FastTrak toll rates go up a dollar starting today. The state-approved increase is the first since 2010, all in all, a gentler blow than what’s happened to a gallon of gas (around $1.80 in January 2009) or a kilowatt hour over the past decade. Inflation is...
IN 1973, New Yorkers stopped and stared in amazement as Dr. Martin Cooper demonstrated the first cellular telephone call, right on the city street. The invention and combination of the radio, battery, and micro-processor had launched the mobile phone era. It takes a...
Two years ago, a solar powered airplane flew around the world. While it didn’t carry passengers apart from the pilots, or even packages, it did send a mega-message about energy: The acquisition, consumption, exhaustion, & celebration of it. Solar Impulse 2 (the...
California’s largest energy provider has come under fire over the fires that devastated the state this year. A barrage of news outlets on the local and national level have placed an alarming amount of blame on PG&E. The purpose of this memo is not to point the...
It is the best of times (if you have solar), it is the worst of times (if you don’t). Here’s a bedtime story we think you’d like to wake up to: Rich and Paul Mann are brothers and next-door neighbors. They’re both married, two kids, two cars, and a mortgage on their...
Solar is to your energy costs what commuting is to your earnings. With a bit of math, we work out whether or not our daily drive is worthwhile. For example, let’s say housing two blocks from your job is $3000 a month; the cost of getting there is negligible. You find...
Sunrise, Sunset I don’t usually like musicals, primarily because there’s a deplorable lack of sports in them. So it took some cajoling to get me to watch the ’71 classic ‘Fiddler on the Roof’. It was and remains magnificent. The celebration of life despite...
There’s a British website called Dentalphobia, which is funny for a couple of reasons: 1) That people are so afraid of getting their teeth fixed that a website dedicated to overcoming that fear can fluoride, I mean flourish, and 2) That the site is UK-based, given the...
In 2016, The Philadelphia Eagles installed 11,000 solar panels at their playing facility, Lincoln Financial Field. They won the Superbowl last year. In 2010, the Golden State Warriors put more than 500 solar panels on top of their practice facility in Oakland. They...
Electric Current & Strange Currency When we travel abroad, the electrical sockets and money looks…foreign. We take note of this so our hairdryer doesn’t explode and we don’t pay $82 for a croissant. Actually, in Paris, that’s not far off. Nevertheless, we’re...
