Here's a standard-issue 250 w solar panel for sale.  No inverter, no frame.

In conclusion $1,125 - $1,350 = -$225 ($225 loss)
$1,350/$1,125x10yrs=12years to return investment.
Capitalization rate: 1,125/10/1,350x100%= 8.3% aprox. Which is less than 10% to be equal, or way less than 50% to be profitable.

already and the Philippines are hitting outsourcing.  And yes, I understand Mr Obama's political calculations.  But we have to look at our own interests, too. 

Also, infighting amongst plebeians looks bad to the patricians and hurts everyone.

It's some guy who wants a technical architect, onsite in some hell hole in New Jersey.   He'd gotten his RFP accepted.

So I ask him:  will I have control over the offshore team?   Sadly no.

Will I have control of the deliverable?  Again, sadly no.

Can I do the work remotely?  No.

Will I have control of the timeline?  Once agan, nahi-ji.

Oh, and he couldn't get his developers connectivity into the client site.

In other words, I told him, you want me to write spec, push and pull code from an offsite connection, trot the code in the client's door, integrate and take responsibility for it all. 

Well, yes.

Alas, that I must have control of some aspect of this project beyond taking the blame.   I have been in this situation before, getting up in the middle of the night to make Skype conference calls to India, looking at version control diffs only to find people haven't been doing anything.  I am perfectly capable of running this project on your behalf but I really must run it. 

I've worked with good offshore teams.  I've worked with bad ones.  Every time I lacked the mandate to sack a worthless developer, they've all been bad.

to comment on the fallout for us (but I expect it won't be very significant either way).  And its not relevant whether Mr Romney has the FP sense of a rodent - although as the Governor of a rich, educated state I suspect you might be underestimating him.

What is reasonably clear is that a Romney presidency will lead to a quicker rise in CO2 emissions because of his fossil fuel supporters.  But Mr Obama and Dr Chu haven't really led on this issue either.  

We simply have to hunker down, and take it on the chin.

Why else do you think I've been so grouchy?

I also find your "Obama should've & could've done more" arguments persuasive. Where we seem to part ways is on the question of what to do about it. My solution amounts to "double down & elect more progressive types to Congress & statehouses, and push for greater acceptance of progressive ideas in the public sphere." I'm not yet clear what your solution is. Did that sound grouchy?

Such as this one. I line mine with tinfoil, poke a few holes through. The secret to charbroil is smoke.

and whether or not the beam from your lens ignites the wooden bench underneath your steak.

I personally recommend about 15-30 SPF. Any higher than that and you'll run out of daylight slow roasting; any lower and you'll wind up with raw meat gloved in a caramelized carbon sheathe. And of course lotions claiming greater than 60 SPF are a scam. I prefer Banana Boat which adds a citrus tang with a soupcon of passion fruit. But go Coppertone if you want more of a coconut/luau kind of vibe.

with a lens you'll get broiling, but for char you need something burning in the cooking chamber. I think to truly replicate a BBQ you'd need to focus the light on some gas BBQ rocks underneath the steak, as they heated and fat dripped off the steak onto them the fat would partially burn and give you the char-broiled flavor.

and get a solar cooker.  For the roast potatoes, at least.

like energy spent in getting the water for the hydraulic fracturing process.  This may not be a problem in the US, but it is here, where getting water outside of irrigation is a big issue.  Also, the chemicals needed for fracking (e.g. guar gum) are derived from seed, so they need water to be grown - they cannot be produced synthetically yet, although people are trying.

Fortunately we have adequate supplies of the guar gum necessary.  But those fields need irrigating too.  Our monsoons have been poor this year - overpumping of groundwater in the sowing season (right now) may have triggered the Great Blackout.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/28/us-india-shale-guar-idUSBRE84R...

In India's northern desert states, farmers are scrambling to harvest as much as they can of a bean with the power to lift them out of poverty. In the United States, the multi-billion dollar shale energy industry is banking on their success.

