Clean Energy & Efficiency

One Hundred and Forty Dollars

It must be a bubble.

EvotingMachine0197 wrote:

One Hundred and Forty Dollars

It must be a bubble.

Quote :

The surge came despite promises from Saudi Arabia over the weekend to boost output by 200,000 barrels a day next month – a move that was widely hoped to have reduced some of recent upward pressure on oil prices.

Analysts blamed the latest hike on the drop in the value of the dollar against the euro, making oil less expensive to investors dealing in other currencies.

A dangerous commodity whose value is left to the mercy of multi-billionaire gamblers... The price should be frozen between the US and Europe.

Economists are saying that there should be a payment for each purchase of commodities futures - at the moment it is free - to deter speculative booms and busts.

Looks like the Iranians were right to stop trading their oil in dollars.

molly bloom aka cactus f wrote:

Economists are saying that there should be a payment for each purchase of commodities futures - at the moment it is free - to deter speculative booms and busts.

I've heard about that, and it does seem to be a good idea. It is equivalent to making banks increase their primary liquidity and secondary liquidity ratios in order to slow bank lending. Bring it on, I say, global markets are over-inflated with bubbly paper floating about. We need to inject some cash and reality into this so as to bring prices back to reality.

Forgive my ignorance but a payment to whom, who sets the
rate, would it be different in each country?

Don't get me wrong I think the idea may help to reduce volatility and is definitely
worth consideration.

Leave the markets alone. Why is it any business of the government what the price of oil is anyway.
It seems that the oil in Dakota is difficult to extract with the present technology. From what I can grasp it is not the depth but the type of stone covering the field.

If you want insanity regarding energy consumption and CO2
omissions look no closer than Britain. I have an interest in renovating some
buildings there. Enter the twilight zone, we have to do cost benefit analysis
to show why improving the U Value (level of insulation) is not economically
practical. I thought being a listed build would suffice, but no, we have to
show that the cost of doing the work outweighs the cost of the additional
energy needed. Now any sane person would know that this is an exercise in
pulling figures out of air and is only as good as your assumptions on future energy
costs. Yes I could easily batten out and cover the stone walls or take down all
the internal ornamental plasterwork to insulate, but think the historical lot
would do a wobblier. We even have solar
panels hidden away on the roof to try to placate. Whatever happened to common
sense. When asked for nonsense I oblige so nonsense they get pages and pages of it.

Generally what you need to do is calculate the CO2 omissions
of new buildings to see if you are allowed to build. But as anyone with one
brain cell would realise that this is a bit fraught with difficulty because the
energy consumed depends as much on shape and the amount of external wall as it
does thermal efficiency of each part of construction. What I can’t comprehend
is why not save everyone a lot of time and set high levels of thermal
efficiency for each element of construction and insist on efficient boilers,
heat pumps and solar panels. If you put in a heat pump the calculation passes anyway
so why bother calculating?

I could go on but with this and HIPS (home information
packs) they have set up a whole industry that monitors, collects pointless
information, is costly and does not in itself produce one bit of improvement. The
cost of that is additional.

Someone in Britain may eventually realise that the internal
and external temperature in winter generally is not that great and the cost of
ever increasing insulation becomes a law of diminishing returns. Energy
production is definitely now the way to go there and high time someone had the standing to tell the tree huggers to look at what they are producing, stop creating pointless jobs and that the money would be better spent on care for the elderly.

Thats what you get when the voters want a communist system. A touch of starvation and mass deaths from rioting is what they need

youngdan wrote:

Thats what you get when the voters want a communist system. A touch of starvation and mass deaths from rioting is what they need

But they would be able to rejoice in the knowledge of how many tons of CO2 they may be producing if they could afford the heating oil.

EvotingMachine0197 wrote:

One Hundred and Forty Dollars

It must be a bubble.

we will see... after the Olympics when the Chinese will probably be forced to stop stockpiling/subsidising owing to the cost. When are the Olympics over??

I'm amazed that anyone is naive enough to think oil 2 miles underground is likely to bring the price back to $1 per gallon.

Good luck, people!

expat girl wrote:

EvotingMachine0197 wrote:

One Hundred and Forty Dollars

It must be a bubble.

we will see... after the Olympics when the Chinese will probably be forced to stop stockpiling/subsidising owing to the cost. When are the Olympics over??

I'm amazed that anyone is naive enough to think oil 2 miles underground is likely to bring the price back to $1 per gallon.

Good luck, people!

Yes, we might agree that the price of oil and not the HIPS pack is the thing most likely to result in improvements to the energy efficiency of buildings. Current oil prices make almost all of the conventional renewables better value, and basic insulation is a no brainer. The quickest and cheapest way of assessing a building is checking how much fuel is required to run it on a typical cold day.

With warmer summers, I hear that air conditioning is the next big energy demand problem in south east England.

I was paying 1 dollar a gallon till recently and I am going out to Dakota and suck it out myself.
I was reading where a gas station was charging 2 pound a litre in England. That man is a hero and I will share my nobel peace prize with him. He was saying that people were buying hundreds of pounds of juice so he upped the price. The result is he has fuel while the other stations are bone dry. He has prevented a shortage of fuel. If price controls were brought in by the government then all the stations would be empty.

As the best (most cost effective) insulation is wool jumpers and string vests perhaps we should reappraise investment opportunities?
There is nothing like a cold stone floor on a January morning to get you moving. Who needs central heating?

The ESB is going to increase the cost of electricity in the Autumn, it is thought from the media today. 30% according to the Indo. http://www.independent.ie/national-news/consumers-face-record-30pc-hike--in-esb-bills-1413466.html

The Examiner was also talking about it recently and the thoughts going around now are about 'fuel poverty' where more than 10% of your income is spent on fuel then you're in fuel poverty. The average electricity bill per year could go up to €1100.

