY MILESTONES

To many, the significant lifestyle changes from the convenience of fossil fuels to clean energy in our way of life seem out of reach and insurmountable compared to our individual day-to-day concerns and daily challenges. But despite our tendency to avoid facing big future problems today, it turns out that on average, we are never more than a year or so away from having to make a major personal energy or lifestyle decision anyway. Almost everything we do demands energy, yet we take the source of that energy for granted and do not usually think of the long term impacts of our energy decisions. If we approach these unavoidable milestone events with some prior homework and a prepared mind [1], we can be ready to seek the path towards sustainability of our species while also achieving lifelong savings in energy costs and lifelong improvements in our environment.

On the other hand, if we do not consider our options in advance of these forced decisions, we usually end up making quick, convenient choices, opting for the least expensive immediate solution which can not only cost us two to three times more in the long run but also is almost always worse for the environment. For example, a gasoline car bought today will still be on the road for nearly two decades and an oil or propane heating system repaired today will still be burning fossil fuel for another dozen years spewing noxious emissions to all our peril. It seems a moral imperative to Friends to at least consider the long term consequences of such decisions today when already we know so much about how damaging a poor choice can be to our environment and our future. Here are some of the major energy milestones we face every year or so which we can anticipate and with a prepared mind can be ready to seek the right long term path.

Energy Supplier: In at least 17 states (in 2015) with progressive energy policy, the utilities offer consumers a choice in energy supplier. The choice is to continue to purchase electricity from the local grid mix, which can include as much as 50% dirty coal in some areas, or we can choose to subscribe to utility solar or utility wind energy at only pennies additional cost. At Maryland’s nominal 14 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) electric rate in 2016, the difference to switch our selection from dirty grid mix power to 100% renewable wind power was about 1 penny per kWh. It’s as easy to do as a check mark in the box on your utility bill and anyone in a state with progressive energy policy and utility deregulation can do it.

Wind is a vital component of our future of clean renewable energy. Despite salesmen promoting home wind and selling some of the silliest approaches to wind energy, practically no home owner has enough wind to make a system practical. Unless your hat blows off your head almost

everyday you go outdoors all year long, you don’t have any useable wind despite what the salesmen might say. I enjoyed the quote I once heard from an enlightened engineer, “Just because something spins in the wind does not mean it is generating any usable power under load”. On the other hand, wind is entirely viable on the large utility scale projects that are well underway and is definitely a choice to be selected from your utility to show support of this nascent yet very viable renewable energy solution. In fact, investments in large scale wind generation is exploding and of this date in 2016, large scale wind is coming in below the cost of c9oal. Signing up for wind power from your utility is again, an easy step towards a personal investment in our sustainable future.

Our roofs need care or replacing about every 20 years and they may be our most important energy asset. As such, any roof decision should fully consider the roof’s potential for life-long solar energy production. In addition, once a solar array covers a roof, not only does it generate energy but greatly extends the life of that roof since it is no longer directly exposed to the elements. But your roof is not the only place for solar panels. Both my home and our Monthly Meeting house chose to install our panels on the ground for a variety of reasons. First was the shade on the roof and second was simply to avoid the issue of the present condition of the roof and the unknowns of its remaining life. A new roof would have cost more than the solar and since it seemed to be in good shape, so, even though it was 20 years old we considered it had plenty more years before it would need to be replaced. Ground mounting the array avoided the shade from trees and also gave us flexibility in location and its pointing direction.

Landscaping: Although we love shade trees and their shade has significant value in reducing air conditioning costs and quality of life, shade can also detract from our solar potential. Later in this book I will show how replacing one tree with a solar array removes as much carbon from the atmosphere (by reducing the burning of fossil fuel for the same energy) as 36 full size trees remove by photosynthesis! Further, solar arrays mounted on the roof with sufficient spacing to allow some air movement can also reduce summer solar heat gain just like a shade tree and can also reduce night time thermal heat loss in the winter.

Community Solar: In areas with abundant trees such as here in a mid-Atlantic state, only about 20% of homes have good solar exposure leaving most homeowners with little access to the solar boon. Similarly, apartment dwellers, condo owners and renters in multi-dwelling buildings also do not have access to the roof or the land on which to invest in their solar future. In some progressive states, the concept of Community Solar is taking root where homeowners without good solar prospects can simply invest in solar panels in community solar projects where their panels will produce power and that power will be subtracted from the homeowner’s bill. They can even carry the credit through to any other home in the same utility service area, or they can sell out if they have to move. This brings solar energy to everyone, not just the 20% with good solar exposure.

Water heating is the largest household energy use in the typical American home next to heating and air conditioning. On average, the typical water heater only lasts about 9 years, and if your heater is straight electric, it costs about ten times its original purchase price in electric consumption over its life. Fortunately, a modern high-efficiency heat-pump water heater that may cost 3 times as much initially will operate almost three times more efficiently and will save thousands of dollars over its lifetime. In addition, if the water heater is in the basement where humidity is a problem, its operation serendipitously acts as a dehumidifier at no added energy cost. Also, being electric, the heatpump is ready at any time to be powered from clean renewable electricity from solar or wind or other turns to renewable energy by the utilities.

LED and CFL Lights have dramatically saved energy in the last few years. When faced with a burned out light bulb, do not replace it with the same horribly inefficient incandescent bulb (under 5% efficient) developed over a century ago. It may only cost $1 but will cost over $60 in energy over the next few years. Replace it with a $3 CFL or LED bulb that will only cost $10 in energy and result in one-fifth the carbon emissions and cost over the same time frame. A typical home with about 50 light bulbs can save almost $2500 in energy costs over the life of these new bulbs with this simple energy decision, a 500% return on investment. Talking with a representative of our local utility, this change to efficient lighting and has caused a 20% overall reduction in the entire local grid generation over the last several years.

Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) in most climates is the largest and most expensive home energy system and historically the most dependent on fossil fuel and typically has an average life on the order of 15 years or so. Historically we burned wood, then coal, then oil and more recently natural gas and propane. The biggest opportunity for the reduction in carbon emissions is to switch from oil to a heat pump. When you think about it, it is the ultimate travesty to be burning a high carbon, finite limited resource just to produce heat with no meaningful work being done. When the price of heating oil rose above $2.80 a gallon in 2015, the cost to heat with oil actually exceeded the high cost of straight electric resistance heating (at the national average of 10 cents/kWh). The cost of a new heating system is big, but is dwarfed by the lifetime energy costs that result. Although natural gas is considered a cleaner fossil fuel with half the carbon emissions of coal for the same heat, it is still burning fossil fuel into the atmosphere and contaminating ground water due to the rise of hydraulic fracking to extract it. Historically, the price of natural gas has been anything but stable and consistent. Despite the historically low prices in 2016 due to the rise of hydraulic fracking, the instability and controversy surrounding that extraction method are vulnerable to change. Besides, the volatility of gas pricing is inherent in the fact that gas is not a commodity that can be easily stored. It has to be produced and used in real-time. This also makes pricing highly dependent on instantaneous supply and demand.

Heatpump HVAC Units: The clean renewable HVAC alternative to these fossil fuels is the heatpump which is 2 to 3 times more efficient and being electric, it can be powered from any renewable clean energy as the grid gets ever cleaner over time. For example, between 2008 and

2012, the impact of dirty coal on our air quality finally began to be recognized even by the most ardent deniers and was punctuated by the gray images of un-breathable air at the Beijing Olympics. During this period, the use of coal driving the grid saw a 20% drop resulting in a cleaner grid. During the same time, the growth of solar and wind energy have been phenomenal.

Geothermal HVAC commonly refers to a ground-source heatpump. These heatpumps can reduce heating and cooling costs 3 to 4 times compared to oil heat because they only have to pump heat to or from the constant 45°F of the ground instead of the outside 20°F in winter for an outside air heatpump. At this rate, a heatpump system can pay for itself many times over during its 10 to 15 year lifespan especially when it is time for a new system anyway. And, being electric, it can run from solar or wind or any other renewable electric source.

Fans: Unfortunately, homes built for the last 60 years were designed to be tight boxes with habitability maintained by energy intensive heating and air-conditioning. The art of using a fan to exchange cooler outside air overnight was not designed in. But it is easy to do with a box window fan in an unused room. Use the door for flow control and only turn on the exhaust fan in the evening after the outside temperature gets below the inside temperature and turn it off in the morning and close the door to retain the cool most of the day.

New Home: Another major life milestone where energy choices can be considered is the average American job change about every 12 years and this is another major life milestone where energy choices can be considered. Choices such as, what climate, what house, what location, what orientation, what HVAC system are all questions that can be considered for their energy impact. Is the home well insulated, does it have efficient appliances? What about heating and cooling and water heat? What are its solar potentials? Does it have passive solar features like overhanging eves to keep out summer sun? (For solar panels, note, that a Southern exposure is no longer a firm requirement. Any angle from East to South to West can work and in fact, East/West roofs can often use both sides and generate up to 170% of the ideal south facing roof.

Cars and Transportation: Buying a new car is probably the most frequent energy decision we have to make and therefore the greatest immediate impact on our emissions footprint. A car bought today will on average still be running (through multiple owners) up to 18 years before it is finally scrapped. Friends with a concern for the environment can simply no longer afford to approach a car purchase without having at least considered the impact of that choice and the new alternatives. Electric Vehicles today are a whole new paradigm that opens up one of our most flexible energy consumptions to clean renewable possibilities. About one third of our energy consumption is in transportation and over 95% of that is local and under 40 miles a day [2]. On average, individual Americans make a car purchase or trade about every 6 years and now, it is important to consider not just the purchase price and number of cup holders, but also the long term overall lifetime costs and consequences.