 

U.S. companies drilling for oil and gas in shale formations have developed a voracious appetite for the powder-like gum made from the seeds of guar, or cluster bean, and the boom in their business has created a bonanza for thousands of small-scale farmers in India who produce 80 percent of the world's beans.

"Guar has changed my life," said Shivlal, a guar farmer who made 300,000 rupees ($5,400) - five times more than his average seasonal income - from selling the beans he planted on five acres (two hectares) of sandy soil in Rajasthan state.

 

"Now, I have a concrete house and a color TV. Next season I will even try to grow guar on the roof."

Guar gum, which is also used to make sauces and ice cream, is a main ingredient of the hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, process used to extract oil and gas from oil shale.

 

Fracking has been called the technology that will change the geopolitics of energy, boosting domestic North American gas supplies to such an extent that experts predict the net importing region will soon turn into a significant gas exporter.

It has also turned guar into a precious commodity farmers now call "black gold". In the Rajasthani city of Jodhpur, under the shadow of an ancient fort, traders buy guar seed at 305 rupees ($5.5) a kg, a 10-fold increase from a year ago.

 

"The whole world got caught not ever thinking they would need as much guar as they do now," said Wade Cowan, co-owner of West Texas Guar Inc., a Brownfield, Texas, company that supplies the powder to U.S. energy companies.

India, on average, produces more than 1 million metric tons (1.1023 million tons) of guar beans annually, the biggest crop in the world. It exported more than 400,000 metric tons of guar products, including gum, in the fiscal year that ended in March 2011. Exporting beans is prohibited.

 

U.S. energy firms, however, will need nearly 300,000 metric tons of guar gum this year, energy investment banking firm Simmons & Company International said in a February report. Last year, the guar shortfall forced some U.S. firms to halt fracking, it said.

that whenever someone proposes a new Mideast war for the purpose of keeping the oil flowing,  the French seem less interested than the other Europeans.

Strange thing though - saw relatively few electric vehicles and hybrids there.   Their basic idea seems to be very small light cars using conventional engines.

It pains me to say it,  all my instincts are in favor of decentralization,  redundancy,  local self-sufficiency, small entrepreneurial rather than large corporate stuff.   But I had to teach an energy course this summer,  and when you have to justify your instincts in front of a roomful of highly numerate people who want figures rather than words,  it forces you to the conclusion that gigantic is good especially when it comes to nuclear.

Let's start with the risk factor.  Yes, a bigger plant means the worst case accident - an outright explosion of the containment vessel - is proportionately larger,  but more plants means more accidents,  and many types of accidents - for example slow leaks - are not proportional to size.   If everyone had a garbage can size nuke in their basement,  there would be accidents somewhere in the US every single day.   If you are worried about proliferation, more plants means more shipments that can be hijacked, more IT systems that can be hacked, etc.

Next, the redundancy / grid reliability argument.  It's true that you don't want all your generating capacity in a single plant.  But you get most of the reliability if you have a few dozen plants in a given region, beyond that it's rapidly diminishing returns.   Having 100 plants on  a grid, any 80 of which are sufficient,  is not hugely better than having 20 plants, any 16 of which are sufficient.

Which leaves the big one, efficiency.  It comes down to details of how much trouble you take to recover waste heat, and there are lots of different places where heat is wasted.  Any one of these taken alone might amount to a 2% difference.  Adding another heat exchanger to recover 2% of 10MW is likely not worth it,  adding one to recover 2% of 1GW might be.  

There's also efficiency in terms of personnel.  A small nuke and a large one both require three shifts worth of security guards,  and three shifts worth of operators.  And I think you're a person that wants vigorous oversight and regulation.   If you had many small plants, you'd have NRC inspectors making rounds of several plants and dropping in now and then.  With large plants, you can have an inspector that does one plant, and lives right there.

Of course all of the above is not an argument for nuclear vs something else.  It's an argument that if you are going to choose nuclear for a certain number of gigawatts, a few big plants makes more sense than many small ones.