The Green Party were going to introduce a Smart meter - what happened that ? Microgeneration of electricity might work well but that Smart Meter has to get installed first. On days like we are having recently then a good whack of solar panels suddenly appearing around the country rolled out on people's lawns and plugged into the Smart meter could make a significant difference to everything from household bill to CO2 emissions to trade balance where less coal and oil and gas would be burned in our stations on those sparkling days we're having.

Maybe people would even invest in permanent solar on their roofs and give some final work to the diminishing stock of Poles...

A smart meter sounds like a great man. When I was working on the buildings in Dublin way back I was staying in a flat in Baille Phib as the bus used to say. You had to feed the meter with 2 bob pieces. However if you reversed the wires the meter would run backwards. This chore was best done sober and wearing rubber gloves and boots and an insulated pliers. These were the days when they were saying there was an ice age coming and like a fool I believed them so I used to leave the cooker on all night. Now that is what I would call a smart meter.

Petrol 132.9 per litre today in Portmarnock.

1 US gallon = 3.78541178 liters

1 Euro = 1.548 USD (Thanks Audi)

So $7.77 per US gallon.

youngdan wrote:

A smart meter sounds like a great man. When I was working on the buildings in Dublin way back I was staying in a flat in Baille Phib as the bus used to say. You had to feed the meter with 2 bob pieces. However if you reversed the wires the meter would run backwards. This chore was best done sober and wearing rubber gloves and boots and an insulated pliers. These were the days when they were saying there was an ice age coming and like a fool I believed them so I used to leave the cooker on all night. Now that is what I would call a smart meter.

The UK meters I hear used to be fixable by simple insertion of a pin, that could be quickly removed when the meter reader called.
With prices the way they are, I guess there will be many more smart meters of this type, and many more cases of hypothermia, come winter.

EvotingMachine0197 wrote:

Petrol 132.9 per litre today in Portmarnock.

1 US gallon = 3.78541178 liters

So $5.02 per US gallon.

Are you forgetting the Euro/dollar conversion at $1.55 for a Euro - it's more like $7.78 when you count that in.

Auditor #9 wrote:

EvotingMachine0197 wrote:

Petrol 132.9 per litre today in Portmarnock.

1 US gallon = 3.78541178 liters

So $5.02 per US gallon.

Are you forgetting the Euro/dollar conversion at $1.55 for a Euro - it's more like $7.78 when you count that in.

I am forgetting that Audi. I'll go fix my post.

Also, I meant to post this in the Fuel watch thread. I might just tidy that up.

It's a bit of an odd one that conversion though because both currencies are floating against each other - it should more be represented as a fraction of the local spending power - average income per week or basic wage.

Auditor #9 wrote:

It's a bit of an odd one that conversion though because both currencies are floating against each other - it should more be represented as a fraction of the local spending power - average income per week or basic wage.

What about stating fuel price as a function of the US consumer price index

If we did the same for Ireland we could compare petrol prices more relatively ?
The US CPI according to Wiki!

What is CPI in Dummies terms? I had a look at the wiki but ?? Is it a measure of aggregate demand for a range of goods - a shopping basket of goods and how much / little they are in demand and an average of their price ? Would petrol already be in there ?

You'd need to measure it against something stable anyway - maybe the price of apples or something - maybe that's it above, though - a measure of the demand and price of goods combined.

Of course oil affects the prices of those things too so, as I imagine it, you have to be careful that whatever you're measuring your ruler is not changing too ...

Auditor #9 wrote:

Maybe people would even invest in permanent solar on their roofs and give some final work to the diminishing stock of Poles...

You will find that the electricity you sell is worth a lot less than the electricity you buy, but do think it is the way to go though needs some adjustment. Numerous small scale local energy producers is a good hedge against strikes at power stations also puts some wealth and power back into local communities.

Auditor #9 wrote:

What is CPI in Dummies terms? I had a look at the wiki but ?? Is it a measure of aggregate demand for a range of goods - a shopping basket of goods and how much / little they are in demand and an average of their price ? Would petrol already be in there ?

The CPI, imo, is a load of crap now that we have the perfectly good HICP to use as our measure of inflation, but I'll leave my personal animosity to the CPI to one side as I explain how this measure is arrived at.

The CSO first does its Quarterly National Household Survey to track consumer expenditure patterns and distribution. They find out what everyone's buying and load it into various categories from Food to Clothing and Footwear to Paints, Glass and Homewares.

Once they've found these categories, each of them are assigned a simple price index. In the original year of the index(ie, Year Zero, the year the index began), the index equals 100. If the category index goes up in price by 10.5% in the second year, that is expressed in the simple price index as 110.5.

The CSO then assigns a weight to each of these simple price indices. These weights are there to represent the relative importance each expenditure has in a consumer's average shop.

The CSO then multiplies each simple price index by its weight. If we take the simple price index from two paragraphs up as having a 1/20 weight(ie, 5% of expenditure is occupied by this simple price index) then we have 5.525 as the weighted SPI.

All these SPIs are then averaged out at the end to arrive at a Composite Price Index and this is what the CSO calculates from month to month. And yes, it does include petrol.

Thanks for that explanation Ard-T.

Some news about Alaskan oil

Bush Urges Congress to Lift Offshore Drilling Ban

Quote :

President Bush called on Congress today to lift a 26-year-old ban on oil drilling off the shores of the United States, arguing that the country needs more domestic energy production to alter the circumstances that are driving up oil prices.

Bush also repeated his call for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in northeastern Alaska and urged Congress to allow access to oil shale in the Green River Basin that stretches across
parts of Wyoming, Utah and Colorado. He said the basin contains the equivalent of about 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil, more than three times the proven oil reserves of Saudi Arabia.