Today in 2016, there is no doubt that local travel, commuting and daily transportation can be done cheaper, cleaner, better and more conveniently with EVs than continuing our century of inefficient gasoline burning internal combustion engines and dependence on gas stations and foreign oil. In 2016, there are over 30 full size electric or plug-in-hybrids on the market [3] and at least four manufacturers have announced that all or most of their product line will be electric or plug-ins in only ten years (by 2025), and able to run on the clean renewable electric energy sources we are developing. The average American car remains on our roads for 18 years (through multiple owners) before it is finally scrapped. Do we fully comprehend that responsibility when we buy another huge gasoline SUV with a few more cup holders?

Things to Add:

Public transportation (switching to electricity even faster than individuals!.... also Bikes and E-bikes

Making the Right choice: You will notice a common thread through all of the previously enumerated life’s energy systems and energy choices … That is, the switch to electricity as the common denominator of all of our energy systems [3.5]. Once we switch to electricity, then we have the option to use any form of energy generation as the source interchangeably. We can as individuals choose to change our electricity source from fossil fuels to clean renewables with a check in the box of a utility form, the installation of solar panels, the subscription to wind electricity from our utility, or the overnight charging of our electric car.

Not only does this switch to electric give us access to clean renewable energy, in almost all cases, it is also less costly in the long run. And if we are lucky enough to have a sunny roof, we also gain the self-sufficiency and security of owning our own energy supply for the rest of our lives and being independent of market fluctuations in oil, gas and coal which tend to go in boom and bust cycles while ever creeping upward.

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In Harmony with Nature

Our current lifestyle is not sustainable.  This is not so much a critique of the way we live today as it is simply the human condition.  Ever since we transitioned from hunter-gatherers, mankind has simply taken what we need from mother Earth and, after the local resources are all gone, we simply moved on to greener pastures and began again.  When we put down roots, we then

expanded the economy into other places where the resources were easier to get, exploiting them to devastation while transporting the resources back home.

This nature of growth, expansion, exploitation and consumption has worked for tens of thousands of years as humans grew out of Africa and expanded to every habitable corner of the planet.  But, just in my lifetime the human population has tripled to over 7 billion in 2015. The ability of our Earth to support this consumption is reaching its limits.  What drives this engine of the human condition is the need for food, water, shelter, energy and transportation.

Figure X. Dirty diesel delivering coal to Maryland plants Figure Y. Four tons per household

As Americans, our thirst for energy is unparalleled.  We individually consume four times more than the world average and until recently we have shown no appetite for reducing our lifestyle and consumption. However, we are turning the corner. Electricity consumption peaked in 2005, and by 2014 was down to 1997 levels [4].

Figure Z. The 80 tons of habitat buldozed into the streams and valleys to get to my 4 tons of coal

The average American home consumes electricity equivalent to about 4 tons of coal a year to meet its energy demands. And the significance of that coal consumption in the Eastern states is dwarfed by the unseen 80 tons of trees, habitat, flora and fauna bulldozed into the valleys and streams of West Virginia to get those 4 tons of coal. This is the equivalent of four railroad cars of habitat lost per year per American home, an unseen travesty by any measure.

With permission: http://ohvec.org/high-resolution-mountaintop-removal-pictures/

Only from the air can we see the impact of 80 tons per American home of habitat loss as a volume of rock shown in the mountain top mining photo above.

Land to Energy: We should consider our energy consumption relative to the amount of land and nature we need to live. In the time of George Fox, when we colonists immigrated to North America, it might have taken about 4 acres of forest to produce a sustainable yield of firewood to burn to meet the energy demand of a small family.  And burn we did. Even the earliest photos from the 19th century showed the decimation of forest as we consumed our environment and pressed ever westward.

As we ran out of forests, we turned to coal, then petroleum and natural gas to burn for our insatiable energy needs. Now in the 21st century we are reaping the downside of this consumption of fossil fuel that is releasing the millions of years of sequestered carbon back into

the atmosphere in only a few hundred years and upsetting the balance of nature which makes our planet and climate habitable for human life.

Sun to Energy: Fortunately, along with this perilous growth in human consumption, the ability to convert solar power directly to usable energy has also been growing. In my middle school years in the 1960’s and the beginning of our excursions into space, solar cells were new and essential to the space program as it was the only practical way to generate power in space for satellites. The cost then was about $100 per watt. That meant a $10,000 investment just to light one 100W light bulb. But as our access to space has grown so has the economy of scale in the development of solar cells. By 2010, the cost of large home solar panels was down to only about $4 per watt. By 2014, the cost was down 100-to-1 to well under $1 per watt. In 2015, the cost of large scale solar plants for electric utility scale production dropped below even the cost of a new coal plant.

As a result, the growth of solar systems in 2016 is exponentially increasing at nearly 120% per year and the death of dirty coal, is imminent at nearly 20% decline per year, the steepest decline since records began in 1949.[5]

Waiting for higher efficiency technology is a fool’s errand. Since my first science project in elementary school in 1955, I have been fascinated by the potential for solar power. From powering my first transistor radio, through to college in 1970 the space age brought in fascinating advances in the technology. But as the space sector drives for higher efficiency, the cost only goes up. The cost of high efficiency cells is now up to over $500 per watt while home solar cells are down below $0.50 a watt. In 2010 solar power was finally becoming practical for the homeowner and by 2015 had become so cost effective as to be even cheaper than the grid. Yet, today with a 100-to-1 reduction in costs for simple silicon cells over the same time frame, we still hear people say they are waiting for newer more efficient technology. I have heard that excuse so much in almost every discussion of solar power that I was finally inspired to make the graph in figure X above. That is, that while the cost of economical solar has dropped 100-to-1, the cost of higher more efficient cells (paid for by the space industry) has only gone up over the same time frame! Today the cost of the most efficient cells is over 1000 times greater than the cost of simple home solar panels. For this 1000-to-1 difference in price, the space industry gains less than a 2-to-1 power advantage. But in space, where satellites cost up to a $Billon

dollars each, a few million for the best solar panels is worth it. And this huge divergent price difference will never change because the space industry will always pay whatever it takes for higher efficiency on their billion dollar satellites while home owners will only pay the absolute minimum. And as the industry gains a percent or so for the most efficient cells, the industry moves to that new technology and abandons last years cells. And with no demand and a 1000-to-1 price compared to home solar, there is no market for that slightly less efficient cell technology to every develop further down the cost curve. Solar panels are now cheaper than even a custom glass window of the same size. The biggest cost of solar energy now is not the panels but the labor to install them.

Living on the Land: Considering the phenomenal growth of solar energy, it is interesting to note the land required to support a solar array to sustainably power a small family in 2016 compared to the 4 acres of forest needed to support that family in the 18th century. There are two easy comparisons. The size of the solar array needs to be no larger than the roof of the typical house. Or about 0.5% of the land required 200 years ago. But what if you have shade? In that case, there is another useful comparison. That is, the area of one mature shade tree (about 400 sqft) is about the same area of solar panels needed to power a small house.

While it is disconcerting to cut down a shade tree to install solar panels, there is another important element at play. Studies have shown that each kilowatt (kW) of solar panels eliminates about the same carbon emissions as does the growth of 6 to 8 mature trees [6]. Multiply this by the typical 7 kW of solar panels for a home, and putting up the solar array has the same carbon emission reduction advantage as planting an acre of trees! By another measure, removing one shade tree to install a solar array is about the same benefit as activating 50 trees relative to our overall carbon CO2 emissions reduction.

Oxygen: Trees have another value besides carbon reduction. They also generate at least half of the oxygen we breathe (the other half is from plankton in the oceans). In that case, it is a sobering statistic that each human on earth needs at least 7 to 8 or so fully mature trees to live [7]. From these statistics it is interesting to make a sketch (above) of our individual sustainable footprint on Earth. We have already noted the vast reduction from 4 acres for firewood energy down to the size of a roof for solar. But we also need to sketch in the other requirements for human life.

The sketch above suggests a small family might need about 3 acres of planet Earth to meet their sustainable resources. The area of our roof or one mature tree, as already discussed, can supply our electrical energy. Twenty tree areas can supply the oxygen, and 2+ acres of arable land can supply our food. Thirteen tree areas are needed for a septic field (although this can overlap the oxygen and/or garden requirements). And finally, four tree areas are needed for a typical house footprint. Water may come from wells below ground or from rain water on the roof. For 50 inches or so average rainfall a year, it would take about 3000 square feet or 8 tree areas of rain water collection and storage to sustain the family.

These estimates are very approximate. For example, a common estimate of 1.25 acres per person for food can be improved nearly 7 to-1 by using intensive and well honed farming methods. In our summary we chose 2 acres for 3.5 people for a small family.

The purpose of this illustration is not to suggest we go back to the woods or small family farming, but simply that we should be stewards of all of nature around us, not just the few square feet we might own or rent. A third of us live in urban environments but there are still parks and trees as well as great rural forest and farms to protect. We can breathe as long as we protect 8 trees somewhere for our air and we can eat if we protect farmland from being paved over. We can also benefit from a few square feet in the community solar garden for our electric production; or, a few gallons of water from the community water supply, and a few gallons of waste treatment in the community treatment plant.

Protect Nature Everywhere: If we take the 3 acres per family as a round number for our needs and take the 324 million US population in 2016 and the 750 million acres of forest and the 280 million acres of prime farmland in the USA it is easy to see that we are getting close to being full. We need to protect these millions of acres of forests and grasslands and farmlands out there to sustain our living, our energy and our breathing needs… but we can only do this as a

society if we collectively have the will to protect those acres. To achieve this, we must battle the calamity of the human condition, that is, the greed of the few to exploit for personal gain at the expense of all. For this reason, each of us, even if we do not own a foot of land, can work towards the common good and contribute to the protection of our forests, trees and arable lands. Find a cause, contribute, and preserve your acres somewhere.

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SOLAR POWER IS HERE TO STAY

From tens of thousands of years ago, our source of useful energy has always been to burn something.  First we burned fallen wood, then harvested trees. Where trees were gone, we burned dung and peat and killed whales to burn their blubber.  Then we mined coal and finally pumped oil and natural gas.  All of these were consumed with vast inefficiency and releasing egregious amounts of carbon dioxide into the air just for the heat we needed for warmth, cooking and processes.

To his and her credit, humans have found ways to use some other forms of energy where practical.  We used the power of falling water for centuries to pump water, to grind grain, and eventually to smelt iron and into the 20th century to generate electricity. Even at sea level, the Danes and Dutch developed wind mills to pump water out of inundated land to create farms. Seafaring civilizations used wind to navigate the seas.  But only in the last century has man discovered the direct conversion of sunlight into electricity and only in the last decade has that process become economical for everyone; and economical it is!

As noted before, the price of solar power has dropped 100 to 1 in my adult lifetime from 1970 to now in 2016.  It dropped 10 to 1 just in the last decade.  In 2012, the amortized cost of solar electricity equaled the retail cost of electricity from the utility and by 2014 it was half.  Now in 2016 solar electricity costs less than even coal at wholesale.  Even oil rich countries in the middle east, with vast oil reserves, are now turning to solar for their energy so they can preserve the oil and sell it at higher prices to everyone else.

Simplicity: For Friends hesitant to embrace this new technology, we should address the simplicity of solar power. Just as we used the flow of water from a higher level to a lower level for energy over the centuries, the conversion of solar energy to electricity is nearly as simple. It is just being done at a microscopic level inside the molecules of silicon (sand). Sunlight essentially adds energy to electrons in the silicon to bump them up from a lower to a higher energy state where they can then flow through wires to electrical circuits to do useful work before returning to their low energy state. There are no moving parts: just the panels in the sun, and an inverter to switch the DC voltage into AC voltage for our home. The connection to our

home grid is the same as simply adding another appliance. An electrician just connects Line1, Line2 and Ground through a circuit breaker in the distribution box. Simple it is.

Grid-Storage: The revolution in the economics of solar energy stems from the use of the grid for energy storage instead of costly and high maintenance battery storage. For off-grid isolated solar power systems, nearly $2 of every $3 invested is in the battery storage system and life-long maintenance, and only one third of the investment is generating power. When we eliminate the batteries, and “store” our daily excess in the grid, then $3 of every $3 invested goes to energy production at retail rates.

[Everyone has now heard of the Elon Musk POWER WALL, so I need to cover the concepts of BATTERY Storage. Batteries are now cost effective, but ONLY under very specific total energy concepts that can only be properly implemente under a totally new approach to the grid (smart meters, Demand-response, Battery Storage, Heat Storage, etc) I have lots to add here…]

Net Metering: Of course, the grid does not actually store the energy. It just shares our excess generation with someone else who needs it at the time. The mechanism for this sharing is the net-meter. When we draw power from the grid, our meter counts the kilowatt-hours (kWh) and at the end of the month we pay for the electricity we used. But with a solar net-meter, when we generate excess electricity during the day, our meter can also run backwards, subtracting from our kWh. At the end of the month, if we have used more than we generated, we pay the utility as usual. But if we generated more than we used, the meter is less than where it started and it shows a credit in kWh that we can use later. Since it is a 1-for-1 credit in kWh, we are getting the same retail value for the electricity we generated in excess as we have to pay when we consume it. Thus the term “net” meter.

The Sun, and our lives are on an annual cycle. Solar panels will usually produce nearly twice as much energy in the long summer days than in the winter and our heating and air conditioning loads vary drastically through the year. Therefore, the utilities only square up any net credit in our account on an annual basis. In the meantime, we pay those monthly bills showing net consumption, and we do not pay when we have a kWh credit (net retail value). Only at the end of a year, if our meter is farther back then where it started will the utility actually pay for any net annual excess. Net metering laws vary and in some states the utility pays retail, but others only pay wholesale. This is fair. The idea of net metering is to let homeowners generate their own electricity at retail rates, but it was not intended to let them be greedy and build large power generating stations on their lots in the suburbs.

Peak Power Value versus Distribution Costs: There is a lot of pushback from some utilities and the fossil fuel lobby and their disinformation campaigns to convince non solar customers in some states that, because solar customers are reducing their bills substantially, it must somehow be costing the non-solar customers more. Nothing could be further from the truth. The cost of

generating electricity varies minute by minute throughout the day to meet the demand. Although the consumer is only billed the average, say 10 cents per kWh, the actual prices paid by the utilities for the power from the generators varies from 2 cents or less at night and up to 20, 40, 80 cents and even as high as $2 per kWh during the peak loads of the day. The nominal cost of electricity is established as the long term average of these drastic daily fluctuations. At the high price times during the day, the home solar net-meter producer is still only getting the same one-to-one 10 cent value credit for her power even though she is producing it when the utility needs it most and when the utility is paying other sources much more than the 10 cents. At night, the solar customer is still paying 10 cents but at a time when it only costs the utility a few pennies. This net peak value of solar more than offsets the modest costs to maintain the distribution hardware of the grid to solar customers.

So, it is not the other utility customers that are losing to solar customers, it is the dirtier utility-owned peaking plants that are fired up during the daily peak where they can sell electricity at ten to twenty times the average rate. Yes, they are losing profit but, unfortunately, that is the goal of a cleaner energy future. We need to phase out the dirtiest and most expensive fossil fuel peaking plants because solar systems can minimize the need for them. It is what must happen if we are to clean up the grid and our air.

*** INSERT A NEW SECTION later called…

“Choosing Your Solar”

The purpose of this section is to actually guide the potential home solar reader through the myriad of sales options and purchasing plans. And to guide the reader to avoid some common overreaching sales claims and misguided sales information. Although more technical than readers might expect in a QIF book, it is this unbiased guidance that they need when they make one of the lasrgest financial invesments in their lives (besides their home).

Actually, I will move this towards the end and join it with another chapter on “Choosing Your EV” to give the same detailed guidance on making one’s next car purchase.

*** INSERT A NEW SECTION later called…

“Choosing Your EV”

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ELECTRIFICATION OF TRANSPORTATION

Electric Vehicles were invented in about 1834 and by the 1890’s were outselling gas cars ten-to-one [8]. Henry Ford even bought one for his wife because it always worked and she just flipped a switch instead of using the heavy crank to start his model T. But, when the electric starter

debuted in 1912, it was the end of EVs for a century. Now, a hundred years later, batteries have improved 20-to-1 over those early electric cars and are now making a striking comeback that will revolutionize our transportation sector.

Since the electrification of transportation is the largest disruptive change to transportation and fossil fuels since the automobile replaced the horse, it is important that Friends fully understand the nuances of this coming revolution and not be misled by legacy misinformation [9]. First, we must understand that an EV is not a replacement for every car, but is an excellent replacement for the 95% portion of our transportation that is local and daily. The average daily mileage of American drivers is about 40 miles a day (15,000 miles a year). And 98% of all daily trips begin and end at home. This kind of travel is the ideal application for EVs because, not only do they leave the home in the morning every day with a fully charged battery range, but also return home every night for a very convenient overnight charge. This costs about $2 a day while never having to interrupt any daily trip to stop at a gas station.

By 2012 most EVs had daily ranges of about 100 miles which is more than 2 times the average daily travel. By 2017, several manufacturers were producing 200 mile EV’s. With almost a 5-times the average American excess daily miles driven, these EV’s can fulfill almost all local travel plus contingencies. Although, most people think they are going to want the largest range available, the smart EV purchaser may prefer to buy no more daily range than they need to avoid paying a large premium for a large capacity battery that they almost never use.

An excellent example of this tradeoff is the expensive and most popular Tesla Model S luxury sedan at over $120,000. While this car has over 250 mile range, Tesla also sold the exact same car with a smaller battery option for $50,000 less. Choosing this lower cost model gave the same luxury prestige, performance and acceleration, and all the other advantages of driving electric while also giving more than 3 times the average American daily range all at a huge savings of $50,000. Yet, this model was eventually dropped from the lineup, because those with that kind of money to spend on a luxury car were not interested in the savings, only in getting the best car with the longest range available whether they needed it or not.

However, to the smart purchaser who saved $50,000 for the smaller battery, there was hardly any daily impact because it was fully charged overnight and began each day with full daily range which was already four times the national average. The only time the difference would be apparent was when the driver would have to charge twice (40 minutes total) to get from Washington DC to NY city instead of once (20 minutes) using a fast DC charging station. Note, the $50k saved could pay for a gas car rental every weekend for 10 years in order to make any long trips needed.

Generally, an EV is not designed to be a distance traveling car. The paradigm changing value-promise of the EV is in local daily travel where it does the job better, cheaper, and more conveniently than gas and never has to go anywhere but home to charge. Even then, if needed, it

can charge anywhere there is a standard electric outlet. Yes, simply plugging into a standard 120v outlet (just like your cell phone at night) can maintain 50 miles a day. Also, plugging in while parked at work can raise that range to nearly 90 miles a day from standard outlets.

EV Cost: Although the EVs re-introduced in 2010 were more expensive than gas cars, in just three years the cost was equal and by 2015 the average cost of all EV’s on the market ($29k including incentives) was significantly less than the average cost of gas cars ($33k). If we take the luxury Tesla out of the total, then the average cost of electric cars drops to $26k which is now over $7k below the average cost of gasoline and diesel cars. In addition, in 2016, the average cost of a used EV was under $10k. Not only do EV’s now cost less than fossil fuel powered cars to buy and operate, they are also much cheaper to own. With 1/3rd the energy cost and without oil changes, mufflers, exhaust systems, radiators, friction brakes, automatic transmissions, catalytic converters, and emissions control systems, they are far simpler and less expensive to maintain. Some estimates suggest that the maintenance costs of an electric car are only 10% of the maintenance costs for a gas car.

The rate of adoption of electric transportation will be even faster than the 10 year revolution in the industry with hybrid technology. Hybrids were introduced by Toyota with the Prius in 2001 and in thirteen years were generally accepted as the best way to achieve the low emissions goals being set by governments around the world. The adoption rate of EVs as the next step in the electrification of transportation has achieved the same rate of growth in half the time.

Fifth Avenue, New York City, on Easter Sunday, 1900 U.S. Bureau of Public Roads. Photographer unknown. – National Archives and Records Administration, Records of the Bureau

of Public Roads.

Once the full understanding of the value promise of EVs to local daily travel sinks in to the general population, the tipping point will have been reached and predictions are that the adoption of EVs will be as dramatic as the replacement of the horse by the automobile at the turn of the last century. In the picture above, taken on Easter in 1900, of 5th Avenue in NY City, it is a challenge to find the single automobile in a street full of horse drawn carriages [10]. Yes, the EV is there right below the center of the picture on the left. Yet, just thirteen years later, the 1913 picture below shows nearly 100% adoption of automobiles and all but one horse drawn carriage (on the left) have vanished [11].

But, even with this possibly explosive rate of adoption of EVs, the average American car remains on our roads for almost two decades (18 years) through multiple owners. The gas cars we might buy today in 2016 will still be burning gasoline and emitting their toxic brew through 2034. We cannot in good conscience perpetuate these dinosaur burners, and good luck selling one.

Gasoline Hybrids: It is important to understand that, although hybrids that were introduced by the Prius in 2001 have both an electric motor and a battery, they still run 100% on the burning of gasoline. What the hybrid electric motor and battery do is to just fill in when more power is needed and then absorb electricity from the regenerative brakes when there is excess at every stop. This reduction in waste and improvement to over 50 MPG does reduce emissions by half compared to older gas cars, but they are still fossil fuel powered and continue to create bad emissions.

Plugins: to simplify the distinction between hybrids and all the various electric vehicle types such as BEV’s HEVs, PHEV’s and EREV’s, it is important that the only thing that matters for driving on clean renewable energy is whether the car has a plug. If it has a plug, then it can run on external sources of electricity such as from Hydro, Solar or Wind, or any other form of 100% clean renewable electricity and is called a “plugin”.

Although the optimum application of EV’s is for local travel and commuting, there are now electric car solutions for everyone. The lower cost all-electric models commonly referred to as BEV’s (Battery Electric Vehicles), such as the top selling Nissan Leaf, are ideal for daily commuting and local travel and for families that have more than one car and can dedicate the all-electric car for local use. But for the individual with access to only one car, or for the daily road-warrior who may be called on any day for several hundred mile trips, then the plugin-hybrid fully meets that need. The plugin-hybrid not only includes sufficient all-electric daily miles with home overnight charging but also has a backup gas engine for long trips at any time, and anywhere.

The top seller in 2016 in the Plugin Hybrid category is the Chevy Volt. This car has over 50 miles of daily all electric range but at any time needed, the gas engine can take over and drive for hundreds of miles between gas stations. It represents the best transition experience from gas to electric.

MPGe: To make it easy to compare the efficiency of EV’s to fossil fuel cars is the concept of Miles Per Gallon Equivalent or MPGe. To get MPGe, the energy content of electricity is converted to the same energy units of gasoline so they can be compared “apples to apples”. The equivalent MPGe of operating these modern plugin electric vehicles is equivalent to getting 100 to 120 miles per gallon on gas. This is more than double even the best gasoline models (Prius). But the real value to our future is the elimination of emissions.

Dirty Coal: There is a lot of negative press from the status-quo politics that attempts to smear EVs with the dirty brush of coal electricity. They claim that because the grid in some parts of the country is powered by nearly 50% coal, that an EV charged from the grid still has dirty carbon emissions. But this propaganda ignores the number one demographic of people who buy EVs. It is no coincidence that those people who buy EVs are the same people who care about the environment and also buy clean electricity from their utility or put up solar panels.

Clean Energy Buyers: Surveys of EV purchasers clearly show this demographic. A survey in California [12] revealed that about 48% of all EV purchasers used (or will use) 100% clean solar or wind power for charging their EV. A survey by Ford [13] in 2015 showed that 83% of their EV purchasers either bought clean solar or wind electricity, from their own solar system or by signing up from the local utility, or would do so as soon as the utility offered it. It can be shown that even with a grid running on 50% coal, the average of EVs charged in that area still only generates about 8% of the emissions compared to a gas car. Since 50% of EV owners use only clean energy, then only 50% use the coal mix electricity and since an EV only uses about 33% of the energy consumed in a gas car, then, the combined effective “emissions” of an EV is 50% of 50% of 33% which is about 8% compared to a gas car emissions.

Claiming that because the average grid still runs on 50% coal that an EV is dirty is like claiming that because 18% of Americans smoke that therefore I have an 18% chance of dying from lung cancer. This is preposterous, I don’t smoke! Similarly more than half of EVs charge from 100% clean electricity and not coal by choice.

Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles: A lot has been made of the future of the hydrogen economy since the byproduct is simply water! What could be cleaner? Well, there is a reason that some EV owners refer to the hydrogen Fuel-Cell EV (FCEV) as a FOOL cell car. This is because there is no source of natural Hydrogen on Earth. It is always combined with something else such as water or natural gas for example.

Although we can drill for more natural gas (more hydraulic fracking and its host of contaminations), this is not economical nor clean. To separate the hydrogen from natural gas, we first have to burn some of the gas to generate steam from water which then reforms into a mixture of hydrogen, carbon monoxide, and some carbon dioxide. What’s wrong with this picture? 1) Massive contamination of ground water through hydraulic fracking to get the gas, then 2) the consumption of more water to form the steam, then 3) burning of some of the gas to get the heat to make the steam and the result is the hydrogen you want and 4) all the carbon into the air that we are trying to avoid in the first place.

Hydrogen from Water Hydrolysis: Similarly, getting hydrogen from water takes much more energy from some other energy source to separate the hydrogen from the oxygen. Instead of first wasting energy in the conversion to hydrogen, more energy compressing the hydrogen, distributing the hydrogen through a distribution system (that does not exist) to a car tank, where the hydrogen is then inefficiently converted to electricity in a fuel cell back to electricity to drive a motor, we could, much more efficiently, simply drive an EV motor from electricity in the first place.

Hydrogen fuel cell cars made sense to the “tank dependent” way of thinking of energy storage for vehicles maybe 10 years ago before modern batteries made electric vehicles practical. With the cost and weight of batteries having dropped 20-to-1 and the cost of 100% clean solar

electricity having dropped 100-to-one, there is little economic business model for the hydrogen FCEV with its lack of a hydrogen source and lack of a distribution system..

Hydrogen in the far future: Despite the prior paragraphs enumerating the lack of a business model for the FCEV, hydrogen may eventually have a niche market in the long run. In the future, when there is excess renewable wind or solar production and there is low demand, the excess clean power might simply be dumped into water tanks to generate free hydrogen. Then, rather than face the insurmountable problem of how to distribute this hydrogen to 200 million cars through a distribution system that does not exist, the answer instead, is to keep the hydrogen in tanks where it was generated and then burn the hydrogen in turbines to feed that stored energy back to the grid when needed. Another small niche might be in long-haul hydrogen trucking and railroad transportation hubs where distribution can be done more easily in bulk just to the hubs.

Tipping the Scales: One last factor that keeps FCEV cars in the news is the California Air Resources Board (CARB) regulations that, decades ago, assumed hydrogen cars might make sense someday. So hydrogen car makers get bonus points for low emissions just like makers of EVs do. In addition, the rules gave ten times the bonus points to any system that can refuel in the same 5 minutes as a gas car. These bonus points are what allows car manufacturers to still sell large numbers of gas cars in California and, because of the point system, they can sell ten times more gas cars for every one hydrogen car they sell compared to every EV they sell. This is why the manufacturers only make exactly the minimum requirement of FCEV’s to sell in California and no more. No one foresaw a decade or more ago how rapidly the EV would overtake the FCEV concept and beat it in every measure of efficiency, practicality and cost.

Battery Swap Technology: Just as the fantasy of hydrogen cars won’t die, neither does the idea of using battery-swapping stations for EVs [14]. Just like the fast fueling bonus points for hydrogen, EVs were also given the ten-to-one bonus points for 5 minute fast charging. This is why Tesla made their Model S cars able to swap the entire battery pack in the magic 5 minute requirement and demonstrated it with great fanfare. After the demo, they collected the millions of dollars’ worth of bonus points, and we have not seen a single battery swap since, nor will we. If one’s battery represents nearly half of their $120k investment in a Tesla, it is no wonder that the owner is not going to give up their known $50k battery for an unknown battery at some roadside swapping station.

The battery swap concept is simply a hold on to the legacy of gas-tank/gas-station legacy thinking. There, refueling is concerned with speed and maximizing convenience, since refueling at a public gas station must always be done while one is using the car. The concept ignores the true value of the EV which is never having to do public refueling in the first place when simply charged at home overnight or while parked at work. It’s a complete paradigm shift to realize that EV’s are refuled while not in-use (parked). And since the typical commuter or local travel vehicle is parked over 21 hours a day, usually either at home or work, there is ample time to recharge out-of-sight-and-out of mind. Thus, EV’s bring the ultimate in convenience to vehicle

refueling. In fact, local travel and commuting and beginning every day with a full battery is achieved with only a 5 second plug-in at night and a 5 second un-plug in the morning. Once commuters get past the concept of public refueling (a century old legacy of gasoline cars) then, the ten seconds a day at home for an EV for local travel is a hands down winner compared to even the fastest 5 minute public gas or recharging station.

Of course if one wants to travel long distance (interstate travel), there are many options:

1) Public transportation by bus, rail or air2) Have a spare high MPG hybrid gasoline car for distant travel and don’t use it locally3) Plug-in hybrid that runs on clean electricity locally but can still run on gas for distance.4) Have a two car family. Drive EV for local and commuting, take the family car on trips5) Buy a long range EV (240 mile battery) which is overkill for local daily travel

Making a choice of these options is a very individual consideration. It is based on how much your daily commute and local usage is compared to how often you need to go on trips and how far. Also important is your access to another car in the family or how much you are willing to pay to have a huge 250 mile battery which really is only used under 50 miles a day and all the rest of the time 80% of it is being hauled around doing nothing. Not to mention the added cost of

paying 5 times more for a battery that you rarely need on your daily usage.

The Charging Conundrum. The charging conundrum is best described in the figure below.

The EV Charging Triangle

The base of the triangle indicates that the vast majority of EV charging will be done at home. Since the car is usually parked there overnight, there are at least 8 to 10 hours available for charging. In that time, even a standard 120v Level 1 (L1) charge cord can be adequate. The time to charge is inconsequential because you are spending that time sleeping and the charging is the ultimate in convenience. The actual impact is the 5 seconds to plug in when you get home and the 5 seconds to unplug when you leave in the morning.

The next most practical time for EV charging on a daily basis is while at work. Here too, the car is parked several hours a day and if plugged into a standard 12ov outlet (L1 charging) from 20 to 40 miles a day of range can be replenished, again within the same small 10 second convenience. Combined, these two can maintain over 80 miles of daily range from just standard outlets.

The enxt level of the charging pyramid is for daily travel that might be beyond the American average of 40 miles a day pus lots of errands. In this case, one might look to plug in while shopping or visiting other locations. This is the focus of most public charging and can be as much as 14% of the charging pyramid. But in these locations, speed of charging begins to be an issue and so these chargers must be level-2 and usually cost much more. And since each car can fill up by quite different amounts each, then a metering system to count the charge and a billing system has to be included, all of which drive up the costs of this kind of charging. Fortunately, this kind of charging is still occurring while the car is parked so the process remains the typical 10 seconds totoal to plug-in and unplug.

The tiny trip of the triangle which studies have shown will represent less than 0.3% of the totoal charging pyramid, however, is the process that gets all the press. This fast charging along the interstate on long trips is the only process that even comes close to mimicking the gas-tank/gas-station legacy thinking and so people focus on it entirely even though it is the most rarely used. In this sense, it is the ultimate in inconvenience. Where chargin while parked is the other 99% of the charging pyramid and only takes 10 seconds of inconvenience, the fast interstate charging on the road is actually the slowest and most inconvenient. This is because it isbeing done while you wait, just like at the ga pump. But unlike the 5 minutes to fill a gas car, even the fastest fast charging takes 20 minutes or more. Compared to gas, this is a four-times slower process. But compared to all the other EV charging-while-parked (10 seconds at a time) it is over one hundred times slower.

Yet the public (that do not yet understand the true value promise of the EV), this fast charging along the interstate is the only thing they focus on, though it represents less than 1% of the EV charging need. This aspect alone is why the number one thing we need to move forward on the electrification of transportation is simply the education of the consumer. EV’s are for local and daily travel. There are many other alternatives for distant travel.

****************************************************

THE SWITCH TO CLEAN RENEWABLE ENERGY - EXAMPLES

Local Transportation Forever: Nothing can make a better case for our future of clean renewable energy than the perfect marriage of EVs and solar. Just covering a single parking spot with only 12 solar panels can fully charge an EV everyday forever to meet the American average 40 miles a day. And each American car has at least 5 parking spaces somewhere, at home, at work, at church or school, at the mall or at the stadium. Solar panels also keep the car cool, cutting down the AC energy needed when driven.

In years past, we anguished over the billion dollar a day cost and dependence on foreign oil. Now in 2016, with a single investment of about $8000 or the amount we used to spend in 4 years for gasoline, we can now drive everyday forever locally and with zero emissions and without foreign oil dependence using free energy from the sun.

Charging at Work: The subtle paradigm change brought by EVs is that they charge conveniently while the car is parked and not in use. (Gas cars have to be inconveniently refueled somewhere in public while we are using them). And cars typically spend more than 22 hours a day parked either at home or at work. For this reason, the Department of Energy has initiated the Workplace-Charging-Challenge [15] to encourage employers to support EV charging at work. Simply plugging into a standard 120v outlet at home can maintain over 50 miles of daily range, and plugging in also to an outlet at work can maintain nearly 80 miles a day.

A Family Example: My family’s focus on renewable energy began in 2007 when Nissan and GM announced their plan for full size standard production EVs by 2010. Since my senior project at Georgia Tech 37 years earlier in 1970 was to build an EV from an old VW, some batteries and an electric motor, an old flame was re-kindled. I eventually converted 3 salvage Priuses from junkyards at low price to battery EVs. Since the range was short, and I was not allowed to plug in at work to re-charge, I also added solar panels to the roof. Eight hours in the sun would add about 8 miles of free electric miles for the ride home.

Earlier when we bought our house in 1990, I had been interested in solar and the utility was offering time-of-use (TOU) metering that cut the daytime 10 cents per kWh, to only 2 cents at night. With that 5:1 difference, I calculated that I could charge batteries at night for use in the day. I was shocked to find that the cost of battery replacement every 5 years would eat up any cost savings. The subtle lesson was that, even if electricity was almost free (such as solar), that the cost of batteries and maintenance would eat up any benefit.

Still, solar kept getting cheaper. My epiphany came on the 2nd Saturday in August 2010, when I realized that this modern revolution in home solar had nothing to do with batteries! Modern solar was grid-tie, meaning excess daily solar generation is stored in the grid by pushing the electric meter backwards and when we need power back at night the meter goes forward. This revelation immediately upended my preconceived notion of home solar. Although our roof was surrounded by trees, we had a clear area at the back of our lot and by spring of 2013 we were finally on line with an 8 kW array providing all of our annual electric needs and saving over $1400 a year with nearly zero electric bills [16].

But, our biggest carbon footprint was not the coal fired electricity but the typical 1000 gallons a year of heating oil which had risen to a cost of $3500 a year at $3.50 per gallon. Burning oil just for heat seemed unforgivable. So we switched to a geothermal (ground source) heatpump and by the fall of 2014 the ground-source heatpump system was installed and the nearly 80 year old black sooty, dirty, stinky, leaky, greasy oil boiler was gone!

Because the heatpump is very efficient, generating almost 2 to 3 times the heat from the same amount of energy, it eliminated the $3500 annual home heating oil costs and only added about $1500 to our electric bill. We met this by doubling our solar array to a new total of 16KW.

After that, our worse electric bill (our total energy costs except gasoline) was $30 in February with all the other months being only the $8 minimum utility account fee.

The above plot shows the decline of our fossil fuel consumption from almost 3000 gallons a year (gasoline, coal equivalent and oil) down to about 300 gallons a year by 2015 by switching to the Prius vehicles, the geothermal heatpump, and the solar panels for an overall 90% reduction in carbon emissions. By 2015, I found a low cost EV to replace one of the Priuses which further dropped our gasoline use to only a few hundred gallons a year for the other Prius and trips.

This reduction in fossil fuels and emissions also reduced our total $6000 a year cost of electricity, heating oil and gasoline down to the typical minimum $8 a month electric bill and the $700 or so per year of remaining gasoline for the other Prius.

Of course, nearly free energy for life from solar requires a substantial initial investment. The way to compare that investment to monthly utility costs is to amortize the investment over the next 20 years. In our case, this gave a comparable average retail equivalent of about 5 cent electricity per kWh, nearly one third of what we would be paying per month if we had done nothing. Most importantly this 5 cents should not only be compared to today’s Maryland 14 cent rate but to the estimated 27 cents per kWh anticipated growth over the same 20 years at an assumed 5% annual rate increase.

Death, Taxes and Utilities: Although nothing is certain in life, utilities usually are. But if you have sun on your property, and you save for your future, you are better off in the long run to invest in your own home energy system and higher efficiencies now for enormous savings later. This will give you the instant 30% federal income tax credit (through 2019) plus other state and

local incentives (depending on location) and eliminate the constant monthly drain on your income being paid month by month for fossil fuel energy for the rest of your life.

As an example, suppose you have $12,000 savings in the bank at the current 1% interest rate. But you also have a $80/month electric bill ($1000/yr). After 10 years your $12,000 will have made $1200 simple interest, but you will have spent $10,000 in utilities. Your savings have been reduced to only $3200. In another 3 years, you will have nothing in equity, your savings are all gone, and you will still owe $1000 a year for the rest of your life for utilities.

On the other hand, if you take out that $12,000 and add $5100 to invest $17,100 in a solar system, you will get back the $5100 at tax time due to the 30% federal tax credit for a net $12,000 out of pocket. This investment from savings has not been spent, but simply converted into $17,100 worth of equity in your own solar energy system for life. You own it. Further, in some states you might get $1000 worth of Solar Renewable Energy Credits (SRECs) per year and your $1000 worth of electricity per year is free. So, at the end of the same 17 years, your original $12,000 investment bought you $17,100 in equity, and saved $13,100 in energy cost for a net gain in value of to over $30,200 and financial security of no electric bills for the rest of your life.

It is true, that by 25 years, the solar panels will have aged and have lost about 20% of their initial power, but surely in that time our energy appliances will be 20% more efficient so that you still get all the energy you need for life. On the other hand, if your lifestyle grows, the cost of solar 25 years from now at today’s growth rates to replace that lost 20% will be insignificant.

Comparing the one case of doing nothing and having your savings vanish while still facing a lifetime of monthly utility bills forever, to the case of investing in solar for a net gain in equity of your savings to over $30,200 in value and no electric bills for life, the path should be clear. Of course this is only an example, and the details of incentives and financial considerations vary, so be sure to investigate these terms in your own local area with professionals.

Annapolis Friends Meeting – Example [17]. Our small meeting was spending about $1500 a year on electricity and as much as $4000 a year on propane. Starting in 2011 we began to explore solar and by January, 2014 a Solar Leasing company installed a leased 9 kW system (shown below) that we fully prepaid up front for a one-time $20k payment instead of monthly payments for the next 20 years. The amortized cost per kWh turns out to be about 6 cents per kWh compared to the current 14 cents per kWh in 2015 and the expected 27 cents per kWh after 20 years. This is a huge savings in our Meeting’s operating budget. We chose the lease, because non-profits cannot get any of the many tax incentives. But through a lease, the solar leasing company got to take all the tax credits and pass the savings on to us. The comparable purchase price of $53k only cost us the initial $20k prepaid lease and our net monthly electric bills went to the minimum for an account ($8/mo).

Photo by Author

In 2014 propane had nearly doubled to $4 a gallon, so we replaced that fossil fuel system with a heatpump and our total heating cost dropped from $4000 for propane down to about $1200 a year in the form of added electricity. The Meeting then approved the purchase of additional solar panels to offset that new energy to bring us back to 100% clean renewable solar for our meeting house.

We had planned to go geothermal because of its efficiency, but then realized that we have no day school nor any permanent office staff and the meeting house is unoccupied overnight and most daytime hours and most usage is at night. Thus, the primary benefit of a geothermal HVAC system to pump heat from the ground’s 45°F temperature instead of outside 20°F temperatures was of little value to us, since the thermostat was set back overnight and daytime anyway. Most of our heating (except First day) is in the afternoon in preparation for evening meetings. Since the climate of Annapolis has an average outdoor temperature of at least 40°F in the afternoons, even in January and February, an air-source heatpump was nearly as efficient as a geothermal system for us but at half the initial cost. The result of switching from propane to electric (to be supplied by solar) not only eliminated our use of fossil fuel and greenhouse gas emissions, but also saved us about $2500 a year in energy costs.

**** NEW ADDITIONS TO ALIGN WITH THE QIF BOOK SERIES:

A Chronology of Quaker Energy and Choices - Transition

This book is the Nth in a series published by the Quaker Institute for the Future (QIF) with a goal of Advancing a global future of inclusion, social justice, and ecological integrity through participatory research and discernment. It comes at a time of transition after almost a decade since the first book, Fueling our Future: A Dialogue about Technology, Ethics, Public Policy, and Remedial Action [QIF 1]. The book represents the state of Climate Change concerns at the end of 2008. Although it was a time of growing concern for climate change but also the challenges of the concomitant lack of momentum and entrenched denial of some and, it was coincidently in hind sight, also near the depth of the worst recession in decades. At the time, “Fueling the Future” stated:

“Climate change and energy futures are splitting the environmental movement. Some environmentalists now defend nuclear power from an ethical point of view. Others are appalled. Opinions differ over whether solar, wind, and other non-carbon energy technologies can keep the lights on. Some hold out hope for “clean coal” and deep earth storage of captured carbon. Others say this is economically unfeasible and dangerous. A rush to bio-fuels is touted as “green energy.” Others see it as sacrificing food for fuel. Our energy future is stacked with technical options and policy dilemmas, but above all with ethical choices. In Fueling our Future, Quakers expert in both the technical and ethical issues, provide key information, critical analysis and thoughtful dialogue on choices for our energy future. Fueling our Future will assist concerned citizens in their evaluation of public policy and personal choices.”

Fortunately, the next eight years saw progressive (although tepid) economic growth and now, nearly a decade later, while still facing the emergency of oncoming climate change, there has been some notable changes in the future of energy. Since 2008 the burning of coal has declined over 20% and new investment in coal is virtually non existent, though unfortunately somewhat due to the rise in natural gas due to fracking. Another area in “Fueling our Future” [page 34] was the significant discussion of the conflicting attitudes towards Nuclear energy without clear unity for its future. But since then, the world changing event of the 2013 Earthquake and Tsunami in Japan resulting in the Fukashima nuclear disaster has had a significant impact on the attitudes towards the future of the nuclear industry causing some countries (Germany)[ref] to about-face and begin the dismantling of their nuclear plants.

Now we have good news with the rise of solar and wind that are growing exponentially. But, in 2008 the death of the first modern Electric Vehicle, the EV1, (Who killed the electric car?)[ref] was fresh in mind and there was nothing much on the horizon to give hope as an alternative to fossil fuels for transportation[page 47]. Now, not even a decade later in 2017 over 30 new EV models are on the market and every major manufacturer is committing to the future of EV’s as the most cost effective technology to wean ourselves from gasoline.

[Of course as I write this summary of progress over the years from 2008 to 2016 and the flourishing of solar and electrification of transportation between the QIF series of books from number 1 to number 10, I am also very mindful of the upheaval and political change that has roiled this country with the election of 2016 and we will not know the outcome for years to come.]

This technology-to-the-rescue excitement with solar, wind and EV’s, however, is somewhat in contrast to a thread through these books that begun in “Fueling the Future” [page 11] that “A purely technocratic approach is inadequate within the context of discernment as practiced by Friends.” And further on [page 17]:

“Some folks think that getting the technology right will enable the species, or at least the wealthy part of it, to keep going on the current energy flight indefinitely. This modernist high-tech vision is that technology of all sorts, including expanded nuclear power, carbon capture and storage coal, wind, solar, and biofuels of all sorts will allow us to maintain our present rate of growth in both population and energy use. This vision assumes that fusion power, and other yet-to-be-discovered energy technologies will eventually allow even further growth. “

This feeling of the inadequacy of dependency on technological solutions was carried through somewhat to the 10th book “Rising to the Challenge, The Transition Movement and People of Faith”[xx] Although the book clearly does not focus on any one approach other than simply getting people together to move forward in faith and activism in whatever way their locaql community and nature lead, some individuals may read this as a gravitation towards islands of resilience, re-localized economies and energy descent, somewhat eschewing technology and a return to nature through permaculture and simpler more engaged lifestyles. But this is more of a clarification to what is important in life and learning alternative ways to live with less dependence on fossil fuels. The back to nature concepts are balanced with an equally strong argument towards bringing these relearned skills “back to town” and sharing their benefits where others congregate in higher density for equally valid economies of scale. Ruah observes the three approaches to the pending doom of climate change.[page16] First, the fatalistic group that see the doom as inevitable, second the group that sees technology as the answer (but with it, a lack of concern and disinterest in action) and third, the group that see a more peaceful and equitable transition to the future.

Our present writing falls somewhat between the 2nd and third group. That is, that the exponential growth of solar, wind, efficient LED lighting and the transition to electrification of transportation in the last decade has exceeded all expectations. If we can only maintain the trend, we can make the transition to resilient communities without the slaughtering upheaval that would result from the chaos envisioned by the first group, the unrealistic deferral (blind eye) of the second group

and without the hard and painful return to an agrarian and diminished energy future promoted by some in the third group.

*** The following 5 paragraphs are just splattered here as a place holder.

The agrarian lifestyle of our farms are not as energy independent as we might think. Ever since man discovered fire, the growth of the human condition beyond hunter gatherers was simply our discovery of the means to harness external energy (beyond what we biologicaslly eat) to multiply our ability to live and thrive. Now we are finding that this is unsustainable.

http://fatknowledge.blogspot.com/2005/05/horses-vs-cars.html

Some have even compared the relative energy sustainability of a horse to that of a Prius and the horse comes in about double the energy efficiency. This comparison uses the energy equivalency of horse grazing food per acre to a gasoline equivalence based on potential biofuel growth per acre. Not a bad approach, but it ignores where we are today, that only a single parking space of solar panels can power an electric car over 40 miles a day forever. Or put into the same acre comparison, instead of powering one horse for a year, or one prius for a year via grown biofuel, now, the same one acre of solar panels could power 100 cars virtually forever even at our current outlandish use of cars.

The point of these paragraphs is to somewhat enlighten some of legacy thinking that tends to visualize our past as a pastoral heaven of clean living and a subconscious aversion to technology when in fact, the simplicity of solar panels to provide energy to live trumps all previous lifestyles by orders of magnitude. The sun has indirectly fueled our emergence as a species over tens of thousands of years, but only via consumable and limited resources stored up for us on this planet over millions of years. Now finally realizing that this is impossible to sustain this simple turn towards the direct conversion of sunlight into energy gives us a hope for the futue… blah blah….

Still in “Rising to the Challenge”, the reference to solar energy retains a hint to the concept of living “off the grid” [page 25] through resilience and energy independence in smaller interdependent communities. Today, however, we now understand the explosive growth of solar is not in off-grid systems (that are dependent on yet unrealized energy storage batteries) but in the progressive adoption begun over the last decade of net-metering policies that allowed grid-connected personal solar systems to become economical and to bring the cost of solar electricity now down below the cost of even coal. In other words, not a withdrawal from the grid to

isolated self-sufficient smaller communities but a coming together in a web of distributed power of mutual support and benefit of our larger community.

Now as the huge economic benefits of grid-tie-solar are realized for the homeowner with good sun on their roofs, we are just beginning to see the birth of community solar concepts that bring solar to everyone in any community independent of their roof, or shade, or housing mobility. This growth of community solar is an excellent springboard to the practical and valuable tenets of the Transition Movement detailed in “Rising to the Challenge”.

The Transition Movement:

Ruah Swennerfelt explored the exciting growth of the Transition Movement in her QIF book “Rising to the Challenge – The Transition Movement and People of Faith”. The courage, faith, and commitment of this movement shows inspiration as they form groups for learning, training and action. With our summary of the state of solar, wind and electric vehicles in this book we hope to contribute ideas to these groups in their transition. With grid-tied solar now cheaper than the utility, they no longer have to strive for isolation and off-grid approach to energy but can instead consider solar as an all inclusive energy source that brings us together in a mutual beneficial web of energy[ref]. Instead of seeing the historically fossil fueled grid as the enemy, we can now see our participation in a cleaning grid through wind and our own solar contributions as this new energy-web.

Similarly, instead of being forced to draw together in smaller compact resilient communities growing our own food and minimizing transportation burning of fossil fuel for food distribution and to get around, we now know that just the solar panels over a single parking space can provide daily electric charging of an EV to a dialy national average range of 40 miles a day. With this clean transportation we do not have to abandon as much of the large scale farming that can be done more efficiently on a large scale and still brought to market and exchanged without the need for fossil fuel transportation. And deep within our cities, many can happily give up their love affair with the automobile and its growing hassles of city congestion in exchange for better, more efficient public transportation and even electric bicycles, all charged from the sun.

The one thing the Transition movement has is energy and people and a keen interest in moving forward on community resilience and sustainability. These are activists seeking everything they can do to contribute to the peaceful, equitable and environmentally friendly future. Fortunately, this potential revolution that solar and EV’s bring to our renewable future is dependent on public education and an awakening that the solution of clean energy and clean transportation is actually here now and available to anyone.

The Charging Sign Initiative: One initiative that the Transition movement might consider is simply enhancing the visibility of the ubiquity of electricity and the grid. It is everywhere.

Although everyone new to EV’s has heard only of the need for public charging infrastructure before EV’s can become a reality, nothing is further from the truth. The significant portion of the value-promise of EV’s is the convenience of EV charging at home or at work while parked and never having to go anywhere public and have to “wait” for a charge. Since every home and garage and most parking lots already have electricity and all have the same standard 120 volt convenient outlet, we need to educate the public that in 97% of all daily charging needs [MDEVIC report 2012], simply plugging into a standard 120v outlet is all that is needed.

In 2010, Annapolis Friends meeting put up simple EV CHARGING signs over two of our existing outlets on light poles in the parking lots and this has been a small beacon of hope and visibility to the green leadings of our community. Now, in 2016 already we have 6% or our meeting either driving EV’s or considering one on their next car transition. The success of this simple “put up a sign” action inspired our establishment of a local initiative that now involved almost 20 other churches, schools, or businesses that had existing outlets and now have signs. [http://aprs.org/EV-charging-signs.html].

We even demonstrated the solution to simple charging for those without driveways that have to park in the street. Just bending a piece of conduit to reach out over the sidewalk can bring an EV charging cord to a car parked in the street without causing a trip hazard on the sidewalk as shown in figure X. In that photo you can also see our Meeting House’s 9 kW grid-tied solar array that provides all of our electric needs over the year (as well as clean energy for EV charging).

OTHER PARALLELS to Climate Change Activism:

Charles Blanchard of QIF suggests this work as a possible…

“…follow-up to QIF's first Focus Book (Fueling our Future) [now added in the previous chapter]. In a possibly similar trajectory of publications, QIF's ninth book (Toward a Right Relationship with Finance: Debt, Interest, Growth, and Security) delves into personal choices in investment decisions and the historical context in which we are now making those choices; it is something of a follow-up to QIF's fifth and sixth more general books on economic issues of interest to Quakers.” [Still needs to be done]…

Charles continues: “Bob, this sounds like the beginning of a very interesting dialogue. I am personally interested in the role of technology change in addressing necessary GHG emission reductions. In managing other air pollutants, such as fine particles, CO, SO2, and NOx, technology change has yielded reductions of 70 - 95% relative to 1970s emission rates.”

These reductions have been more than sufficient to bring about dramatic improvements in air quality, despite substantial increases in population, number of vehicle miles per year, and GDP between 1980 and the present. Precedent therefore exists for reducing air pollutant emissions with emissions controls, fuel efficiency, and fuel switching. I do not think many people are aware of the air pollution control

success stories that should provide examples and inspiration. What seems to me to confuse the discussion about GHG emission control is the (in my view) correct perception that anthropogenic-induced climate change is one of many indicators of human over-exploitation of planetary resources - overfishing, overlogging, over-conversion of natural ecosystems to human-dominated systems. The conclusion that lifestyle changes are needed is likely correct in the larger context of the human relationship to the planet, even if it is incorrect in regard to managing GHG emissions. This point seems important to me, in that the need to reduce GHG emissions is immediate, and solutions are immediately available for rapidly addressing this problem - that should be a hopeful message to people who are pessimistic about the future. The larger questions about growth, and limits to growth, will remain, and will no doubt be very difficult to address. But we don't have to solve the problem of unlimited growth to reduce GHG emissions to appropriate levels.”

[… more to flesh this out…]

This conclusion below was the old one and now needs to be re-written in light of all the QIF material being added.

Conclusion: I hope I have been able to give enough background on this fascinating birth of clean renewable energy-in-our-time to point seekers toward the right questions in their search for integrity in our use of energy and stewardship of our resources. I am but an engineer and can only speak to the practicalities of energy details and will leave the elocution of the spirit and mindful benefits to other Friends who have well covered these topics before me. Our Baltimore Yearly Meeting “Faith and Practice” speaks to our faith and the Life of the spirit and using our God given talents. Key topics relative to clean energy independence are social and civic responsibility and peace and non-violence. Other topics relative to our interest in this book are the financial decisions, thriftiness, and care of humankind and the Environment.

Pendle Hill publishes a number of pamphlets on a variety of topics [18]. For example, S.F. Nicholson’s discussion of economics, “Quaker Money” #290, speaks of Quaker’s industriousness and thriftiness leading to inner security with less dependence on money but directing our investments in honest and inherent worth, not capitalist speculation; or J. Brown’s growth from environmental activism to spiritual balance in her pamphlet #336 (and her garden) “God’s Spirit in Nature”.

In this Energy Choices pamphlet I have avoided the topic of nuclear energy. Although J. Tallmadge writes in his pamphlet #300, “Therefore Choose Life - The Spiritual Challenge of the Nuclear Age” about the spiritual aspects of living in a world with the threat of total annihilation, he does not dwell on the peaceful use of nuclear energy. My personal concerns are the balance between the need for clean air energy on the one hand and a future clean of harmful nuclear byproducts as well. I have visited both Nagasaki and Hiroshima and been grieved by the story of annihilation and human tragedy but am also perplexed by the modern city that has grown up right on top of ground zero with rebuilding begun only days after the conflagration. I cannot forget the perplexity of seeing a small tombstone size marker on a side street, next to a sidewalk

soda machine which marks ground zero. Do we yet know the true human cost of the following generations of an entire city built on ground zero considering our strong fear of the effects of long term radioactive contamination? It has only been 70 years ago. Addressing this controversial topic is beyond the scope of this book and I leave the topic to others.

[The first QIF book had a section on nuclear and disunity beginning on p13. Covered in detail on page 34. But I tend to not be interested in this topic for this book. Nuclear is NOTHING that we as indivuals can do, and so it is of no interest to this book. Although it could be possible to add some new info about the Thorium cycle which is being considered as a cleaner form of local community nuclear power]

[But to at least address Nuclear, I have asked my wife (An Astrophysist at the Naval Acaemy and lifelong Quaker) to write a few paragraphs not on nuclear power as we humans interpret it, but on the scale of the formation of the univerwse and out planet. The Sun is nothing more than the extreme nuclear fusion of Hydorgen and Helium and it is this Nuclear power that is radiated to us as sunlight which we should welcome. It is alos interesting to see how the hydrogen and helium fusion play out in the death and rebirth of stars as they cycle through higher and higher energy states and produce higher and higher elements to give us all the rest of the material that forms our earth. ALthogh these processes take billions of years, they are a part of what we are and this does give a universal perspective on our inconsequential place in the universe and how delicately balanced everything in the universe had to be to get uw where we are today. This should open our eyes as to have careful we should be then, in our stewardship of Earth.]

In another pamphlet #403, J.M. Ratcliffe writes of her thoughts on “Integrity, Ecology and Community”. She explores our predicament as a spiritual crisis where the “scope… and impact of our technological and globalized economies… have created a dangerous gap in… our ability to understand or feel responsible for the consequences.” She cautions against the tendency to fight against the perpetrators of environmental abuse resulting in hostility, polarization, and entrenchment and less in understanding, transformation, and progress. She speaks to rediscovered traditions and hints at new experiments in our “backyards” (such as our green meeting house and solar panels) and she addresses simplicity not in terms of giving up things but in lessening the excessive business, frenzy and complexity of our lives leading to a richness and serenity of life lived in integrity. This speaks to our goals of security and peace through clean renewable energy with less dependence on exploitation of the Earth.

T. Head’s “Envisioning a Moral Economy” #405 asks “how ought the human economy function as part of Earth’s life system?” Economics is based on consumption and exploitation which supports a system of domination. He describes the 18th century’s Quaker John Woolman’s writings on a moral economy where “good work… nourishes the soul, expresses the spirit and fulfills our lives,” while also “pleading for balance in economic affairs.” He says “most wars have underlying economic causes, often about access to resources.” He concludes with the concept of enough. “How does it speak to the need of every human being to have enough?”

How much more peaceful will the world today be if we eliminate our dependence on foreign oil and natural gas fracking through energy self-sufficiency powered only by the sun and wind.

********************************************About the Author

My career in electronics, communications and space plus a 20 year career in the Navy, began in 1955 with the building of little telegraphs from images in the encyclopedia in 2nd grade. By 4th grade all kids within three blocks were networked. And by middle school (1957) the space race was on. By high school we had ham licenses and could communicate great distances using WWII surplus radios. To power these toys during scout camping we rewound an old car generator to produce 110 volts from a discarded lawnmower motor.

This early interest in energy evolved to my senior project at Georgia Tech in 1970 to electrify an old VW to participate in the first MIT/CalTech Cross-country Clean Air Car Race. Though the car made it to the Mississippi, I was shipped across country to Navy graduate school in Monterey, CA. During these years, Amateur Radio was exploring the use of VHF radios for local two-way communications. At my first duty station in Pearl Harbor, I configured a suitcase sized radio in the trunk of my car and using an old telephone dial to make phone calls through the Ham radio repeater on Diamond Head in 1971.

During this time the University of Hawaii had experimented with similar radios to interconnect remote teletypes from the other islands to access the central computer on Oahu. This shared use of a data channel was called the Aloha protocol and can be considered the beginnings of what is now the internet. By 1975 and while stationed in the Washington DC area, our local radio club developed similar teletype links to one of the first microcomputers (a 6800) in my basement. We spun off teletype support into one of the first dial-up TTY networks for the deaf. For faster speed, our local club (AMRAD) developed the AX.25 protocol for data over radio and the FCC made it legal in 1978 and it is viable to this day.

During a sea tour in Japan I began to experiment with this data channel for plotting the location of ships and by the mid 80’s had developed a protocol to facilitate Ham radio support of emergency communications. By 1992, I combined the position info with the traffic data and called it the Automatic Packet Reporting System (APRS) to match my callsign, WB4APR. Since that time, APRS has grown worldwide with many tens of thousands of users and is accessible to anyone on http://aprs.fi.

By 2001 at the Naval Academy and married to a lovely astrophysicist (so I could get access to her observatory roof for my antennas) I mentored our first student satellite to carry this protocol into space. This was followed by ten other such spacecraft and experiments paralleling the 2007 time frame when I had my energy epiphany and began my remaining lifelong leading to change the world to renewable energy as described in these chapters.

Appendix A:

Preface and Quaker Institute for the Future (QIF) heritage:

The Religious Society of Friends has long carried an active concern for the application of scholarly and scientific knowledge to the great work of human betterment.

Kenneth Boulding, Quaker economist and pioneer scholar in the field of systems analysis was one of the first social scientists to fully recognize Earth’s ecological context as the primary reference for all policy and action on the human future and human betterment.

In the last decade of his life Kenneth Boulding convened a project he called, “Quaker Studies on Human Betterment” in which he and fellow scholars made presentations and held discussions on various themes of social, economic, and ecological concern. The idea for Quaker Institute for the Future grew directly from this project.

QIF developed from a June 2003 gathering of Quaker economists, ecologists and public policy professionals at Pendle Hill, Wallingford PA. In preparing for this gathering, Tom Head (George Fox University), offered the following guidance:

Our task…is not to find . . . just the right economic model, nor is it to force a large problem into a small model, but, instead, ….to open ourselves to some of the very largest questions facing humankind and to help each other towards ways of understanding . . . . how to faithfully and humbly respond to the enormity of what is before us.

A “Prospectus for a Quaker Think Tank” was circulated at the 2003 gathering. A working group was convened out the gathering and met again at Bar Harbor, ME in August where a “Charter” document was approved.

QIF thus established its approach to research and the development of knowledge within the context of Friends’ “experiments with truth,” Quaker testimonies, and collaborative discernment.

In our modern age, research functions as a basic foundation of the social order. We believe Friends are called to generate knowledge, wisdom and systematic insight that informs public policy for the common good. We believe this kind of work will enable us to live more fully in “the virtue of the life and power” that treats all humans and the whole Earth as a manifestation of the Divine.

Within this heritage, QIF seeks to realize the evolutionary potential of Quaker testimonies.

This approach to research aims to support the Quaker community in its application of Friends testimonies to the critical issues of human betterment and an Earth restored. In particular, the Institute seeks to support the frontline work of American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Canadian Friends Service Committee, Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL), Quaker International Affairs Programme (Canada), as well as other Quaker organizations.

Quaker Institute for the Future is incorporated in the state of California as a non-profit, 501[c]3, scientific and educational organization. QIF’s by-laws were approved at the first meeting of the Board of Trustees in August 2004.

Charles Blanchard, QIF526 Cornell AveAlbany, CA 94706

REFERENCES:

[1] Prepared mind: Calvin W. Schwabe, Pamphlet #343 "Quakerism and Science", P26[2] Most travel is local: http://www.solarjourneyusa.com/EVdistanceAnalysis.php[3] EV Info Sheet: http://evadc.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/EVInfoSheet-20160118.pdf[3.5] Electrify everything: http://www.vox.com/2016/9/19/12938086/electrify-everything[4] Electricity peak: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC?locations=US[5] Solar and Coal: https://www.eia.gov/forecasts/steo/report/coal.cfm[6] Trees per kWh: http://newenglandcleanenergy.com/energymiser/2015/09/24/tree-math-2-solar-vs-trees-whats-the-carbon-trade-off/[7] Trees per person: http://www.sciencefocus.com/qa/how-many-trees-are-needed-provide-enough-oxygen-one-person:http://www.seia.org/news/us-solar-market-set-grow-119-2016-installations-reach-16-gw[8] EV sales: http://www.electricauto.org/?page=evhistory [9] EV Misinformation: http://aprs.org/EV-misinformation.html[10] NY City auto disruption: http://mountaintownnews.net/2015/08/20/tony-sebas-startling-view-of-market-disruptions/[11] No Horses: http://mountaintownnews.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/5th-ave.jpg

[12] Buying clean energy for EVs: https://cleanvehiclerebate.org/eng/vehicle-owner-survey/feb-2014-survey

[13] Ford Study: http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1099531_electric-car-drivers-tell-ford-well-never-go-back-to-gasoline

[14] A Better Place Bankruptcy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place

[15] DOE Workplace Charging Challenge: http://energy.gov/eere/vehicles/ev-everywhere-workplace-charging-challenge

[16] My Solar Experience: http://aprs.org/my-solar.html

[17] Annapolis Friends Meeting Environmental page: http://aprs.org/AFM/environment.html

[18] Pendle Hill Pamphlets: https://pendlehill.org/product-category/pamphlets/

[QIF 1] Fueling our Future: A Dialogue about Technology, Ethics, Public Policy, and Remedial Action

Prepared by: Earthcare Working Group of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and Quaker Institute for the Future, Ed Dreby & Keith Helmuth, Coordinators; Judy Lumb, Editor March 2009 ($12)

[QIF 10] Rising to the Challenge: The Transition Movement and People of Faith

Prepared by: Ruah Swennerfelt; Foreword by Rob Hopkins2016 ($15)

And lots more new references…